As/Is

6.28.2015

Dancing with Dancing with Myself Pt. 2

I have a few more things to say about Dancing With Myself. The perspective adopted by the author of a sonnet does not have to be a youthful one, but it tends to be. The youthful voice, exploring feelings of confinement, isolation, or (conversely, as in Keats' sonnets) euphoria and expansiveness, tends to hit us with a sense of something bubbling over or overflowing. The protagonist of Dancing with Myself adopts, uncommonly, a weathered voice and perspective, a voice already scarred by a lifetime of painful experience, even if the voice still believes in the redemptive powers of love and companionship. I think of Wordsworth and The world is too much with us, probably the gravest, most profound sonnet of the nineteenth century; my exiled-from-paradise protagonist shares with Wordsworth's the sense of disenchantment and alienation from the dreary intercourse of daily life and its vagaries. Yet the melancholy of age and experience vie here with the poignant sense of not-yet-atrophied emotional responsiveness, and not-yet-atrophied intellectual curiosity to go right along with it. This protagonist is weathered but not defeated.

Another bizarre Romanticism tangent, this time to Keats' Odes: the protagonist of Dancing with Myself finds himself exploring all the silence and slow time he needs, as Keats' does when he beholds his Grecian Urn. What these sonnets are drained of is the sense of original innocence engraved into the urn; that the urn celebrates youth, ecstasy, conflict, faith, and mythology, and Keats ricochets them back into his poem, mirroring the themes reckoned, adding his own gloss and prosodic richness; while Dancing with Myself explores age and aging processes, keeping the conflict, faith, and mythology, losing the youth and ecstasy. Part of the aged or weathered quality of the Dancing with Myself sonnets are expressed in their approach to form: rather than aping the Romantics, as a younger poet might, I employ what I call "clustering" or semi-formal techniques. Thus, I avoid the merely imitative, and express the maturity of a poet who can make formal compromises towards the creation of new forms.

posted by Adam Fieled on Sunday, June 28, 2015

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6.27.2015

Dancing with Dancing with Myself

As I've recounted elsewhere, the middle portion of When You Bit..., Dancing with Myself, was completed in 2007 but then had to be scrapped and re-written in the spring of '08. Listening to how this twenty sonnet cycle worked out, it strikes me that the ambivalence of the protagonist, how he is on a hook he might or might not want to be on, is the dominant theme or motif which emotionally charges the piece with pathos, longing. That pathos and that longing, expressed both directly and with imagery/metaphor, raises Dancing with Myself above the first and third sections of the book (Sister Lovers and Two of Us) so that it is the most fit to stand alone.

In terms of where the Dancing with Myself protagonist is headed: if he cannot admit how many bets he is hedging about what confronts him in this relationship he's had to push (briefly) to the side (this is in Palliative), it is because he probably cannot decide himself how many bets need to be hedged himself. The construction crew grinding away at pavement on 21st Street (Whiskey), and how this protagonist "lives in his churned guts," both make visceral the cognitive-affective meat-grinder he's been placed into. Yet, looking at Dancing with Myself in relation to the history of the sonnet, other meat-grinders, which have ensnared the likes of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder and Sir Philip Sidney, have tended towards more of a sense of grievance and complaint. Wyatt and Sidney whine, where I offer up resignation. Lingering in the back, also, is the issue of duration; how long can I get this love-object to commit to me? While Dancing with Myself is more than loosely based on a situation which really did happen to, and isolate, me, I will leave it to my readers and listeners to decide whether the sonnets justify the suffering or not. That, by the way, is one function the sonnet has as a poetic form (more than, say, an ode or an elegy): to let a protagonist show us why and how he or she is suffering, and then to ask us to accept and bless or sanctify their suffering in an embrace of the literary moment.

posted by Adam Fieled on Saturday, June 27, 2015

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6.26.2015

Apparition Poems: Apologia (two-part preface '13-'22)

Though no sustained narrative buoys it up, Apparition Poems is meant to be sprawling, and epic. An American epic, even one legitimate on world levels, could only be one made up of disparate, seemingly irreconcilable parts— such a state of affairs being America’s, too. The strains which chafe and collide in Apparition Poems are discrete— love poems, carnal poems, meta-poems, philosophical poems, etc. Forced to cohabitate, they make a clang and a roar together (or, as Whitman would have it, a “barbaric yawp”) which creates a permanent (for the duration of the epic) sense of dislocation, disorientation, and discomfort. This is enhanced by the nuances of individual poems, which are often shaped in the dialect of multiple meanings and insinuation. Almost every linguistic sign in Apparition Poems is bifurcated; either by the context of its relationship to other linguistic signs in the poems, or by its relationship to the epic whole of the book itself. If  Apparition Poems is an epic, it is an epic of language; the combative adventure of multiple meanings, shifting contexts and perspectives, and the ultimate despair of the incommensurability of artful utterance with practical life in an era of material and spiritual decline. It is significant that the poems are numbered rather than named; it emphasizes the fragmentary (or apparitional) nature of each, its place in a kind of mosaic, rather than a series of wholes welded together by chance or arbitrary willfulness (as is de rigueur for poetry texts).

This is the dichotomy of Apparition Poems— epics, in the classical sense, are meant to represent continuous, cohesive action— narrative continuity is essential. Apparition Poems is an epic in fragments— every poem drops us, in medias res, into a new narrative. If I choose to call Apparition Poems an epic, not in the classical (or Miltonic) sense but in a newfangled, American mode (which nonetheless maintains some classical conventions), it is because the fragments together create a magnitude of scope which can comfortably be called epic. The action represented in the poems ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the heroic to the anti-heroic; there are dramatic monologues set amidst the other forms, so that the book never strays too far from direct and directly represented humanism and humanistic endeavor. The American character is peevish if not able to compete— so are the characters here. Life degenerates into a contest and a quest for victory, even in peaceful or solitary contexts. Yet, if the indigenous landscape is strange and surrealistic, it is difficult to maintain straightforward competitive attitudes— consciousness has to adjust while competing, creating a quandary away from the brazen singularity which has defined successful, militaristic America in the world.

Suddenly, American consciousness is beleaguered by shifting sands and multiple meanings— an inability, not only to be singular but to perceive singular meanings. Even as multiplications are resisted, everything multiplies, and often into profit loss, rather than profit gain. The epic, fragmentary narrative of Apparition Poems is a down-bound, tragic one, rather than a story of valor or heroism. The consolation for loss of material consonance is a more realistic vision of the world and of human life— as a site of/for dynamism, rather than stasis, of/for multiplicity, rather than singularity. Apparition Poems is a vista into “multiple America” from Philadelphia, its birth-place, and a city beleaguered also by multiple visions of itself. No city in America has so much historical heft; nor did any American city suffer so harsh a demotion in the brutally materialistic twentieth century. Yet, as Apparition Poems suggests, if a new America is to manifest in the twenty-first century, it might as well begin in Philadelphia. If the epic focuses on loss followed by more loss, rather than eventual, fulsome triumph, then so be it. And if Apparition Poems as fragmentary epic imposes a lesson, it is this— the pursuit of singularity in human life is a fool’s game; the truth is almost always, and triumphantly, multiple. 

.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

With twelve years hindsight, and with a sense of affection for the text, combined with an acknowledgement that I am partly being arch, it seems to me that Apparition Poems has established itself as a less-than-wholesome book. The sense, in the text, of both perversity and perversion in a generalized sense, creating textual angles meant to cut or incise rather than (as is more usual in America) to caress, make an approach to this text after all these years what could, possibly, be considered superfluous. The problem with an abrupt dismissal, and it is a less-than-wholesome problem, is the recourse the book has to philosophy and philosophical thought, still within the bounds of the aestheticized, as a reaching or attempted journey beyond perversion, or into perversion transcendentalized again into allegory, loaded metaphor, and formal reinvention. Once poetry here has attempted intercourse with the higher frequencies of discursive thought, we deduce that an interrogation is necessary as to whether this intercourse is possible, in a real way, at all. To answer this query, it must first also be interrogated, even into more open air than we might like, what intercourse is possible between poetry and philosophy; further investigating, when we understand what the possibilities are, whether this form or manner or intercourse is desirable or not.

The apparition which haunts the book: a sense of depth and solidity, held within an individual consciousness; a sense of wholesomeness; leads the protagonist beyond the landscape of the carnal, and of jejune inquiries into language, which fall short of achieving more intellectually than stylization or stylized modes of disjuncture and deconstruction. The only oxygen which reaches him, which can propel the shards of a decimated consciousness into at least an imagination of wholesomeness, is that supplied by a desperate surrender to discourses aimed higher than aestheticized language is designed to reach, and at the conditions and terms the aesthetic generally offer. The image arises of a Don Quixote figure, pacing the streets of Center City Philadelphia in the middle of the night. In the state of perversity, perversion, and the less-than-wholesome within which the book was written; a trance of sorts; it never occurred to the author that a reliance on the aesthetic, and on stylization in general, could give way to limpidity if control was relinquished into those more limpid discursive spaces. Rather, bifurcating the philosophical so that it could also fulfill the terms of the aesthetic, and of stylization, seemed a viable tactic towards giving vent to that sense of the fragmented, the jagged, the incisively sharp, which animated his consciousness.

Philosophy, and philosophical discourse, aims, at its highest pitch, for the most objective kind of truth. Language becomes a conduit for vistas opened, meant to answer questions that cannot be answered by the quantifications of scientists— the being of beings, the precise nature of human consciousness itself. The poet’s aim is more about a sophisticated form of entertainment— language as a conduit for the pursuit of sumptuousness, imagination strained to make things, or things-of-the-world, transitive to other things (metaphor), along with a lower, compromised version of objectivity, functioning in harmonious balance with imperatives to imagination and melopoeia. The real intercourse possible between philosophy and poetry is thus a borrowing, by poetry, of a more objective lens with which to view poetry’s traditional objects— eros, affectivity, metaphoric creativity. What philosophy can take back, in its turn, is a something intermittently useful to the philosopher and his discourses— a sense enjoyment or playfulness in a lower mode of discourse— waters warmer, if less ultimately nourishing, to splash around in.

The assignation of desirability or not desirability to this congeries of circumstances manifests a sense of ambiguity, which can only be answered by individuals forced to confront it. If I continue to affix my own assignation of less-than-wholesome to Apparition Poems, it is because the point at which philosophy appears in the book has a hinge to a less-than-traditional poetry aesthetic, which substitutes rancor, discord, and semantic/syntactic explosiveness, in several directions, for sumptuousness, and metaphors constructed and perpetuated in a textual Theater of Cruelty, to borrow from Artaud, all of which push against the bounds of what might be considered entertaining, for poetry’s conventional pursuits. What entertainment could then be derived from Apparition Poems, would be the emergence of philosophy, as an objective antidote to a subjectivity jaundiced by immersion in a jungle of overly sharp, hostile metaphors— thus alienated from the wholesomeness of the conventionally aesthetic.

As an individual, confronting a text, it may be acknowledged or unacknowledged that Apparition Poems creates new waters for higher discourses to play around in— play, here, being a function of metaphors-as-toys, aesthetic landscapes as stomping grounds, idiosyncratic syndromes as vehicles of possible universalization. The book, in other words, cannot cure itself, make itself wholesome— though, through its sense of reaching for philosophy, it tries— but philosophy itself, engaging in a mode of investigation here (ransacking the Theater of Cruelty for points of interest) can do for the book, what the book cannot do for itself. If all these things happen amidst an ambiance of mischief, of willing transgression, so much the better.

 

Adam Fieled, 2013-2022     

posted by Adam Fieled on Friday, June 26, 2015

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6.25.2015

Somebody Stole America

They say it's some barbaric banker
in Athens, Berlin, Dublin, London,

New York, LA California;
not your average American gangster.

'It wasn't the Klan or the Skin heads
Or them that blows up' different
'Churches, reincarnates us on Death Row',

But Bush, Rove, West, Limbaugh, Beck
Trump, Palin; and the rest of the fanatics
Cast on the wrong side of history, failing,
Exposed, the ignoble motives & forgettable
Lie upon lie of McCarthyen Propaganda.

24/7 falsifying public records, forged
By the immensely unimportant human ego,
Senators, governors, chiefs Of police, FBI,
CIA, State Dept, reach in illogical costume

inhumane reasoning, the lowest moral order
and poorest sanity,
Most of humanity leasing happiness

Freedom, democracy, in empires of potentates,
Hidden kings embodying powers in the blocks
Of billions they stole.

Somebody stole America

A witless moron with wealthy parents
Bringing yawl tha good ol' Geronimo vibe;
Cartels and cabals plundering Columbia

Dumbocretin dem and repugnicon sneering
English we do not speak, beckoning away,
Away with Columbia's gilt, Kansas city

Banks, masses of private capital living
Breathing federal transfers of bullion

Murmuring in micro-second millions, in a blink
Numberless billions and far fetched trillions,
Olowalu, Ottawa, Oklahoma; everywhere it is

Printed, the financial system; somebody stole
It; a handful of assholes, somebody stole

America, Fort Knox, Greenwich Village, Dylan's
Soul, Hartford, Halifax, happiness, blessings,
fantastically eloquent experts on all things

modo, of the moment, contemporary American
talkers in bright bold mush, cool, detached
and lofty orators, aping toobs, ranting fools

bring it back, bring it back, bring it back
exquisitely conducted on philosophical branches
of inquiry in the salons of Cyberville.

The mannered dictions, outrageous positions,
sheer affronted vitality reflecting, perhaps,

metaphorical masters and mistresses of ancient
Cree deities, knowers of Graeco-Roman gods
from Apollo to Zeus, Eamhain, of the Apple trees
of swans and yew trees, Emerson, Eliot and Poe

tu-wit tu-wooing an American conundrum
conflating in flyte what is wrong or is right,
correct or inaccurate, kerching kerching kerching

O the memory of it sings, city shining on a high
and hollow hill, America be true, America be
brave, Columbia come wipe away our original

stain of Slavery, tears, culture, sanitize our founding
facts, transmute to modern American myth, God-

father, Pulp Fiction, inhabitants of darkness, noir
ma, on top o the world, a saintly scholar mam,

the noble arted one, hallowed jangling scripture
with conviction, true make our dream become.

posted by Coirí Filíochta on Thursday, June 25, 2015

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6.24.2015

The Arbitrary and the Artful

That language, used to create musical effects in poetry, is not arbitrary; does, in fact, depend on meaningful or artful arrangement to establish and consolidate its effects; chafes against the confines of Deconstructionist discourse. The Deconstructionist commonplace, derived from Saussure— that linguistic signifiers are arbitrary (and this dictum is usually presented as iron-clad)— does not deal adequately with either the musical potentialities of language, or how they have already manifested significantly in the lyrical poems produced both by French Symbolism and English Romanticism. Deconstructionism is notoriously soft on dealing with poetry in general— key texts like Roland Barthes The Pleasures of the Text lean heavily on fiction, as Barthes deals (for example) with Proust and Robbe-Grillet rather than Baudelaire. Poetry, especially lyrical poetry, is a direct threat to the sanctioned discourses of Deconstructionism— as a tactile, manifest testament to not-arbitrary language (which advertises, in both its intentions and its effects, its own artfulness and non-arbitrary quality), created by individuals, often to make metaphysical inquiries, and to induce sensual, visceral cognitive pleasure and enchantment simultaneously.

Lyrical poetry signifies a set of imperatives or complexes— aesthetic interests which, when fulfilled, can appear serendipitous without stumbling into the disarray of the random; and, the more exquisite the verbal music produced, the less random it seems. The materiality of this kind of text (be it Keats or Baudelaire) has its own meaning and purpose indigenous to it; it is self-sustaining and self-justifying, and manifests its purpose in its own material subsistence. Deconstructionists would, if they could, disavow lyricism; however, to disavow lyricism is to disavow all music; to discard Keats and Baudelaire would be to discard Bach and Beethoven, as well. Music can be justified qua music or qua language. Roland Barthes leaning heavily on fiction is suspect— both because fiction reinforces master narratives (of cohesiveness, of reality) of human life which may be false, and because novelistic language does not have the hinge to being irreplaceable, singular, individual which accomplished lyricism does. Unless Deconstructionism in the twenty-first century can develop a discursive chiasmus with poetry and the lyrical, there will remain suspicions that the motivations of/for Deconstructionist discourse are destructive, rather than creative ones; and that the Deconstructionist elevation of fiction over poetry has in it the contradiction of willful ignorance of musical language (melopoeia) which, in both its motivations and its effects, is not arbitrary. It is another frightening realization of an alignment between Deconstructionism and post-modernity— an alignment based, metaphorically speaking, on killing.

posted by Adam Fieled on Wednesday, June 24, 2015

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6.23.2015

Mad Pursuits

It is natural that the burgeoning twenty-first century have some questions for the remnants of the twentieth. To re-interrogate Deconstructionism, its aims and ethos: would it be transgressive to inquire whether certain Deconstructionist formulations employ roughly the same imperative spread-sheet employed by post-modernists and post-modernism? If Deconstructionism and post-modernism do share a number of imperatives, will that create a conception of Deconstructionism acceptable to us in the humanities now? These questions would not arise in my consciousness unless I harbored suspicions that The Death Of The Author, the dissolution of the constitutive subject, and there is nothing outside the text might have been meant perhaps more literally then some have supposed. As in, the Deconstructionist game consisted, at least partly, of wiping out the potentialities of individuals and individual authorship, and obliterating (as post-modernism did, in destroying both aesthetic formality and metaphysical inquiry) any sense for the potentialities of being an individual against conglomerate interests at all. These are dark surmises, and may end as nothing more, just as looking for depth consonance beneath the surface of Deconstructionist textuality may or may not find anything jeweled, behind the veneer of crabbed hermeticism which constitutes most Deconstructionist texts. They may be games against metaphysical inquiry or not, and indicate whether Deconstructionism amounts, at least in part, to a disguised, baroque-seeming enforcement of post-modern rigor against aesthetic formality, metaphysical inquiry, and the potentialities of the individual against society.

I am thinking of these things as I continue my own inquiry into values around aesthetic formality, via examination of Keats' Odal Cycle. Keats has his own, individual manner of enforcing the form of his forms; how he makes the Odes preen (and I do not wish to use "preen" pejoratively, though it may seem so) and pirouette in advertising their own sumptuous gorgeousness, and every form becomes meta-formal in advertising itself. The liberation possible in this century, expedited through myself, Abby, and PFS in general, has so much to do with the potentialities of individuals, both in alignments and against conglomerates and conglomerate interests, that I cannot help but laugh at the post-modern illness, which blusters boldly forward, proud never to seem to be retreating, from nothingness into greater nothingness, while poor Abby and I are forced to blaze a trail that, where formality is concerned, must begin from nineteenth century models (Keats, Shelley, Ingres, David): shame on us! Metaphysics, formality, individuals! The dark supposition of a secret alignment between Deconstructionism and post-modernism is just one vista issuing out of what we have accomplished in the last ten years of Philadelphia, and it remains just that for me: a supposition. It will take a few decades for Deconstructionism to demonstrate just how much was (and is) actually there beneath the surface of its dictates, and for what manifests around PFS to respond adequately.

posted by Adam Fieled on Tuesday, June 23, 2015

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6.22.2015

John Keats and "Mad For It"...

Is the music enough? If the point of John Keats' Odal Cycle is to lead the reader back to the vista that the prosody's the thing, can we accept, as we would accept in Bach or Beethoven, that the rich formality of the Odes is its own aesthetic justification and reward? If I can, it is because (as I said) what we accept in Bach and Beethoven we should be able to accept (also) in Keats. What I want to discuss here is that, in Grecian Urn, Keats' stages a demonstration of melopoeia, poetic music, for its own sake, in stanza three, and the achieved "mad for it" effect is clearly meant to be euphoric ecstasy:

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

To me, stanza three stands as self-conscious mimesis of pagan or tribal spirit, which is angled (as is suggested later in the poem) against cognition and towards the passion and the rapture of purgative, self-expressive celebration (whether in a creative context, as with those who created the urn itself, or not). Ultimately, whether magnificent prosody alone can justify the Odes is an important question, specifically because how you answer is an accurate barometer of how well you do or do not relate to forms and pure formality in major high art consonant art. If form and formal rigor were benched, as from a ball-game, in the twentieth century, it is for a reason few suspect— superior formality in art is just as threatening and dangerous as art's narrative-thematic levels, both to the unenlightened and to conglomerate groups who would like to subject art to its dictates. It is an expression of extreme and supreme individuality, and as such encourages individuals who are moved by it to attempt to find an individual voice for themselves. This, the twentieth century could not abide. If a significant number of individuals go "mad for it" in the twenty-first, once again the human race, at least in some sectors, can come to terms with the vagaries of individuals who bother to do things for themselves.

posted by Adam Fieled on Monday, June 22, 2015

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6.21.2015

Portrait: Abby Heller-Burnham (Anonymous)

posted by Adam Fieled on Sunday, June 21, 2015

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Preface: Rising in Scorpio ('13)

The motivation of this pdf is to collate and consolidate what I deem to be the cream of the Philly Free School’s artistic achievement. I have taken into consideration what I have not taken into consideration— that this judgment is mine alone. If other artists would like to argue for other placements/arrangements, they are welcome to. Nevertheless, for me: what do Abby’s “Nine Paintings” and my “Apparition Poems” have in common? I have been stunned by the parallels (and parallelism) between the two— I’ve already addressed many of the key motifs. They include: a certain approach to depth and complexity involving multiple and multiplying themes and potential meanings; a sense of “queerness” or oddity which is intermittently sexualized (for Abby, the application is more literal); an urban, rather than suburban or pastoral orientation, which is often site-specific to early twenty-first century Philadelphia (which, by not being New York, builds another level of queerness into the construct); a lack of indigenous American aesthetic influence, and a mistrust of twentieth century art in general (bloodlines running from Abby to nineteenth-century France, Ingres and David; from me to nineteenth-century England, Keats and Wordsworth), while the work does thematically engage contemporary America; and a generalized ambience of darkness, moodiness, the eerie and the haunted.

The difference between Philadelphia-via-England and Philadelphia-via-France (and the twentieth century largely being passed over) is rather pronounced; my approach has in it many levels of directness and earnestness which could comfortably be called English levels, and an adjunct to English Romanticism; Abby’s lateral sense of perversity and absurdism, her inability (thematically) to be morally or ethically earnest, is quintessentially French, while the French sense of darkness has a perception of absurdity built into it, and English gloom can be just plain gloomy. To bring the male/female dichotomy to bear on Nine Paintings and Apparition Poems is even trickier, and more lateral; Abby’s approach has some feral energy and some tenderness to it; it is as androgynous as the highest art tends to be. About Apparition Poems, it would probably be inappropriate for me to comment on. I will remark that I call these two collections together "Rising in Scorpio" specifically because, in this context and in 2013 America, it seems to me that the darkness, depth, and complexity of the two collections will be experienced in many contexts as more feral than not, with many “stings” built into it, for lazy post-modernists and semi-comatose centrists. Good art has always been capable of stinging mediocrity to death, if properly placed and contextualized at the correct moment; for the Philly Free School, the time is now.

It is also my idea (and, honestly, it could be called a pretense) that, if the Philly Free School plants the right seeds, the twenty-first century might be more germane for serious art than the twentieth was; even as our politics, sexual and otherwise, import the best of what the twentieth century had to offer. The higher connotations of the Scorpio archetype have to do with depth, complexity, and the darkness of unsparing truthfulness— the imperative towards unsparing truthfulness (against “eerie” effects which are easily generated and can be superficial), primitive though it is, was important for Abby and I. Even more than myself, Abby suffered in her life from a desire for absolute purity on all levels. Nine Paintings and Apparition Poems show Abby and I at a point of maximum and precarious balance— able to be truthful and artful on profound levels at once. To do so was, for both of us, in the America we inherited, an act of almost foolhardy bravery; but we did it anyway.

posted by Adam Fieled on Sunday, June 21, 2015

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6.19.2015

Ode: To Satan

Let it not be said that his rhetoric drifts

   out of focus on Earth for a casual minute—

nor that just retribution is not terribly swift

    for those who disrespect his intimate business;

as the new mother, tethered away from her child,

      deliberately eats what she doesn’t want

           to mortify dread that she might be other

      then a perfect Satan’s gofer, starving and wild—

          infanticide-schemes, inverted taunts,

              floorboards arranged to make room for another.

Pentagrams engraved on truth, justice-seats,

    masks woven tightly of paint mixed in flesh,

abattoirs filled with poison-dwarf sweets,

     histories out of nothingness, made mesh.

What are they scripting? For who, for what?

    That all the false idols, set in a line, might dance

       tangled, backwards, to all that they dread?

How is he drifting? He’s straight, he’s shut

     against any spook holds a  heavenly chance

         of imposing their visions, or raising the dead.

You’re a ruddy old Big Man Downstairs, you,

   fibs so jejune I can’t hear but to laugh—

and your buttons are pinned upon somebody who

    mistook all the fame, and the fortunate path.

Why governments swoon before truth is clear—

    you set the bar too high, and low at once,

       no innocent victim can face all the dumbness—

why all of these souls from downstairs, not here,

     can’t say a lick out of being a dunce,

       define for the ages what being a bum is.

posted by Adam Fieled on Friday, June 19, 2015

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6.14.2015

A Reflection on Poetry & Publishing

(Originally published as a comment on the Facebook of Welsh poet Brett Evans, co-founder and co-editor of independent literary journal, Prole. Also published at the Irish Poetry Blog.) 
 

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Although he later deleted and blocked me from his Facebook for not agreeing with him that Carol Hughes was somehow awf for not allowing a biographer access to all her dead husband's papers; the best advice I ever got was from Bloodaxe Books founder and Editor, Neil Astley; in Conway's pub on Parnell Street, Dublin, after the joint launch at the Irish Writer's Centre, of the Selina Guinness edited New Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2004) and Leanne O'Sullivan's debut, Waiting for my Clothes (Bloodaxe, 2004).

At that time, I think in September 2004, I had recently graduated in May of the same year, from my home town Edge Hill University (Writing Studies and Drama, 2:1) and had been living in the Iveagh homeless hostel in Dublin for three months.

In a short several minute chat he advised me to get out and recite live in public as much as possible; and that the biggest mistake people make is sending out a collection of poems for consideration before they are ready, and that they should first build up writing experience, publishing credits in magazines, and work work work, write, write, write, and wait, wait, wait until they've enough experience and what not.

At that time I'd been writing for three years and my conception of what poetry and Publishing was all about was very different to what it is now, because I had very little experience of writing or publishing and viewed the process thru the lens of the novice, at best at bardic grade two (of seven) MacFirmid (son of composition) thinking that becoming a published poet was a semi-mystical process similar to that of finding fame as an actor; in that it was all very opaque and mysterious.

My poems would be spotted by a fairy godfather of poetry publishing who'd take me under their wing and do all the hard work and all I'd have to do is show up and star reciting (at that time only from memory) the poetry I'd accumulated on the page up to that time.

I think just meeting and getting the real gen from one of Britain's most knowledgeable independent poetry publishers was in itself a very valuable lesson, because for the first time I'd spoken with someone at the top of the tree and the whole thing had been humanised and I was imparted something no amount of reading about publishing could ever do.

At that point I had been methodically sending out poems for about a year, beginning sending out in the third year of the writing and drama course, and getting published here and there. In that short time what struck me is that you'd never know what an editor would want to publish. Stuff you thought strong was not picked and poems you thought had no chance were published.

In the spring of the following year I lost all interest in seeing my poems published in small magazines, and playing what I increasingly viewed as a psychological game of submit-reject/accept, in which the submitter is seeking affirmation and validation for what can often be a lonely and unrewarded business of writing poems for the purpose of seeing them published by others in the mags they edit.

Though I was having a good publication hit rate I was increasingly bored with the novelty of seeing my poems and name published in small circulation magazines. A short sugar high followed by business as normal and a return to writing and studying the mass of Irish mythology that makes up much of the bardic curriculum.

And that at that point was still a voluminous sprawl of confusion, the skeleton of the poetic that came around year five/six, still yet to firm up and appear in the mind. And so in a very real way, trusting that by just studying the material on the fourteen year course would in itself reveal what I hoped to find.

And because of my thoughts about the future of publishing in the online age, at that time the consensus still very much an old-guard gate-keeper mindset, was beginning to view the process of submit-accept/reject as a redundant one, in which both sides are seeking affirmation in what vision of poetry we have and what we are doing, for the purpose of accumulating and increasing our sense of contemporary poetic relevance and (minor) cultural importance.

This is because some editors would write back rejecting what I'd submitted, not with a simple, thanks but no thanks, but a note that made it plain that, on their part, they were playing a different game with themselves to the one I was, making their intellectual confusion unintentionally comedically plain in pretend pretentious toff voices not their own.

My own thoughts where that in the near future (ie, now) we would all effectively be publishers on an equal footing able to reach anyone in the world with an internet connection, and so, I reasoned, the thing to concentrate on was not getting published by other people, but cleaving to the idea that I was a student with ten years learning the material from the fourteen year writing course that trained forty generation of filidh poets, and trusting in that process to teach and deliver the lessons and experience with which to publish one's own writing on my own terms when the time was right. Knowing I had another ten years as a student, a decade before I'd need to publish anything, meant I felt zero pressure to get published, even though for most this would be a laughingly far too long time to try oneself out having a crack at the aul poetry game.

I was very lucky to have had the first three years of my writing life occur at home in Ormskirk bygone times, in the very best and most supportive place it was possible to evolve creatively and intellectually, and without which I would perhaps not have been laughing at the amadán poetry editors up their own holes we all know and are familiar with from experience, but getting depressed by their exclusionary spirit and sense of being custodians of only the most special and greatest English poetry that appears between the pages of the few hundred copies of their rags.

However this is not the reason I lost all interest in playing the submit-reject/accept game. The final nail in the coffin that sealed the deal and made all interest evaporate, was chancing across online, Washington state Ogham expert Erynn Rowan Laurie's English translation of a 120 line 7C Old Irish text, that states an in-depth and comprehensive definition of what poetry is, where it comes from, and how it works, 'in the body and soul of a person.'

In a druidic voice from the earliest founding mythological bard of literate Ireland, Milesian poet Amergin. It is one of only four attributed to this figure and three times longer than the next longest piece, a riddling roscanna poem he is most well known for, Song of Ireland, that Aul Plumdoon Muldoon made an entire Oxford lecture of punning allusive gobbledegook prose in response to.

 Amergin was the druid of the seventh, and chronologically final, mythological race of 'takers' of the island documented in the 11C Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of the Takings of Ireland, who, with his surviving (of twelve) two brothers, Eber and Eremon, had seized the island from the Tuatha De Danann, in 1300 BC according to Geoffrey Keating's, or 1700 BC according to the Four Masters' version of mythological history, both compiled in the early to middle 17C.

The untitled Old Irish text is found in the medieval Book of Ballymote, and was first translated into English in 1979 by Professor Liam Breatnach of the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, one of Ireland's premier Old and Middle Irish experts, with a deep knowledge of the texts that make up the fourteen year filidh (poets) curriculum, having translated such important pieces as Uraicecht na Ríar: The poetic grades in early Irish law, and numerous other bardic related material.

Though now known, due to the triple-cauldron imagary used as a metaphor to explain how poetry works in a person, as Cauldron of Poesy, the text didn't have or need a title in its original form because, I suspect, it was one of the most widely known and first texts introduced to a grade one foclo turning up on the first day of singing school at Samhain, to begin the six month Samhain to Beltaine winter semester, that over the following twelve to fourteen years led through another five grades, MacFirmid (son of composition), Dos (bushy-tree shelterer), Cano (cub/whelp), Cli (ridgepole), Anruth (great stream), before terminating at the apical grade of Ollamh (ullav) Doctor of Poetry.

At which point they were the equivalent of a secular poet-barrister practicing in the highest forms of strict and straight (dán direach) verse, that they were introduced to only at the sixth grade Anruth, around year six/seven; as it needed six years of study before they'd be competent to tackle the head-wrecking complexity of the fourteen or so dán direch meters and work out if the prophetic, mantric side that set a fully formed fíli poet apart from the lower grades, was there and working.

At that point I was on a roll publishing wise, and was playing the game like everyone else. Living in the Iveagh homeless hostel and centering myself on acquiring experience and a live skin, out two or three times a week on the thriving closed and open-mic scene in Dublin during the height of Bertie Ahern's time in office, when, it has to be noted, the collective Irish cultural mood was right up itself, ostentatious and one of nouveau riche smugly delusional optimism that the economic good times were here forever, and that Irish people generally were a very special sort of precious English language snowflake, and the chosen few blessed with an invincible sort of otherworldly speaking magic, that, as we discovered on the morning Brian Lenihan (rip) made the announcement of the Bank Guarantee he laughably stated would be 'the cheapest in history' - was subsequently proved by events to be a crock of self-delusional sales crap everyone had swallowed hook line and sinker.

At the time of discovering it I was in my 'office', an internet sweet shop at the foot of Ha'penny Bridge on Aston Quay, and I remember thinking at the time that I was reading for the first time one of the most important bardic texts written. A belief that has only deepened in the intervening decade.

I had just had a poem and prose piece about the live poetry scene in Dublin published on the website of the Galway Arts Centre, and it was with this publishing credit that I lost all interest in sending out anymore, buzzing with the belief that my writing needed no more outside validation, just at the very point the untitled 7C Amergin text popped up on my computer screen at Aston Quay.

Reading it for the first time I instinctively knew that this was a textual guide one needed to progress in writing without any input or intellectual validation from others, not least because few, if any, poetry editors are aware of it to know that there exists a holy grail of Gaelic poetry as important as Horace's Ars Poetica.

A suspicion confirmed when I began publicising the find around the English speaking world to a wall of complete ambivalence, disinterest, and non-engagement, confirming what I thought then and now know; that many people are not into writing poetry to write the best poems we can, but to see our name in lights and on longlists.

Only two other people I interacted with have got its importance, Ó Bhéal: Cork's Weekly Poetry Event founder Paul Casey, and American poet Jerome Rothenberg.

After having got on the nerves and displeased a very long list of self-important poetry folk around the English speaking world, always for something very petty (the straw that broke the back of British-Hungarian poet George Szirtes' tolerance, replying to his question of how I knew something, 'because I don't spend all my time on Facebook'), I am in a way unintentionally lucky to have stopped sending out when I did, because though I am sitting on fourteen years of unpublished material, I have observed other people trying to get work out there, usually with something interesting to say on the page in prose, who have got on the wrong side of important editors for displeasing them over something very petty and minor, that the pasha-editors then trash and contextualise as being just bitter failures because they had a manuscript rejected by them.

 Anyway  leave it there, globble di baglady de dye doi dough...(am hearing this as i hit send) KTF!

Desmond Swords

 

posted by Coirí Filíochta on Sunday, June 14, 2015

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6.12.2015

Ogham Lesson 1: Elyn Newkis - Lisen Newky - Kewl Sneyin - Newly Kisen

Hello yawl.

One mua time and listen in the new key to a tale of the bardic bluffas bullshitting lidl aul moi, dreaming their high cultural jinks in the Tir na RTE realm of Gobnam Boglady & Their Bans of ambitious literary cut-throats in shmokin shpokin feerz peroppa wurda. Lisen Newky, Nesil Kewny & Enils N'yewk.

Names oghamically changed to protect the lidl diks-ed 'n kids skiddin abo nuwir in tha paja liov witten pothutrae en litowary Bubbalin.

~

After eight years of funding the All Ireland Live Poetry Shlam Competition i am increasingly unable to stop myself from involuntarily laughing at the unintentionally comedic vibe and plastic sense of poetic entitlement emanating from some of the most self-important self-appointed cultural healing energy workers in Bublin, that are involved in tha shmokern liov puthotrae 'n sham shleen in the capital of Bullshitland.

This is because all but a few of the filidh have - several days ago - made it very plain they assume I am a social-media poetry dinosaur and special kind of English mug that likes nothing more than giving away free money to them; and someone whose own live poetry is never gonna be good enough to appear on any stage with any of their own, regularly outed and touted works of heartbreaking mediocrity, I mean, staggeringly beautiful eloquence.


I can only conclude after eight years of side-lined and silent observation that our live spoken word shlash slam scene in Bubbalin consists of a handful of Bublin-based foet-fwend principles that are in an organisational thick of it with themselves, the new brooms team at Poetry Island, n' waydeo n' telievwishun stalwarts of RTE, and, to repeat the point, have made it plain over the years, by silence and short evasive utterance, coupled with a refusal to engage with me (proved by an eight year absence of any written replies to the handful of messages I've ever sent them) - that I am the very last foet they're gonna do their vibrational healing energy events with in the realm of live and (by its very nature) competitive oral poetry happening today in Bubbalin.

A scene in which the worst lack all conviction or interest in the bardic curriculum, and the best are laughably overrated. Swamis swanning round the city in smugly self-congratulatory bubbles, their shallow social-scene entitlement masquerading as a revolutionary come all ye welcome and democratic open-access poetic pulse of the real poetry movement reflecting what's happening on the streets, yeah!

That may have been the way it was for the first few years after its birth, and before our new scene started, at a four-year (2004-8) weekly occurring come all ye, truly democratic, regular weekly open mic, Write and Recite (WaR), but puleez, c'mon noi, the alphas in the zoo of a live shpokin wurda sheen are now very well established, n' tis all vewy peroppa woppa.

However, all but one or two of the principle actors and high-literary judges, juries and executioners in Bubbalin's right now eight year old 'new' (yawn) team-scene of happy hand-wavers, not once recited their shmokin shpokin wurds liov on the weekly WaR scene.

I know of the current mob of very ambitious and self-important liov poetsa Bubbalin tuawn through them wanting to win the Title of the All Ireland Shlam competition, that I created, for nothing, off my own back, whilst living in the Oivaay homeless hostel, and have been funding every year since it started in 2007.

I rarely go to any of the many invite-only closed-mic events that have been the norm in Bublin since Write and Recite vanished unwritten or recorded on any official Ireland live poetry record custoded by the New Live peroppa shpokin wurda poetry scenestas that created the 'new' one following in the wake of tha auld wun we all lived through at WaR.

Having finished a four year weekly live poetry apprenticeship in WaR by the time the new and thrilling (now not so exciting or new) social-media-created and organised scene was birthed in 2008, by a handful of computer literate language and culture lovers, I was freed to concentrate on the written side of my practise. And so, with other filliocht studies to occupy me, I av for the last eight years took no personal part in Bubblin's shmokin shpokin word sheen.

However it is clear from observing it remotely online that after eight years of the same faces doing the same spoken word pieces, many of the elders and principle protagonists in the Bubblin spoken word scene-team, have gone awf.

The worst are full of smug assumption and so insufferably so far up their own holes after years of constant and continual social-media self-publicity - and a corresponding facebook level of critical engagement - that it makes one gwiggle, ih rellih dez make one chuckle and titter at the unintentionally comedic performances of their unearned sense of cultural certainty that their literary pretensions exhibit. The Bubblin shmokin shpokin wurdas believing the blurb and hype they've been spouting and puffing for so many years about one another online in the corporate echo-chamber of Phasebuke.

But so what, none of my business, woddoo i kare? Exactly, nothing. However I found myself being roped into their made-up world several days ago, when it was made crystal clear to me that tha shmokin shpokin wurd team-scene now officially want nothing whatsoever to do with me, not because I torture small animals for pleasure, hate old people with a vengeance, troll them online and rejoice on hearing of their deaths, but because of a piece of writing published outside their delusional echo-chamber in which my thoughts on di Boglady diva Deva Ardlon, and lidl aul liov poet, Newl Shwaney, are laid bare.

Let that sink in. The mind of our new Bubblin ass-lickers learning how to be a peroppa shpokin wurda, make no delineation of publishing borders whatsoever.

They seem to believe, or have been indoctrinated and now accept the bullshit of what poetic superiors ventriliquise the muppets' voices, that all creative writing is published on just one big social-media Facebook Page; that The Boglady's Bagmon and Bagwomen, gabnom, mabnog, gonbam, and their supporting non-oghamically trained nob rags; are the natural-born deputy-editors of. Some mythical and non-existent happy clappy huggy no brags group Page; appointed by The Executive Editors of Nobrag 'emselvs, The Boglady and St Coalman of the Peroppa Shpokin Warders.

What was interesting (for me), is that the quality of this trash-talk piece of online hack writing I published on my blog, was the sole cause, several evenings ago, of the online membership privileges of an online poetry dump, Portry Dope, being revoked, and myself deleted, banned and blocked from access to this New Yorker of a social-media micro-bubble, by its creator, lets call her Elyn Newkis.

A new ass-kisser on tha shmokin live sphokin slash shlam block party in Bubbalin; and young poetry dope who seems to have been in possession of the delusional belief, (i imagine until reading the reply to her banning order), that anyone writing all over the world must first be approved of and cleared for publishing by awfisez fram an online poetry inspectorate, in which Elyn Newkis, as a newly commissioned ofizor and emerging stand out ass-licker in the Deva Ardlon Boglady's Gobwowmin Order of St Coalman's; mimicking the elders from our gosh wow fuk yeh team-scene, by communicating with me for the very first time, with a message, not awn.

In the voice of a bwitish toff conveying their displeasure at one's critical voice speaking what it believes in the the moment of that (or any other) piece of spontaneously created writing that has grown out of a fourteen year study of the bardic curriculum and practice founded on what I have learnt from the course reading material and plain old practise of speaking with anyone, anywhere, online, about the topic of poetry and dán. Which is all I have been doing since leaving my home town's Edge Hill University in Ormskirk, Lancashire.

~

Created in January, the Portry Dope is a small phazebuke group for an assortment of creatively young oddballs and weirdos, two to three hundred Bubbalin kids, and potential future shlam shtaws, spamming away all things shpokin wurda, tua their hearts content. And, imo, a welcome addition that is all part of the learning process for everyone involved.

From the lowliest teen member with depression letting it all out in print to our Group of confused and untrained bardic wannabes, right up to the Newkis creator Elyn, in third level education attending one of the most cliquey universities in not only Awyerland or Bubbalin town, but the wole woid vworld: Twintity.

In, of, on, and from which the whole concept and history of modern Bublin draws the literary spirit of itself.

Newkis wrote to me several evenings ago after I'd gone to her dump to leave a link to an unpublished poem of mine that'd just been published, and i discovered the dump no longer appears and that I must be banned. I had not been informed, just silently deleted and blocked, so I wrote a short text to Elyn Newkis:

 Hiya m8, a wannid teh post a link to a 2007 poem unpublished cuz tha poem is its own reward, n wen a goes teh dump@portrydope to tell ul ma bezzies abow ih, tha portrydope paj neva cum up n it dunt on me kevin desmond's words fb eeva m8, n ah wuz finkin, ooh, a wunda wots ap'nin theer loik pulaze fram the leburtaze m8y, lottsa luv a fwend

She wrote back an hour or two later informing me I had been excluded and was no longer a member; explicitly stating that the reason I'd been banned from her self-sealed tin-pot social-media micro-bubble, is because of my English voice in the language of a piece I wrote and published on my ten year old Irish Poetry Blog, that (please read very carefully) 'was reported to me as abusive'.

Note the tone, ethos, and poetic of Newkis's voice:

'Sorry Desmond, your post about' poetry diva Deva Ardlon 'was reported to me as abusive, and I've had words with you before over this. In hindsight I regret removing you from the group as I thought this May have been a bit harsh, but you have been warned that anymore abusive posts towards other members would result in your expulsion.'

The first think to strike me ass odd, lie number one, is that the parochially famous diva and Boglady Deva Ardlon, is not a member of the Portry Dope, as they left Phasebuke years ago and now rant on far more intellectually visible and eminent publications, her brand of faux socialist-in-residence cat-tripe about the end of the world and Ascension.

What made me psml was i was being asked to accept, on face value by this person twenty-five years younger than me, who has never written to me before, that i am being excluded from publishing ever again in her self-important Group, because I was breaking a talk policy and being offensive and insulting to another member, because I wrote and published an original piece of writing, not on the wall of this Facebook collective group page, but a ten year old Irish Poetry Blog; that an unnamed anonymous complainer and supposed member of Portry Dope, finds supposedly  'offensive'.

So, if you are a member of Portry Dope and don't like a piece of writing someone writes and publishes elsewhere outside the echo-chamber; then that is a legitimate ground of complaint on which an other anonymous member of one of your poetry dumps' can have you slung out. Madness. Intellectual facism, a very very backwardly dangerous and dog-shit illogical critical basis to found and implement as your come all ye pill for literary enlightenment and great new re-invention of the poetry wheel.

As a sixty word piece of literature by someone who was 13 or younger when I created the Irish Poetry Blog, I thought it most unimpressive because it fails to make any positive impression on me, because the contents are entirely untrue and total bollix. With the mind boggling at the banal depths this uncritical tissue of falsehoods and balderdash reveals; I replied, at length, beginning, as I do in all social-media echo-chambers when such crucial poetic cases are before a theatrical bench of live written craic 'eds:

'You've 'had words' with me? Can you produce these 'words' you've 'had' with me, please?'

Told 'you have been warned before', about 'abusive posts towards other members', not a thing pop'd into my mind, and I knew it was utter bullshit; and i wrote back, having a great time on the light side with a trusty shield of poetic truth, Kevin Desmond's words, and my mother's memory here in her name, Swords.

After firing off a few fastly written (in her ears), heretical home truths (and, it must be noted, enjoying the process) - to this new and decent enough filliocht/craft of poetry student, a second level (of seven student bard grades) MacFirmid at best, that was contacting and addressing me for the very first time, with a complete fairy story; I worked it all out on the page spontaneously writing; and shortly into the process wrote it was ok, she didn't need to reply, and that i'll 'spare you the embarrassment of having to open your gob and makin a dikhed out yerself.'

By the end of the reply i had worked everything out and left on a cheerful note, wishing the newkid Newkis love; but feeling a tad bad with myself for writing such poetically potent home-truths in such adult literary language to one so tender and ignorant, and so i wrote a second reply telling them not to take anything srsly i'd written in the first reply, and that I was just a humble servant of the soul with fourteen years in the game (to their own one or two years writing) and that life itself was a poem, dán also meaning 'fate' in the orginal druidic comprehension of the word; and that life is great  'wen ye study of the bardic curriculum brings you blessings that can only be described as otherworldly, once the writing in your life attracts the positivity of angelic spirit that makes your writing practice not about other people reading or publishing it, but you writing the best poems you can.'

Signing off with love, grá agus siochain, and ending on a blessing for the 'divine poetic force of positive good in' her 'own life, dán, poem, shlukyable beduklyivvle, adios amiga, sal waygo de shlaedoh.'

~

To repeat, again, looking thru the communication records between us, of both my personal and all island accounts, i discovered that this was the very first time Elyn Newkis had got in touch and written to me. Though of course I may be mistaken and Elyn has written something that I haven't read, until proven otherwise, my original assessment of 'bullshit' stands, beduvil, shtel.

Next on Irish Poetry Blog

Straight after the Newkis affair, a complaint was published by St Kewlmain Gaekern, decrying 'The Bogman, A Public Reflection', as 'bollix', and stay choon'd to read the documenting of this most recent and epic competitive critical conversational shlam between several of Erin's finest peroppa shmokin liov shpokun wurda-wardens and Poetry Police Gurdmins that fail to show up on the page of a now deleted social-media conversational catastrophe initiated by Sir Coalman and lost by his cronies just as fulla bs as Elyn Newkis's original faery story written and sent as part of, what I can only conclude, was a joint-effort by Bubbalin's team-scene to shut an English rhymer out by all means possible.

Aw, innit lovely?

Gerrup n holla, lemme shee thoos awms noi.

Kevin Desmond's words 

posted by Coirí Filíochta on Friday, June 12, 2015

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6.08.2015

Ode: On Exile

No bells strike at Saint Matthew’s; midnight

   means lights out; across Fayette Street, windows

send slow signals; but for hope of daylight,

    no means of evoking, painted or not, halos.

Occasional cars; the 7-11 parking lot empties

   not completely, the night crew forced to spill

      laced coffee, pills, down throats, past painted

faces reflecting gloom, as they plan candies

      passed around to kill behind, enemies

         locked in basements, unwilling dross killed.

Dull, dense, reptile-laden world— nature’s phantom

    side, scarred with imperatives to destroy— I

stride past Calvary Episcopal, its handsome,

     enchanted spires, trying to forge a “who” and “why.”

Caravaggio’s John the Baptist, crouched darkly

     in murk, I superimpose on Conshohocken at

       night, including the succession into severed head—

knowing that in there (7-11), warnings sharply

    uttered mean nothing, less than nothing at that,

       humanity is lost, then its corpse is bled.

This is not the world I was born for— Butler

    Pike, a Honda pulls into the abandoned

Dairy Queen lot, the young male driver scuttles

    out into the apartment complex, fear-flattened—

as to what John Milton would say about these

    suburban straits, everyone changing form

       like Satan, a poet singed by lost innocence

up all night on his own pills, thoughts, caffeine—

     I divine he knew all this, putrid fires warmed

         to kill brains, rigid rules passed on, idiot to idiot.

Adam Fieled, 2015

posted by Adam Fieled on Monday, June 08, 2015

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6.05.2015

On Exile

No bells strike at Saint Matthew’s; midnight

   means lights out; across Fayette Street, windows

send slow signals; but for hope of daylight,

    no means of evoking, painted or not, halos.

Occasional cars; the 7-11 parking lot empties

   not completely, the night crew forced to spill

      laced coffee, pills, down throats, past painted

faces reflecting gloom, as they plan candies

      passed around to kill behind, enemies

         locked in basements, unwilling dross killed.

Dull, dense, reptile-laden world— nature’s phantom

    side, scarred with imperatives to destroy— I

stride past Calvary Episcopal, its handsome,

     enchanted spires, trying to forge a “who” and “why.”

Caravaggio’s John the Baptist, crouched darkly

     in murk, I superimpose on Conshohocken at

       night, including the succession into severed head—

knowing that in there (7-11), warnings sharply

    uttered mean nothing, less than nothing at that,

       humanity is lost, then its corpse is bled.

This is not the world I was born for— Butler

    Pike, a Honda pulls into the abandoned

Dairy Queen lot, the young male driver scuttles

    out into the apartment complex, fear-flattened—

as to what John Milton would say about these

    suburban straits, everyone changing form

       like Satan, a poet singed by lost innocence

up all night on his own pills, thoughts, caffeine—

     I divine he knew all this, putrid fires warmed

        to kill brains, rigid rules passed on, idiot to idiot. 

        

posted by Adam Fieled on Friday, June 05, 2015

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