The story of Poetry Incarnation '05, the Philly Free School event held at the Khyber in Olde City Philadelphia on July 5, 2005, is a wry one. The primordial fact of the event was not evident to me and Mike Land until the event was underway: because the Khyber was on ground-level; anyone walking by on 2nd Street could look in and see what was going on; the chaotic, ecstatic frenzy of the Highwire P.F.S. shows couldn't happen. The labyrinth entrance to the Highwire, and its placement several floors up from street-level in the Gilbert Building, made it ideal for loosening up the inhibitions of a willing audience. So that, we got hype for Poetry Incarnation '05 (I had done an interview with Deesha Dyer of Philly City Paper from the Boston 'burbs about ten days before the event), lots of paying customers showed up, but beneath the surface, Mike and I knew that the basic premise of the Philly Free School (we offer you new kinds, forms, manners of freedom, so that you see what you can handle) was not able to be fulfilled. Mary & Abby couldn't make it; Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum was conspicuously absent, too. The most memorable performance, for me, was Hannah Miller's drunken screed about what Philadelphia meant to her. There was also some unpleasantness from the PhillySound poets; they expected to be a headlining act, and wound up reading without any particular fanfare, just like everyone else. They later claimed, falsely, that I "stole their money." All in all, Poetry Incarnation '05 was worth doing; it established us, P.F.S., as a public commodity in Philly; but was nonetheless not as much fun as the Highwire shows. Many years later, it is also noticeable that there was no one highlight to the entire Philly Free School experience of the mid-Aughts. The highlight was the sustained 2004/2005 peak of what the Highwire Gallery bothered to be in Center City Philadelphia; and how Mike and I managed to ride these waves towards a series of events that made the pursuit of real freedom the issue it should be among the human race.
I’ve never listened to the Devil… he’s whispering in my ear now, telling me about chance— play the cards, don’t pretend you can deal the hand… I never tried to deal the hand, I tell him, because the deck has no card with a poet’s face. The Devil laughs at me, dumps a load of press clippings in a bag I marked Don’t touch— …………………………………………. now, it’s so cloudy we can only perch on rigid, bare ruined branches. We cannot fathom what the surface should be, why the inelegant is preponderant. Red flags whip our livers. Red hot prods in crowded rings circle us. There can be no twittering hope without notions of liberty, as means of using flies, flying, flown over the protests on Market Street. ………………………………………………… When you lift a Coca-Cola, you are pulling a lever for entropy. The cloying tickle of high fructose corn syrup— all dreams dried into anodyne. Goods may be America’s heart, en masse; what in them beats? Sounds of horses hooves, trampling down corporate dirt, all in a bone-piled graveyard. Sounds of whinnies, conflagrations, blinker-viewed social situational Waterloos, & you don’t know (they won’t let you) who’s standing behind who, or you. ………………………………………….. An old, mad, blind, despised, dying king, says the country. We protect imagery, say others. Belief is testament to goodness, rigidity means faithfulness to a spiel we all know like simple algebra, and that can be equated to squares. We are bellwethers of chicken egg home fries, I am a clucking and a shucking and jiving, you’re alive to little red roosters too lazy to crow for day. No facile Geist for this Zeit. It’s a time for knickknacks picked up like cordite. Shoot. …………………………………………… No Blogosphere back-draft, only post ahead, into cacophony: wire, networks, new wild west; ropes, holsters. Age-old books; angst, anemic. It’s sexily red, moral/ethical oblivion, hemmed in, quick as spurt, across oceans: thermo-genic press coverage, safe, free; corpses, numbers, brain lotions. ………………………………………….. That notion, “that I’m suffering well,” must be in Plato somewhere, or Nietzsche— now, it’s in you too. You don’t succeed in laughing at the shard-sharp world; it’s jammed too deep in your throat, with suffocated senators, black-robed judges, tentative press secretaries. You only cough up butt-ends based on others’ words. Laughter is solely for surprise autopsies— of an atrophied surface, what’s under incomprehensible to most, who know, very precisely, just how most they are. …………………………………………. A gift everyone gets is a Pat Boon(e). Death & taxes are both Pat Boon(e)s. Truth, as always, is less pat. Truth has more to do with what I really glean from you, which is not a political (exactly), is (rakishly, richly) anti-politics, & is conveyed by swift skin-kicks. There is no place for this in the full frontal assault land we’ve been Shanghai’d into, & the dissemination of which is America’s ultimate Pat Boon(e). ……………………………………….. a soul's incision into your cerebellum which i can fill gingerly, not spill onto a nail-bed you carefully made to ensure maximum viscosity crank & creak the senator speaks …………………………………………….
For the duration of the mid-Aughts, Mike Land lived at the Adelphia House at 13th and Chestnut, here shown. The point of interest: what Mike was exposed to was a neighborhood which had no specific name; was, in fact, the absolute center of Center City Philadelphia. The center-of-the-center vibe was interesting: Mike's window looked down, from the seventh floor, at Chestnut Street; and what he would see, even at one, two, or three in the morning, was a constant fracas. Directly across the street was the liquor store from 1488; a few blocks away was Woody's, Philly's el primo gay bar, where the Free School pack would sometimes hang out. Yet Mike's window square was about a neighborhood and an intersection that never slept. Logan Square was relatively quiet at night, as was West Philadelphia. It is from the Adelphia House that we planned Free School moves like Poetry Incarnation '05, and the various shows we did at the Highwire Gallery. Incidentally, the Highwire Gallery, on Cherry Street between Broad and 13th Street, a few blocks from Mike (and in a neighborhood which, as of '19, has been partially re-zoned), was another center-of-the-center edifice, even as the vibe was slightly less of a fracas than the Adelphia House. By Cherry Street, Broad is turning into North Broad; yet from the Gilbert Building steps, the view of Philadelphia City Hall was stunning. From the Adelphia House windows, which faced south, no dice. What Mike had going, at the center-of-the-center, which Mary & I did not, is the sense of Philadelphia as a great raging beast, constantly churning, constantly in motion; and Mike's life at the time was a ricochet of the same energies.
The Four Quarters Magazine began in the early Teens and, as is intriguing, published out of India. I managed to place several Great Recession poems there in 2013. As of 2016, they were off the air, and a little later offline completely. A shame: I liked the template/formatting aspect of the site, and the idea that post-avant had expanded to a locale outside the usual loops.
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