The & Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing

The & Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing, released by Lake Forest College Press in conjunction with Northwestern University Press in 2009, features Apparition Poems from Beams by Adam Fieled. 

Sex as Dialectic

William Wordsworth leaves out of his Preface to Lyrical Ballads any particular approach to physicality, to the body, or to bodily awareness in general. By doing so, he leaves a certain critical door wide open to accusations that both Lyrical Ballads and the rest of his oeuvre lack the visceral quality born of rigorous physicality. When the mind, for example, associates ideas in a state of excitement, Wordsworth seeks to document the process in his poems; yet what the mind is reacting to is (Wordsworth suggests) a kind of perceptive consciousness of the durable permanence of natural forms and the human mind’s chiasmus with them. What if, however, we engage the durable permanence of the human body itself, as Renaissance humanism likes to suggest? Or, even better, engage texts and textuality which assume that the body itself is an idea, and associations and entanglements of bodies are associations and entanglements of ideas as well? This is in Keats’ Odal Cycle, and in Apparition Poems as well, especially in 1070, which forms a palimpsest over Wordsworth’s Solitary Reaper:

I said, “I can’t

even remember

the last time I

was excited, how

can I associate

ideas?”

            She pulled

out a gun, a tube

of oil, and an air

cushion,

            and it was

a spontaneous

overflow,

            powerfully

felt, in which we

reaped together—

 It is a backbone of one of the strains of my work, which includes (also) Equations and When You Bit…, that sexuality is not only an expression of our physical selves but also an idea. A tangential thought is that, as is expressed in 1070, the human body itself is an idea, and sex itself can be a kind of physical dialectic, a movement in three parts. 

Neo-Romanticism and the Individual

There is one central Neo-Romantic contradiction which animated the lives of all the Neo-Romantic artists in Philadelphia in the Aughts: we were all engaged with the world around us on as many levels as possible. Yet, to follow through on the quest and the aptitude to create innovative, provocative, and major high art consonant art, we all needed to maintain (sometimes) an extreme degree of solitude as well. I can’t speak for Abby, but for me, the tug between solitude and solitary creation on one side and social and/or sexual engagement on the other was a hard row to hoe. This contradiction is there for all serious artists, but we, all of us, were perhaps more baroque, labyrinthine, and apparitional then other artists at other times, as the smorgasbord we had before was so rich and so tricky. So, we had to flail around and attempt to find as much solidity as we could on as many levels as we could. What Abby gives us, in Frozen Warnings, is a sense of two things: total emotional entropy between two individuals, and a manifest formal/thematic triumph over the insipid Americana of Andrew Wyeth, on his own turf. Abby, in fact, has ways of triumphing over PAFA (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) formalism simply by painting situations as emotionally charged (sometimes sexually also, sometimes not) as possible. The pursuit of passions and emotions in serious art is always solid. It also manages to bridge the gap between solitary worlds of creation and levels of social engagement. Takes us, solidly, to Apparition Poem 1341:

Secrets whispered behind us

have a cheapness to bind us

to liquors, but may blind us

to possibilities of what deep

secrets are lost in pursuit of

an ultimate drunkenness that

reflects off surfaces like dead

fishes at the bottom of filthy

rivers— what goes up most is

just the imperviousness gained

by walking down streets, tipsy,

which I did as I said this to her,

over the Schuylkill, two fishes.

Individuals who live in multiple worlds often do not find it easy to connect. All the Apparition Poems elements— the night, the city, sex, death, drunkenness— coalesce around the vagaries of trying to communicate the incommunicable, which may be incommunicable for practical or for psycho-spiritual reasons. The dry ice I-it here, is matched by Abby’s equivalent of the same in Frozen Warnings. From Center City Philadelphia in the Aughts, we all had to live through a certain amount of dry ice— the city is not a solitary place, even when you need it to be, and it was invasive and intrusive sometimes. Aughts Philly, in fact, had and was a kind of merry-go-round game, which meant that mastering the stops, when to get on and when to get off (so to speak), was a delicate art. Artists need space. Frozen Warnings is given by Abby here a suburban template, but involves urban issues too— what happens when hipster-ism and scenester-ism turn sour, and what sinks in is the gravitas of one’s own isolation? The Neo-Romantic obsession with multi-tiered living is also frustrated by the dynamics of balancing imperatives to join and imperatives to self-isolate as well. So that, our reaction to this dilemma could not be dictated to us by Philadelphia’s architecture; that could only lend rigor to the art we were creating. As to what should constitute the life, we were all more or less on our own, and it remains that way to this day.  

Neo-Romanticism and the Academy

As per Neo-Romanticism and the Academy: we will have to be both in it and out of it forever. The in/out dichotomy could express beleaguered avant-gardism or half (or a third or quarter) academicism; but, because Neo-Romanticism has a hinge both to philosophy and literary theory on high levels, both of which flourish (usually) only in academic contexts, and because I went to Penn and Abby to PAFA, we will never properly be “street” (as we could be) in Philadelphia, New York, or anywhere else. The more aesthetically valid version of academicism we espouse is our version of classicism— of historical awareness which dotes on an elite handful of already elite achievements, specifically in English Romanticism and French Neo-Classicism. Yet, looking at Meeting Halfway, Abby’s boldest statement of queer intentionality, and how classicism is balanced by an imperative to be intimate, sexual, and provocatively so, we can see how Philadelphia’s architecture insisted on a multi-leveled, multi-tiered approach, so that we as artists could be, at least partly, of the street as of the Academy. Call it Neo-Romanticism’s nod to Mannerism, or just a major high art consonant Wall of Sound; and this whole syndrome, of balancing a plethora of imperatives, including raw, frank sexuality, and a classicist dedication to elite forms, is also played out provocatively in Apparition Poem 1649:

Oh you guys, you guys are tough.

I came here to write about some

thing, but now that I came, I can’t

come to a decision about what I

came for. What? You said I can’t

do this? You said it’s not possible

because it’s a violation and not a

moving one? It’s true, you guys

are tough. You know I have tried,

at different times, to please you in

little ways, but this one time I had

this student that was giving me head

and she stopped in the middle to tell

me that I had good taste and you had

bad taste, and I’ll admit it, I believed

her. She was your student too, maybe

you’ve seen her around. She’s the one

with the scarves and the jewelry and

the jewels and the courtesy to give the

teachers head who deserve it. Do you?

Fayette Street in Conshohocken, Plymouth-Whitemarsh manifests a willingness to transgress, and so do we. When themes and forms are juxtaposed in unlikely ways (City Hall, Center City Philly), we demonstrate an extremely rugged sense of individualism, as does our body of work. Neither Abby nor I were working with any kind of dossier or script to guide our creativity; we were under the architectural spell we were under, and winging it. Getting classicist hands dirty the right way round; the buildings insisted on it (Liberty Place Towers). Or, you could call it formal rigor with a socially relevant edge; creating spaces for our audience where beauty and sexuality themselves could be provocative issues, ditto aesthetic formality. Posit these constituent elements to Neo-Romanticism in chiasmus with the Academy, and what emerges is something very indeterminate, to be honest. Or, the ambiguity between the Academy and Neo-Romanticism has inhering in it the tension between formality and thematic provocation, beauty and conceptuality, which (owing to an inferior relationship to aesthetic form and formality) the twentieth century in literature and visual art never particularly bothered to deal with, as the English Romantics and French Neo-Classicists did in the nineteenth. The twentieth century, backwards and sideways, in Neo-Romanticism, is all about what in our work is conceptual, including concepts of forms, and why we have chosen to employ aesthetic formality the way we have. In the aftermath of the glut of post-modern conceptuality in the last fifty years, daring to be formally beautiful and socially relevant simultaneously is its own gambit. Walks down the right Philadelphia streets will show anyone that Philadelphia’s spaces are constantly doing these tricks, between usefulness and ravishment, what is serviceable and what is sumptuous, all in a time/space continuum spanning a number of centuries. What our architecture revealed to us is a game much more grandiose and all-encompassing then most of the twentieth century in our disciplines dared to imagine— a way of taking raw sex, raw beauty, and weaving it through with the right kind of conceptuality so that we’ve got all the way from Ingres to Warhol, all the way from Keats to Pynchon covered. 

Echoes of Mannerism in Neo-Romanticism

The hinge from Neo-Romanticism to Mannerism, also, is a reasonably blatant one. Our whole approach to art— more is more, rather then less is more— features exaggerated portions and warped perspectives, even amidst the elaborate formality and architectural hi-jinx. Abby and I both share a perspective, which recurs regularly, that there is or can be something inherently funny or absurd about complexity, and that the multiplication of tangents from a work of art should include tangents the basis of which are absurdity and Dada and Duchamp. With the rejection of simplicity, of course, comes the realization that if we are not to appear too stentorian or heavy-handed, a light touch can be as effective as a sturm und drang one. The Walls Have Ears, here, has in-built the Mannerist tensions around queerness and bisexuality; behind that, the idea that sexuality itself, as both an ideal and an idea, is inherently Mannerist. It brings out in individuals, always, what is warped and/or perverse, not to mention exaggerated, in them; and because the formality of the painting is, as ever, masterful, and because queerness is a serious theme to be addressed, audiences can choose to take The Walls Have Ears as an exercise in painterly absurdism or not. Coloration issues— everything bathed in piss-yellow (Serrano?)(Piss Dykes?)— opens a vista that, when Neo-Romanticism builds into its constructs a sense of absurdity, Mannerist exaggerates aid and abet us towards a realization that the Philadelphia architecture, kitchen sink approach can yield the right dividends. Or Apparition Poem 1327:

She said, you want Sister

Lovers, you son of a bitch,

pouted on a beige couch in

Plastic City, I said, I want

Sister Lovers, but I’m not

a son of a bitch, and I can

prove it (I drooled slightly),

took it out and we made

such spectacular love that

the couch turned blue from

our intensity, but I had to

wear a mask because I’d

been warned that this girl

was, herself, a son of a bitch—

Neo-Romanticism is, take it or leave it, pretty free and easy about sex and sexual intercourse. Just as Philadelphia architecture is pretty free and easy about co-opting your space and thrusting its symmetries into your brain. Not to mention that the ambiance in Aughts Philadelphia which we all lived through was largely about free and easy sex. This poem starts from a ground that the two figures in the poem appear to be either very stoned, or bimbos, possibly porn stars (or actors), and then sets the game in motion which it wants to set. It’s about straight sex too, which (to be frank) I feel might be ready to make a comeback. The Dada level is how goofy the exaggerations are, towards a sense that every conceivable imperative to aesthetic excess is served, other than the number of lines in the poem. Apparition Poems only has a handful of sonnets in it, and sonnets as a poetic form are usually the enemies of the Mannerist (sonnets think small, stay confined), but that’s part of the game here, as in Undulant. And the fact that both The Walls Have Ears and 1327 “have game” and play games is one of the reasons Neo-Romanticism is contemporary and ready to compete right now. Because the whole twentieth century is always showing up in the paintings and poems sideways, and at odd angles, audiences won’t need to feel disappointed that they are falling into a trough of anything backwards seeming or retrograde. This is true, particularly because the free and easy approach to carnality is rather advanced, and executed with a sense of borderline-disjointed looseness. What can I say? All those years our architecture was dictating our art, it also pulled off the neat trick of freeing Philly’s bedroom antics, which were considerable in all circles, both when masks were necessary and when they were not.

Platonics and Neo-Romanticism

The parable of Plato’s cave is an interesting one for Neo-Romanticism. The idea, that all we perceive with our brains are shadows of a higher, more perfect reality which exists in some ethereal realm in (perhaps) a parallel universe, fits in perfectly with the sometimes gratuitous gorgeousness of Philadelphia’s architecture. If Philadelphia’s architecture amounts to shadows on the wall of the proverbial cave, echoing a more perfect reality, then Neo-Romantic art, if it is to fulfill its task and obligation to Philadelphia’s architecture, must embody a similar sense of the gorgeous. The duality inheres: Neo-Romanticism has on one side Philadelphia’s architecture, on the other side deep-set engagements with English Romanticism and French Neo-Classicism. All of this is involved, in Neo-Romanticism, in an unbounded sense of idealism around the potentialities of serious art. Our idealism, in fact, was and remains a kind of ghost for us; the sense of channeling worlds which must remain ghost worlds on earth, of translating the untranslatable, of manifesting the sublime as a mode of echoing a higher, inaccessible sublime. Art’s illustrious past is thus so well-worn in Philadelphia’s consciousness, from PMA on out, that Philadelphia artists must get used to the ghosts, the way citizens of Phoenix get used to the tarantulas. Idealism and the past form part of the mind’s architecture in and for Neo-Romanticism, and the Platonic which girds up the buildings which form our landscape become built into our mindscapes as well. This Apparition Poem attempts a co-opt move of Platonics, towards a realization of irony towards absurdity amidst the sturm und drang of the domestic:

You can’t

get it when

you want it,

but when I

want it I get

it; she rolled

over on her

belly, which

was very full,

and slept; its

just shadows

on the wall, I

thought, dark.

The idealistic idea that somewhere in the universe hovers a more perfect pregnant wife or mistress hangs heavy here. If the juxtaposition here— Greek philosophical gravitas with down-in-the-dirt domesticity and sexually charged strife— is a rich one, it is because the “ghosting” or apparitional process has happened in an unusual context or at an unusual moment. It has also erupted from the brain of an unusual protagonist. Abby’s Lost Twins is even richer, creating a scaffolding of allegories over parables under allegories about art history, gender, queerness, form (engagement, importantly, with David), and also the sense of dislocation, of being “ghosted,” through alienation alternating with familiarity to art’s past. The idealism in Neo-Romantic art is also a conceit, as in The Lost Twins— that the works of art we create can encompass everything, from pop culture to Duchamp to David, all at once, and put together in a novel formal package as elaborate and maze-like as anything on Broad Street or Pine Street in Center City Philadelphia, for example, or Fayette Street in Conshohocken, which is its own Narnian paradise. Somewhere, says the Neo-Romantic narrative, there exists a perfect universe of perfect works of art, which permanently capture and embody all important forms and themes. The ghost of this perfect, spectral world holds us in thrall as we attempt to channel it. We have our hint of it in Philadelphia’s architecture, Keats, Ingres, David, and now we become psychic lightning rods to bring it down to earth again. If this sounds Romantic, good. The idealism of Neo-Romanticism has as one of its foundations the belief in a shuddering, resonant, inter-connected and interstitially linked world, not just the shards and fragments of Modernism and post-modernism. What they chopped to bits, we impose wholeness and unity on.

Ingres and Text

The English Romantics were usually quite coy about sex and sexuality; Byron not that much, the others very much indeed. One of the odd facets of Neo-Romanticism is that the best bits of my poetry actually have as much to do with French Neo-Classicism, especially Ingres, as they do with the English Romantics, who I like to tease. Thus, this palimpsest over Wordsworth’s Solitary Reaper, who he quite chastely listens to in the ever-present Romantic enchanted forest, with its shuddering, resonant eco-system of sensations and thoughts:

I said, “I can’t
even remember
the last time I
was excited, how
can I associate
ideas?”
            She pulled
out a gun, a tube
of oil, and an air
cushion,
            and it was
a spontaneous
overflow,
            powerfully
felt, in which we
reaped together— 

Ingres, and his Odalisque, does a similar trick over Wordsworth’s coyness (they were contemporaneous), and also manages to create a chiasmus between architecture and sex. The way Ingres paints his nude, her architectural proportions, all the exquisite symmetries and scaffolding spaces, are what make her of permanent interest. She’s a building and, as the song goes, a brick house. Abby does a similar skyscraper trick in Meeting Halfway, which is frank on another level about sex and sexuality; not about the architecture and tactility of bodies, but about queerness, and how the body defines space in relation to its proclivities. That’s why Neo-Romanticism does not need to fall into a rut in which I am accused of being a predatory male in text, decimating women with my gaze; Abby’s presence redeems the whole package deal we offer with the sense of the bodies she paints, including also The Walls Have Ears, signifying the architecture not only of sex, but of the thoughts which sex builds in our mind out of the different, potentially queer, worlds we inhabit. The architecture, as it were, of sexual identity. All the ways sex can create ghosts or apparitions— that when two people sleep together, queer or not, a third entity is created which hangs as a ghost presence over the two; that being inside the body of another human being is potentially a dupe situation, in which you are really nowhere, if you have not also penetrated the other’s psyche; that bodily fluids around sexuality are ghostly or apparitional substances; and that every person you sleep with, if examined closely, creates another challenge of multiple meanings for those who wish to lead an aesthetically and socially examined life— are also ways sex has of putting up psychological scaffolding, which creates the phenomenological complexes which define our individuality in relation to the world. Wordsworth and the rest are too coy to get there; they remain in their own imaginations; Ingres and David, on this level, are richer, and so my translation (I cannot speak for Abs) of Ingres into text, flowing into poetry and also prose.