Monday, May 1, 2017
Monday, April 3, 2017
Aphorisms Pt. 2
No community is as rich as a community of one.
If you are a "people person," it is because you don't know who or what people are, yourself included.
Contrary to what Stein said, the rules are not already known.
Never revile what's solid beneath the surface.
When a society succeeds in destroying the individual, it also succeeds in rendering itself obsolescent. The individual is the agent of human progress (to the extent that human progress is possible), always.
The primordial perspective poetry sets in place- one individual writing to, for, or about another individual- is also the most durable possible literary perspective.
Pop World/Pop Church, when it happens, is a cruel phenomenon, because it is meant, from its inception, to be erased. The individual is not.
The masses are always implored to admire things that add up to nothing. They are also implored to reject what's solid beneath the surface. What's solid cannot be widely popular.
Yet solidity, is all its myriad forms, is the only ostensible reason for the continuation of the human race.
The individual is solid.
This contradiction; solidity being the only ostensible reason for the continuation of the human race, yet solidity being widely unpopular; strikes at the heart of any perception of the human race en masse other than almost-complete absurdity.
The masses chop things into place, and are chopped into place.
America is more variegated, less absurd, than most other human race locales.
By the most solid standards, the twentieth century was far quieter than the nineteenth. Most of the noise was on the surface, and easily erased. The twentieth century "school" was of quietude; surface-level spectacles now razed to zeroes, permanently.
The profound silence of the twentieth century may have been supposed to work as a riposte to Keats and English Romanticism, a solid apotheosis of the individual. Even Deconstruction is suspect on this level.
Neo-Romanticism was conceived, developed, and disseminated to be solid.
Much more so than other American cities, Philadelphia is solid.
Solidity is louder than what's on the surface. The twenty-first century has already consolidated a position as louder, more solid, than the twentieth.
Philadelphia architecture is solid. Even before Neo-Romanticism, it stood beneath the surface as a representation of Philadelphia's solidity over the rest of America.
.......................................................................................................................
The principle of solidity in serious art has to do with depth and well-roundedness; the sense, in the work of art, that all possible imperatives built into the respective form have been honored and fulfilled. Post-modernity has been one long denial of both the possibility and the desirability of solidity.
Post-modern poetry denies thematics, outright and wholesale. This is absurd. Poetry which addresses no important themes is placed into circulation to preclude seriousness and solidity from emerging in contemporary poetry, at any time this chooses to happen.
There is no reason to read poetry which addresses no important themes, or will only address important themes in a deliberately obfuscated fashion.
The distaste for solidity in serious art is degenerate; and evinces a hunger for art, and all other humanistic endeavors, to be reduced to zero-level beneath the surface.
If you are a "people person," it is because you don't know who or what people are, yourself included.
Contrary to what Stein said, the rules are not already known.
Never revile what's solid beneath the surface.
When a society succeeds in destroying the individual, it also succeeds in rendering itself obsolescent. The individual is the agent of human progress (to the extent that human progress is possible), always.
The primordial perspective poetry sets in place- one individual writing to, for, or about another individual- is also the most durable possible literary perspective.
Pop World/Pop Church, when it happens, is a cruel phenomenon, because it is meant, from its inception, to be erased. The individual is not.
The masses are always implored to admire things that add up to nothing. They are also implored to reject what's solid beneath the surface. What's solid cannot be widely popular.
Yet solidity, is all its myriad forms, is the only ostensible reason for the continuation of the human race.
The individual is solid.
This contradiction; solidity being the only ostensible reason for the continuation of the human race, yet solidity being widely unpopular; strikes at the heart of any perception of the human race en masse other than almost-complete absurdity.
The masses chop things into place, and are chopped into place.
America is more variegated, less absurd, than most other human race locales.
By the most solid standards, the twentieth century was far quieter than the nineteenth. Most of the noise was on the surface, and easily erased. The twentieth century "school" was of quietude; surface-level spectacles now razed to zeroes, permanently.
The profound silence of the twentieth century may have been supposed to work as a riposte to Keats and English Romanticism, a solid apotheosis of the individual. Even Deconstruction is suspect on this level.
Neo-Romanticism was conceived, developed, and disseminated to be solid.
Much more so than other American cities, Philadelphia is solid.
Solidity is louder than what's on the surface. The twenty-first century has already consolidated a position as louder, more solid, than the twentieth.
Philadelphia architecture is solid. Even before Neo-Romanticism, it stood beneath the surface as a representation of Philadelphia's solidity over the rest of America.
.......................................................................................................................
The principle of solidity in serious art has to do with depth and well-roundedness; the sense, in the work of art, that all possible imperatives built into the respective form have been honored and fulfilled. Post-modernity has been one long denial of both the possibility and the desirability of solidity.
Post-modern poetry denies thematics, outright and wholesale. This is absurd. Poetry which addresses no important themes is placed into circulation to preclude seriousness and solidity from emerging in contemporary poetry, at any time this chooses to happen.
There is no reason to read poetry which addresses no important themes, or will only address important themes in a deliberately obfuscated fashion.
The distaste for solidity in serious art is degenerate; and evinces a hunger for art, and all other humanistic endeavors, to be reduced to zero-level beneath the surface.
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pa): "Frequencies"
I.
“We’re at our most bestial when threatened not
with hatred but indifference; what our blood wants
is reaction of some kind.” New Hampshire night,
our own reaction, you pliant, penetrable, laid out beneath me as
flies fidgeted our room, pirouetted moist air. Yet
we sank beneath bestiality to do just what indifferently
we wanted, beneath our glut of blood, so the summoned
beasts might react with this: ripped limb from limb,
buried in low-lying Virginia swamp marsh, given what
aphorism is only got in extinction, darling, as I quote
what you said at the bar before. In other words, they
hated us. The one-night stand wouldn’t matter if your
brain didn’t have the right words in it: stories, sequences,
slammed-down metaphors of a singed self. Frequencies.
II.
As the world between her legs tightened around
her, what she saw in bed with me was stark: okra,
stamens, roots, all that in nature coalesces in erect
growth; and a shadow father bent, then erect, then
bent again, perverse from amassing wealth in a world
whose submissiveness poisons him. Beneath the sultry,
wooded surface, what I saw was a semi-frightened
animal, along for an all-night ride (gruesomeness of
4 a.m. New Hampshire sun), knife thusly thrusting
into the backs of everyone around her, managing
to have stamina enough against constraint to take
what she was taking. The mattress thumped: above,
an angel was unable to conceal laughter, understanding
it was all in the script, including the garish sun’s leer.
“We’re at our most bestial when threatened not
with hatred but indifference; what our blood wants
is reaction of some kind.” New Hampshire night,
our own reaction, you pliant, penetrable, laid out beneath me as
flies fidgeted our room, pirouetted moist air. Yet
we sank beneath bestiality to do just what indifferently
we wanted, beneath our glut of blood, so the summoned
beasts might react with this: ripped limb from limb,
buried in low-lying Virginia swamp marsh, given what
aphorism is only got in extinction, darling, as I quote
what you said at the bar before. In other words, they
hated us. The one-night stand wouldn’t matter if your
brain didn’t have the right words in it: stories, sequences,
slammed-down metaphors of a singed self. Frequencies.
II.
As the world between her legs tightened around
her, what she saw in bed with me was stark: okra,
stamens, roots, all that in nature coalesces in erect
growth; and a shadow father bent, then erect, then
bent again, perverse from amassing wealth in a world
whose submissiveness poisons him. Beneath the sultry,
wooded surface, what I saw was a semi-frightened
animal, along for an all-night ride (gruesomeness of
4 a.m. New Hampshire sun), knife thusly thrusting
into the backs of everyone around her, managing
to have stamina enough against constraint to take
what she was taking. The mattress thumped: above,
an angel was unable to conceal laughter, understanding
it was all in the script, including the garish sun’s leer.
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
Something Solid: The Nineties: Defiance
you can say goodbye to my own future life. Rather
more distressingly, they’re both high, as she holds on
tight. Her long, slender arms make the necessary circle
around his ample waist; long, lank blonde hair blows
in the breeze. Yet she’s quiet at Penn Crest, stubbornly resistant to
attempts to draw her out. She’s his girl Friday more
than wife. Real marriage hovers in the future as
a homing beacon, against the ravages of too many
deal-related parties, intermediaries imploring her
to step back, climb on his loaded lap: her one & only.
Body/soul unity haunts her waking hours, a vision
inherited from the Renaissance shakes her dope-addled brain.
Statuesque, she carries a blown-glass bowl, rolling papers.
The most formal future comrade migrates from flat to flat,
the length of Manhattan; saved from school’s repetitive
rigors, yet awkward against others more normal. As is
often the New York spin, there is no getting close. Kids
come & go. She’s got the pluck, as is ascertained, to paint
what she wants. The most difficult forms (portal-ways, planar spaces)
flow easily out of her. She’s then a weird, worrisome windup
doll to defy the lightness of touch used to lighting up
the New York art firmament. She’s a gem for someplace else,
not dust-binned yet, but close. Half-noticing, she also
imposes a posture of defiance on her life— tiny, half-dyke.
Day-to-day, the grind is to take the advanced lights, find
somewhere to migrate with them. The vision behind is crystal.
I was destined to defy the motorbike with paper piles, marriages. Right?
Sunday, March 5, 2017
Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Star Child
ride back from New Hope to Center City; drowsy,
all three of us, on a bunch of laced weed, thinking
whatever we were thinking. Kim kept putting
the pedal to the metal at times slightly off. We all
could’ve been as good as dead, if we didn’t have it,
but we did. What we had was a shared pact, into
the air, the spheres, the universe, that whatever befell
us at that time, that place, we would have to survive,
because we just would. And we did. Which didn’t
change the state of affairs, stagnant for both of us
with Kim, not brimful of anything, that whatever
soporific fantasies I might’ve had, our taking her out
to canoe on the Delaware did not result in any
consummation, & with her forgetting her purse on
one of the islands, where we got even more trashed.
We forgot about this, the ride home, Kim’s reflexes, how
the rest of our lives depended on something not proven,
trustworthy. The two buddies had brains circling
similarly: nothing to worry about, go with it, understand
your invincibility, it’s there if you believe, it just is. Where
shields like that come from, I don’t know, but I will
say— exclusivity is the rule. You only depend on it
if you know it’s there. Off the two of them went, into
the late afternoon sun, after dropping me off in Logan
Square. Somewhere, a frequency in the sky consolidated
itself. Gaetan didn’t look like a star-child then, but he was.
His magnanimity, more than a lion’s, granted him nine lives.
© Adam Fieled 2024-2025
Sunday, February 26, 2017
Something Solid: The Nineties: "Central Pennsylvania"
My young writing life: a solitary hike up Kilimanjaro
(apprentice, as I was, to no one specifically). I wrote
and wrote until Kilimanjaro was scaled, Mont Blanc,
and Snowdon. The graciousness of State College
revealed itself in sublets: South Atherton Street, West
Nittany Avenue. I surveyed my papers, which for me
were drenched in the ecstasy of tears, terror, and tremors
transcended; and charted Central Pennsylvania as a mighty
mind— a million shades of green. For a few months, this
little college town was representatively, legitimately my
possession. I consumed College Avenue as though
it were nitrous, my diploma made of universe, or the heaven
of poetry’s gravel-paths. Much of me would remain where
this breakthrough occurred, could never change. Nature’s way.
© Adam Fieled 2022-2026
(apprentice, as I was, to no one specifically). I wrote
and wrote until Kilimanjaro was scaled, Mont Blanc,
and Snowdon. The graciousness of State College
revealed itself in sublets: South Atherton Street, West
Nittany Avenue. I surveyed my papers, which for me
were drenched in the ecstasy of tears, terror, and tremors
transcended; and charted Central Pennsylvania as a mighty
mind— a million shades of green. For a few months, this
little college town was representatively, legitimately my
possession. I consumed College Avenue as though
it were nitrous, my diploma made of universe, or the heaven
of poetry’s gravel-paths. Much of me would remain where
this breakthrough occurred, could never change. Nature’s way.
© Adam Fieled 2022-2026
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
Cheltenham at Poetry Library at Southbank Centre, London
Proud to say that Cheltenham is now on the shelves at the Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre, London, UK. Many thanks to the Poetry Library staff!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)