As/Is

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 ones.

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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11.06.2024

Rubber Soul: The Word

I said to my friend, “love”
was the one we both missed,
w knit stockings, red gloves,
apple-pie eyes. She ran away
from booze, smoke, our beds.
She was too good for us. Now
all we have is the word: “love.”

He told me I misunderstood,
that it’s the word not the girl
that matters: “love” is self-
creating, a verdict delivered
on creation, a benediction on
all manners of bullshit, hung
on our days like stalagmites.

Well, I said, as long as there’s
something in the world other
than bullshit, I guess there’s
something to hope for from
each moment. Not much, he
said, but we have to go, I need
a beer, & he was right, & we went.

posted by Adam Fieled on Wednesday, November 06, 2024

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11.02.2024

Posit

The sound recording I have circulating now called Live In Brooklyn features Amy King, in her introduction, mentioning the imminent release of my chapbook Posit. Its official release date, when I mailed out the first copies, was June 9, 2007. Just the mention of Posit, for me, makes Live in Brooklyn more important than the video taped at Goodbye Blue Monday in Bushwick (Brooklyn) in August 2009, of me reading some When You Bit… sonnets. The reason is simple: for Neo-Romanticism, for the Philly Free School, Posit has prescience in it which can effectively make it our Lyrical Ballads. Lyrical Ballads, as is known, was an early (first ed. 1798) Wordsworth/Coleridge collaboration which supplied an intellectual spine and framework to and for English Romanticism. Similarly, Posit provides an intellectual spine and framework which supports the entire Neo-Romantic endeavor or enterprise. It journeys from defining Neo-Romantic subjectivity, establishing an engagement with Deconstructionism and other forms of philosophy, re-affirming, past the English Romantics, the power of the personal, the first-person singular in art, and also incising into our gestalt sensibility a warm, humanistic approach to human sexuality, in defiance of English Romanticism’s wonted frigidity and more in line with Neo-Classicist painters Ingres and David, Posit stands as a document which leaps past 2007 (as The Posit Trilogy leaps past '17, Volo '23) and establishes what the twenty-first century might hold for high art, from Philadelphia (implying the entire East Coast as environs) on out. For me, Posit is the most seminal text with my name on it until Apparition Poems and the Cheltenham Elegies. The likability factor, huge in work like the Dancing With Myself sonnets and Chimes, may not be as omnipresent, but Posit was not channeled specifically to be likable: it is there, as Lyrical Ballads was, to lay the groundwork for a revolution in consciousness, away from the vacuity of previous American art (most emphatically, post-modernity) and towards creating representative American work which could stand comparison with anything produced in Europe in the last thousand years. The dialogues with Wordsworth (whose Preface for LB remains both incisive and definitive), specifically, have continued into the present day.

Whether Deconstructionism happened to be a cohesive, authentic intellectual juggernaut movement or not is up for debate. What is not up for debate is that the central tenets of Deconstructionism— the evanescence and arbitrary nature of language, and the dichotomous push-pull both away from and towards the text and textuality— inform Posit, The Posit Trilogy, and Volo, to a very significant extent. That Deconstructionism can also apply to painting— that there is also, proverbially, nothing outside the image— makes Deconstructionist thought relevant also to the Philly Free School and Neo-Romanticism in totem. What Posit seems to signal, as a literary talisman initiating the Neo-Romantic endeavor (encompassing also, what Abby Heller-Burnham had already painted), was the reemergence of non-arbitrary language, of a kind of lyricism-within-Deconstruction, as self-contradictory as that sounds. An ethos, then, which attempted (and attempts) to make aesthetic its own contradictions.

To what extent can form and formality (lyricism) redeem the arbitrary nature of the signifier? Is the lyrical signifier arbitrary? An empirical answer would have to put the truth in the middle of things— that, for instance, with “known” and “shown” in the title poem’s concluding line, the sonority of the two words together (that they rhyme) makes for an effect meant to engender pleasure, and not to be arbitrary; yet, why k-n-o-w-n and s-h-o-w-n mean what they mean, rather then meaning something else, is as arbitrary as any other word, or words, meaning what they mean. Bring in, or draft, so to speak, the issue of subjectivity-in-text, the first person singular, and you see how lyricism drafts Deconstructionism, also. The pull is away from corrosive nihilism and towards some discrete affirmations: of form and formality in art as redemptive, of formal effects as meaningful against the arbitrary, and of the first person singular as a potential textual meeting place or median point around which all these imperatives assemble.
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Posit, released as a Dusie chap in June 2007, was my first major print publication. Most of the Posit poems had been written in the winter months which joined 2006 and 2007. It was my first year as a University Fellow at Temple University in Philadelphia, and a Fellowship year— I didn’t have to teach. In the fall of 2006, I had done a graduate workshop with Rachel Blau DuPlessis. She called her own work “post-Objectivist”— a continuation of the investigative interrogation of textual subjectivity by poets like George Oppen and Carl Rakosi (who called themselves Objectivists), with a slant towards feminism and a bias towards Deconstructionist literary theory. Rachel was heavily critical of any first person sensibility, expressed in poetic language, which didn’t take the time to investigate and interrogate its own efficacy. The belief that language could only be justified “qua language,” rather than language opening a transparent window on whatever a naïve subject desires you (as reader) to see (this thought-circuit is a lift from Derrida) was one Rachel carried through all her writing and reading tasks. I was thirty, and just beginning to publish seriously— I couldn’t help but be influenced.

The mood I caught, while composing the Posit poems that winter, was a congeries of this influence with other contingent factors— my first trip to Chicago in December ’06 (memorialized in Illinois Sky), the spookiness of West Philadelphia and the Eris Temple (Le Chat Noir), and even the perceived contemporary relevance of Greek myth (Eyeballs). I separated myself from Rachel’s formulations by maintaining a narrative voice— without a narrative voice, what animates poetry to begin with? Rachel’s own work suffered heavily from lack of a strong narrative voice— even more from the notion that narrative itself was (and even could be) outdated and outmoded. Rachel, for some reason, associated narrative with the nineteenth century— but the truer association is more thoroughgoing, i.e. poetic language is impossible (utterly so) without narrative, for it is, inexorably, words following words to create narrative which creates the effect of symbol and art, always. Nothing negotiable there. Poetry sans narrative struck me as a gimmick, and still does. Rachel and her compeers did betray a weakness for gimmick, and obfuscation, in mistrust, of substance (what in literature which produces long-term strength), which compromised their self-praised idealism.

In any case, Posit did not disavow narrative cohesion, nor did it fall prey to substance-bashing. The cohesion of the chapbook as a gestalt is loosely themed around not only an interrogation but a celebration of the poetic “I,” not relying on the disjunctures and ellipses which were trendy in 2007, but on sensual objective correlatives (Illinois Sky, Le Chat Noir, Eyeballs, Dracula’s Bride) and formal experiments which combined disjunctures with straightforward narrative (Posit, Come to the Point, Day Song). The theoretical gist of Posit is this— mixing the tenets of Deconstructionism with poetic language is richest and most rewarding if, amidst the ellipses and disjunctures, poetic language is allowed to be itself— to carry, not only narrative and voice, but sensuality, imagery, simile/metaphor, and intimations of profound emotion. If all the constituent elements which form the backbone of poetic language are lost, what’s left is a mere husk— and American avant-garde poetry, for the second half of century XX and into century XXI, is largely a congeries of husks, hollow spaces and impoverished waste lands. The waste land mentality: resist Eliot, follow Pound. Hilarious, then, for Rachel to have told me that Posit "channels Pound." As usual, only in theory. And, as ever, the mirroring Pound text does not exist. Pound: he's the paper dragon to shred. I was channeling Eliot. Posit is meant to represent the initiation of a new, rich strain of American poetry— and its influence has been felt.

posted by Adam Fieled on Saturday, November 02, 2024

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