As/Is

2.05.2025

Deep Wood's Woven Shade: Apparition Poem #2040

 

Where metaphors become themselves, put
the pedal to the metal, I want to be the one
not riding bitch on the plush-lined vessel’s
back seat, so that I generate (from tension!)
new metaphors also putting their pedal to the metal,
& the car I’m speaking of is Noah’s Ark, I’m the one
that got everything in there— it would have to be,
because she chose to paint kids playing King of the Hill,
because our brains did King of the Hill games back
& forth, years after all the fucking was finished,

because calculation was not foreign to the situation
on her side, so that I carry the all, the everything she is,
rich, recondite, multifariously about intelligence
or retardation, depending on her mood, green eyes
knowing the me past me that she’s counting on,
the Ark having to be a car to stunt it, in her wonted
fashion, perhaps even a jalopy. She knows me past me,
is herself a man, a king, past what was between her legs,
which I thought I found interesting past calculation,
because she set up a game there I’d fall for, & I did—

posted by Adam Fieled on Wednesday, February 05, 2025

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Brand New Key

New URLs on a newly archived Argotist Online site, and a sense of semi-republication, for the e-books The Posit Trilogy, The Great Recession, and Mother Earth.

posted by Adam Fieled on Wednesday, February 05, 2025

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1.27.2025

Jenny Kanzler: from Art Odyssey (2013)(5)

 

posted by Adam Fieled on Monday, January 27, 2025

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1.21.2025

Deep Wood's Woven Shade: Apparition Poem #1347

Because women who paint have two bodies,
the fragile blood/flesh vessel common, normed,
to all, & an aggregate of coalesced colors & forms,
extending residue useful to raise brains past models,
the winter day arose I plumbed the depths (for a random
reason) of my files, found a miracle, ten paintings,
all master class, by her, without understanding how
I’d mislaid them a decade before. But there, in that now,
I found her body again, the first stroked into
the second, & it was a revelation past anything but

the most violently revelatory intercourse possible
between two human beings. Honestly, not hostile
but real, our more literal expression had wobbled
on skittish rails towards the noncommittal or gossamer.
But as she left it for real, her physical body, in coalesced
colors & forms, the retrieval was all intercourse elevated
into matrimony usually thought too good for the human
race. It is, actually. Especially given the work’s twists
& turns towards revealing again all this dullness
we live in. Four bodies must suffice, to turn dullness to fullness.

posted by Adam Fieled on Tuesday, January 21, 2025

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1.13.2025

Apparition Poem #1180 in Scud

 

Apparition Poem #1180 in Scud. 

posted by Adam Fieled on Monday, January 13, 2025

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1.05.2025

Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Dresser in Lothlorien Poetry Journal

 Dresser, from the Aughts Philly section of Something Solid, in Lothlorien Poetry Journal. 

posted by Adam Fieled on Sunday, January 05, 2025

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1.01.2025

Jenny Kanzler: from Art Odyssey (2013)(4)

 

posted by Adam Fieled on Wednesday, January 01, 2025

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12.30.2024

Deep Wood's Woven Shade: Apparition Poem #1208

 

You bed down in a sty,
squeeze out your mind
like a rag, catch water
(usually greasy) in tins,
mix them up (murkiness
is not undesired), add an
edge of cyanide (or gin),
yet you know all the time
none of this will do much
good, or anything at all,
most of it is destined as
bricks in no wall, thus
does the blood spill, but
when you heal, how you
grab the sun & moon places
you where chemicals beg
your brain for admittance—

posted by Adam Fieled on Monday, December 30, 2024

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12.23.2024

Jenny Kanzler: from Art Odyssey (2013)(3)

 

posted by Adam Fieled on Monday, December 23, 2024

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Flaubert and the Great Recession

A think-piece on Madame Bovary and the American zeitgeist from a UK blog in 2013. 

posted by Adam Fieled on Monday, December 23, 2024

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Plymouth-Whitemarsh: Book #2

The first book in my oeuvre to directly address Plymouth-Whitemarsh: autumn 2019's The Great Recession. As of late 2024, another salvo fired directly from Ply-Mar begins its journey; the Beams sequel Dance Monkey, from Funtime Press. Will I  get to a trilogy? Who knows.

posted by Adam Fieled on Monday, December 23, 2024

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12.21.2024

Jenny Kanzler: from Art Odyssey (2013)(2)

 

posted by Adam Fieled on Saturday, December 21, 2024

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12.20.2024

Jenny Kanzler: from Art Odyssey (2013)

 

posted by Adam Fieled on Friday, December 20, 2024

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12.17.2024

Deep Wood's Woven Shade: Apparition Poem #516

 

#516

This lowly wise slug, stuck
to woody surfaces, rocky
bottoms, is yours: vacuum-
space, death to suck. But
lucky dips come in with such
brave vehemence (yellow
light, stop, before red) that
as we park near the woods
I hear an axe chop off your
reticence. This, however dense,
is how a man begets expanse—
what’s Eve, what’s ribbed, what’s chance—

posted by Adam Fieled on Tuesday, December 17, 2024

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12.10.2024

Fellating the Pickle

Fellating the Pickle, a standout piece from The Great Recession, on a 2012 On Barcelona page, with some other stuff.

posted by Adam Fieled on Tuesday, December 10, 2024

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11.23.2024

Returns

 

Conventions are difficult to work around, in poetry and in books in general. Publishers tend to publish what they know will sell in the world, and both anomalous books and anomalous authors are often stung to death by an enforced status quo mentality. That having been said, when my first books were released in 2007, I was determined to book-publish, as much as I could, my way, and against the biggest publishing bete noir in English language poetry, i.m.h.o. The bete noir in question is simple— poetry collections, the convention enforces, should not cohere around any central theme or narrative, the way that fiction, drama, philosophy, and science texts do. With some notable exceptions, poets (American, UK) are encouraged to just throw the requisite number of poems together and call the result a manuscript. That, to me, is not a real book, folks. Like me or lump me (and in rock, lump me in with Floyd, thank you very much), I have a stringent definition, and a stringent standard, of what constitutes a real book, which I have now spent almost twenty years attempting to live up to. The standard means coherence and cohesiveness, built into the text, around a narrative, a set of themes, or a formal imperative, or all three at once. Some of my books are woven tightly this way, some are, as Jimmy Page would say, tight but loose. All are the nightmare of the poets I studied under to obtain my graduate degrees. Yet that, for better or for worse, is my books standard. C’est la vie.

No surprise then, that when in the late summer of 2010, a few months after the release of Apparition Poems, I finally published a grab-bag of a chapbook with Mipoesias, no story or narrative stood behind its creation and publication that much. I had it, they offered to publish it, in a collection of chapbooks they were doing at the same time. Fair. I called the thing Returns because I was returning, in a way that I could, to a sort of beginning again, before I was possessed by the literary will-to-cohesion. The individual poems I have discussed elsewhere— Wittgenstein’s Song, written at the Last Drop in spring 2005, debuted in Henniker in a Carol Frost workshop; After Andrew Marvell, about Jen Strawser’s best friend in 1996, reprised in 2008; and now, added, Twisted Limbs, double editioned in 2006, an anthem around the potentially perceived heroism of/in carnal entanglement, apostrophe, could be, to Mary or Hannah or Abby. The important sui generis thing here, the token thing, you might say, even after a few alterations have been made, is that Returns remains my contribution to the ultimate grab-bag sweepstakes. Here I am, standing with the folks at Henniker, and (more than half the time, and more than they would like to admit) at Penn and Temple, too. Being conventional, as I try not to be. Attempting, of course, to sell in the world nonetheless. Drowning, as the new cover suggests? Sort of. Who isn’t, these days?

posted by Adam Fieled on Saturday, November 23, 2024

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11.13.2024

New Apparition Poems: 2013-2014

The initial Apparition Poems series sprung right out of the heart of Center City Philadelphia. Everything about the twists and turns built into the pieces had to do with city life and an urban landscape. This, including what a major city is like in the middle of the night. The thirty-six pieces in New Apparition Poems 2013-2014 are not as necessarily nighttime as what’s etched in the two Blazevox books. They don’t need to be. All that stillness, that sense of slumber, are built into the suburbs, all day, every day. I had relocated from Logan Square to Conshohocken in 2012, and understood that what Conshohocken was, was about an emended sense of the active or activity, tilted towards stasis rather than dynamism. The 2013-2014 Apparition Poems thus have a backdrop about consciousness coming to grips with stasis, and with the sense of stasis doubled, owing to the aftermath of the 2007-2009 recession. As of 2013-2014, and as was later deemphasized, the media were still reporting the said recession as The Great Recession, and helping us to a realization that we were a nation of hamburger flippers. The national scene was not a prosperous one.

The other thing worth knowing about Conshohocken: despite all the somnambulant touches, Conshohocken is famed for its architectural grandiosity. The way Fayette Street works in Conshohocken is that, on an ocular level, it could appear sublime at any time. Thus, it would be fallacious to say that when I stepped into Conshohocken, I entered into any kind of dead zone. The building scene, as is often the case in Philly and the environs, was, and is, a magnificent one. So that, by 2013 I felt ready to do the work of re-imagining what an Apparition Poem could be, even in a context more static than I would’ve preferred. Morris Arboretum, on the cover, is set within the city limits of Philadelphia, but in a part of the city far from Logan Square and Center City, not far from Conshohocken and Plymouth-Whitemarsh. It is a tribute to the endless sense of diversity and graciousness built into Philly that it has within its boundary-lines a real arboretum. It is a photo, also, I snapped myself in 2022. What I meant to convey is that all these suburban, or sub-urban, elements, conspired to place me in a subconscious space in which the series called Apparition Poems could have a legitimate rebirth. That’s what New Apparition Poems 2013-2014 is all about.

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Two of the most major of the New Apparition Poems from the 2013-2014 period featured in this pdf also appeared in Issue #60 of UK print journal Tears in the Fence in 2014. 

This edition of New Apparition Poems includes not only 2013-2014 Apps but 2024-2025 ones.

Deep Wood's Woven Shade, also, is a collection of 2020s Apparition Poems. 

Quiddities collects philosophy-minded Apparition Poems.  

posted by Adam Fieled on Wednesday, November 13, 2024

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11.11.2024

The White Album: Revolution #9

 

At the Satellite      coffeehouse Chomsky-ites         have tattoos of Eastern symbols

     (I-Ching, yin-yang, Buddha)       all over their arms     the screen-saver

for the computer     is ImpeachBush.com     while they sit huddled    over pamphlets

       printed on cheap paper     put together at Kinko’s     about how to make bombs

overthrow the gov’t     grow hemp    smoke hemp     know hemp     be hemp

        or the way to join a food co-op     that has exotic berries with anti-oxidants 

& which has been going     in West Philly     since 1969     but these kids

         were raised on indie punk     and their bands     only know a few chords

but everything about suffering      and it comes out in songs       like glass shards

          no one has Health Insurance      many have bikes     get in accidents

get addicted to pills      but no one much cares       Health Insurance is for yuppies

          what is wanted is a community     anti-everything      material goods

are derided in favor of principles     but there is no public outlet      to bring them

          to the attention of the masses     who are disdained anyway     for not having

tattoos     playing in punk bands      reading Chomsky     shopping at Mariposa

          knowing what scum directs the media       what polished, rehearsed scum

polished, rehearsed, privileged      by luck and education      to brainwash us with

           imbecile illusions of happiness            but these kids ain’t happy either

they want something else          what they can’t admit to wanting     a real voice,

            real status     real position     real influence     real opportunity

& it’s not going to happen        here at the Satellite     so they sip brackish drinks

            unsweetened by sugar         give out their pamphlets      promote their bands

find themselves at thirty          borderline derelict       addicted to Percosets

            that they get through covert means           which are unreliable    some have canes

as if this were an old age home       which it is      as Shelley was aged by radicalism

            unchecked by moderation          emotional, psychological, or otherwise

so that it’s the world against them            and they ape contentment with this

            scenario that sears its lines onto their foreheads               oh the irony

that Penn is just a few blocks away             where Chomsky went, and me

            where real influence is possible           owing to prestige and money

but don’t call West Philly University City here             you’ll get spit on

            because it’s seen as a marketing ploy            to destroy the Satellite

its espirit de corps          atmosphere of huddled hairiness          tattooed twists

             wanton sex          perverse reliance on self-medication     & impending age

which reduces sangfroid to bitterness       just like black coffee     & black coffee

              is what the Satellite does best        Edith Piaf could sing a chanson

just for the Satellite           only in triple time     like a punk song     everyone

              would bow their heads, knowing truth        knowing failure    knowing

salvaging a life from radicalism      is a scary venture       not for sissies

               or those who want Health Insurance          to keep them alive

 

posted by Adam Fieled on Monday, November 11, 2024

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