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.
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.
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.
Ironic, in a piece about luxury, sensuality, and ease, that it’s taken me so long, until 2024, to finish Trish: A Romance. The portion of the Aughts Philly dream which has remained crystalline over twenty to twenty five years— emancipation from limiting belief systems or creeds, freedom to live expressively, and, most importantly, manifestations of extreme, libertine-worthy excess— are not difficult to define or express. The difficulty in the Trish: A Romance textual journey, which began in 2009, is to render luxury, sensuality, and ease, while remaining faithful to complexities built into myself, Trish (Mary) and Tobi (Abby) as characters. Not all libertine models are complicated people; we were. Also worth noting about 2009; the last real chunk of time I spent with Abby Heller-Burnham, in the 23rd and Arch apartment (Westminster Arch), involved Trish: A Romance. I wanted to tape Abby talking about Mary, narrating their friendship, to see if I could use it. Thus, one section of the book (I thought) could be Abby-on-Mary. Didn’t work. When the tape began to roll, Abby wanted to talk about herself and her travails, which were gruesome in late-summer ’09. Abby was not a happy camper then, and all the ease, the bliss of the six, seven, eight years before were gone. As I said, I was never to interact with her in a prolonged way again.
Yet, Trish: A Romance remains, a testament to a period of time with many miracles built into it. Like the travelogue writings of Christopher Isherwood, the text dwells on a surfeit of characters who don’t just dream but live wild adventures and romances. The bizarre formality of the piece— seven sets of six sonnet-length stanzas— was invented so that the action could be conveyed in a vessel (as Mary would say) lean and mean enough to make the ride a brisk one. The miracle isn’t just in fornication and carousing— it’s the fact that said fornication and carousing was done in a spirit not just of affection but of love. At the end of the day, these are characters who love each other. This, notwithstanding the concluding revelation of the protagonist— that Trish has remained at lease partially unknowable to him. The point is, the characters in Trish: A Romance are not scallywags. They have, and notice, their own emotions. Even as accusations of self-indulgence are not necessarily misplaced. People will take Trish: A Romance not just to Christopher Isherwood but to Brett Easton-Ellis; that much sex, drugs, youthfulness, and rambunctious indulgence does form a sense of symmetry with Less Than Zero. I would only choose to say that in Trish, a sense of emotional/spiritual engagement, rather than dispossession, takes all the Philly-L.A. energy and harnesses it into a form more human, more likeable than the Easton-Ellis book. Remember: the three protagonists are all artists, creative types. La Boheme? No. Something unique, that’s just what it is. See for yourself.
For those of us born in the 70s and 80s, who lived through the Aughts in Center City and West Philadelphia, our perception of Philadelphia will always be skewered by the sexualized over and undercurrents which animated, charged, and lit the Philly arts scene on fire with sexual energy during that time. Many of us were annoyed by the misconception the media created of a not-fully-sexed Philadelphia; but we were disarmed on that level. I have said elsewhere, and it bears repeating, that if the city of Philadelphia has a sun sign it is Gemini. It's another way of saying this: Philadelphia from within looks and feels vastly different than Philadelphia seen in a cursory way or from a distance. The sultriness around our scene was warmer and more human than the scenes we had all read about in New York and L.A.: we weren’t motivated by money or prestige as such, or the desire to create and maintain images of/for ourselves. The hot blood that ran through McGlinchey’s, Dirty Frank’s, the Good Dog, and all our other hang out venues had some actual romance in it; we all went so far as to care, passionately, about other people. The Gemini twist, as ever for Philadelphia, is that if the seeds we plant ripen correctly, Philadelphia may go on record as one of the hottest scenes in the history of the arts, thus overturning a century of bad press, neglect, abuse, and widely spread misinformation, not to mention a corrupt arts-dissemination system with it.
Art and life have a way of co-mingling which can be difficult to finesse for an author. Because I dared to place her image on the cover of this book/pdf, I might as well announce what will be obvious to those who knew me and the Philly scene during the Aughts: the female protagonist of Trish is modeled on Philadelphia painter Mary Evelyn Harju. The life I built with Mary (and with the Philly Free School) was highly unusual; we were artists without being rich kid dilettantes or prestige hounds; lovers without being mutually exclusive; Penn students and graduates who went out of our way not to be academic; and human beings who tossed and turned on our own emotional waves without trying to fake balance or calm. It was a scattered life we had, and a haphazard one; but the love and affection we shared was genuine. In fact, if I have ever had a Laura or a Beatrice, it is Mary. The difference, of course, between myself and Plutarch and Dante, is that Mary and I consummated our relationship very fast. The heat we had for each other never quite let up, either. The picture on the cover here was snapped at a party thrown at Mary’s house (4325 Baltimore Avenue) in the early Aughts. That house was an experience in itself— it was filled, always, with artists, musicians, and other bohemians. On certain nights, everyone in the house would be intoxicated on something or other. Many nights I spent there, I felt as if the entire house had ascended into deep space, into some other, more spectral part of the universe than West Philadelphia. I have memories of floating down hallways and stairs. Mary was a wonderful playmate and an excellent mate in general. She was never boring. And, to the extent that I hope this piece conveys the intense electric excitement I felt in her presence, it is a reminder that these elevated feelings are always possible, even during a Great Recession. It thus, becomes the Gemini stare of Philadelphia down the barrel of a shotgun.
For five hundred
years, they’ve said
the same thing:
these are the end
times, this is the
flood, the end of
things, apocalypse.
Funny how the
people talking
(including me)
never seem to
be the ones in
the street giving
food to the home
less. In fact, much
of this speech occurs
at meals, over grunts
of animal satisfaction.
You must be well
fed to pontificate:
I, like many others,
(hungry when full)
wonder what to do,
while my guitar
gently weeps, &
my life sleeps.
The murk and sludge of 2008 engendered a wide variety of responses. When I could get high in 2008, it was on the wings of a writing bender which wound up seeing me into the Teens. In the triumvirate of e-chap/e-book publications in ’08 and ’09, Revolver distinguishes itself by a vested sense of sobriety. Revolver is not me burying myself in alcohol, nor is it me wallowing in the urban menace atmosphere of filth and scum. Revolver is where I respond to the sleaze and scum by fighting back. Wide awake, the protagonist here takes in the world around him, and sees what unholy, bitterly corrupted lights he can shoot out. Beneath the sobriety and the fury, Revolver also reads as a last will and testament of and for my relationship with Mary Evelyn Harju. I’m watching her moves, and watching mine, and trying to discern why the impasse between us must be, or seem, permanent. Blood on the Tracks time. There’s always a rift where the physical and spiritual play a violent, spiteful game of tug-of-war. The criticisms and recriminations which inform Love You To, lead to molten melt-down of She Said She Said and then the complete and totalized entropy of For No One. As the final salvo of the e-chap, Tomorrow Never Knows consummates a willful imposition of the physical on the spiritual and vice versa, into a sense of life being conceived in a dissolution of individual consciousness. This is where the lovers cease to exist, and commune in something like a Universal consciousness or Mind. Where sex means something. Where Mary and I are concerned, the final fuck (half-metaphorically meant) is the most profound. The revolver carried by the protagonist annihilates itself, as it self-exhausts, and the ecstasy does not exclude sobriety, faithfulness, or discipline. What actually happened between Ms. H and I in the second half of ’07 is tangled. Some of our raw material got transmuted, some rendered with (again) an adequate faithfulness. Released as a Scantily Clad Press e-chap in ’08, Revolver’s solution for recessional entropy is a commitment to cultivating presence, reality, individuality. These are seen to be worth fighting for. Entity, unthinking consciousness, is not to be trusted, as a weakening agent. All shot through with a patina of raw, divorced pain. One way home.
Vino veritas, translates from the Latin, roughly, as this: truth-in-alcohol. The phenomenon by which we tell more of the truth when drunk. Is vino veritas something real? I wouldn’t venture a definitive guess. Different people react different ways to different stimulants and/or depressants. I would only say that, in my life as a writer, I’ve only dived (delved) into these murky waters once, i.e. written an entire piece (in this case, a chapbook length manuscript) while alcohol shit-faced. Rubber Soul was written and published in 2008. I have made a point of pointing out, in other places, that I was not playing the game straight for much of that particular, recession-trundling year. I wasn’t compulsively shit-faced either; I had (for instance) to function at Temple, both as adjunct prof and graduate student, and I did. But it was a saucy time, of old games turning up loose ends, and, where the recession was concerned, micro and macro levels converging in my life, and the lives of those I cared for. Even as I found, of course, that I couldn’t take care of them anymore. So: I was drunk enough of the time to take my stab, for instance, at the Jack Kerouac of Big Sur. The narrative voice emerges, as in Big Sur, fuzzy, hazy, staggering, stumbling. Drunken. Also channeling my old family relation Jim Morrison. Paul Rothchild said of Morrison, When he was being the shit-faced kamikaze drunk, it was odds-on against getting him to do a vocal. You might look into it. Paraphrase for a writer churning out a brief book: I looked into it.
The narrative Rubber Soul voice is, in fact, too fuzzy, too hazy, to attempt anything classic. Keats keeps getting leaned on, Manhattan juts in absurdly, as does a bizarre overlay of occult/New Age/Golden Dawn baggage. Amidst all the glass shards, who I am as a long-suffering male protagonist in Girl is clearly, and precociously, taking on the task of relating/mythologizing the years on the front-lines with Mary Evelyn. Eight years, to be precise. The Word finds me sounding not like Kerouac or Morrison but like Charles Bukowski. He becomes another absurd overlay, amidst the fuzziness and the Crowley bric-a-brac. The overall tone of Rubber Soul, I would say, is not morose like Big Sur but frenzied, chaotic, hysterical. Much of it’s supposed to be funny, too, the kind of funniness The White Album sacrifices at the altar of still-cherished classicism. Rubber Soul can be taken as a romp all the way through. Ungovernable Press, btw, which published The White Album (1st ed.) and Rubber Soul in ’09 and ’08, respectively, is based in Sweden, and emanates from editor Lars Palm at the center. Part of the ’08 fracas was about weird worlds colliding online. Philadelphia to Malmo? Why not. And me and many others did have a sense of largesse, then, about how many books and chapbooks we could publish. A nifty compensation, as it were, for all the drunken nights. And a clue as to why some of us have been able to survive all the melees.
The composition of the first draft of The White Album happened over three days, in the summer of 2008. The three days caught me in the middle of the move I was making between two flats in Logan Square. Once the hard drive was set up in the new place, I was able to let loose there. It was, in fact, cathartic to write The White Album; I was, for real, letting loose. The writing was informed by a kind of white heat, owing to a physiological sense of being pressurized. This, because I felt the much lower ceilings, and much more squat space, were closing in on me. The lightning bolt of the three days had some sense of desperation in them, as though time were running out, as reflected in downsized residency. In 2008, such turned out to be the case very much. I also remember the summer of 2009, when The White Album appeared, much differently. By 2009, there was a gravity and formality to the desolation of the streets. The party was over, and that was that. Awful, but easy to pin down. At the Last Drop, the social hi-jinx turned ugly, and the standardized Aughts Philly laissez faire transformed into everyone-get-in-line. I kept running into hob-goblin people from my past. The book came out; got linked at a bunch of the right places; did some somersaults on Goodreads; that was it, for then. Books take forever, right? But that sense of the squalid, built into The White Album as a literary construct, and owing merely to low ceilings in Westminster Arch as a contingency, works, I feel, as a synecdoche for what the late Aughts were about in Philly, and the East Coast. I also credit Ungovernable editor Lars Palm for keeping the site, and the pdfs, clean, sturdy, cared-for. And the flat I’m in has higher ceilings now.
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