Something Solid, unlike Apparition Poems, is a book which knows its place. The God-forsaken violence of the poems strung in numbers is replaced by the textual sangfroid of consolidation with the core values which render poetry useful for most literary landscapes— incidents and situations chosen for interrogation, involving the poet in memory, sensuality, and the formality of the traditional sonnet (and newfangled double sonnet, twenty-eight lines). It represents a downward curve, as it were, into these topos, rather than an upward curve into serious philosophical discourse. What would make the book more than a curiosity (or, perhaps, anti-curiosity) to such discourse, is a Barthes-ian acknowledgement of a basic literary principle which philosophy finds distasteful, but which nonetheless has and will always dictate individual literary economies— we tend to read and re-read what we find pleasurable to read and re-read. The pleasure principle inhering in texts and textuality may dictate that Something Solid, despite its not being angled in a strictly original way, will be read and re-read with more pleasure and avidity than Apparition Poems, which most, including discursive minds, may choose to respect from a distance. The version of poetic memory explored here has as its ensign an engagement with two periods in time, one place specific— the Nineties, and Aughts Philadelphia. Built into the book’s willfully conventional dynamic, is the imposition, on these periods, of an aura of romantic chaos, of the possibility of the poet’s consciousness, in medias res in the appointed zeitgeists, conflating internal with external vicissitudes, so that the book resonates as both completely personal and ripe for universalization. The poet stands within the text and its dramas, a self-conscious synecdoche. The narrative-thematic context is semi-autobiography.
Where sensuality is taken in the text is to a locale configured to purify and transcendentalize its manifestation into an emergence of dramatic, imaginative and tactile reality. Bodies are not seen as real but hyperreal; the carnal acts as a portal into its own effacement, into the larger existence of Eros as an idea and ideal to mystify the objective-discursive. Also, Eros subsists to express the effacement of objectivity into immediacy, drama, and the aesthetic establishing its own, rightful claim on aestheticized language, in as ideal form as the text and the poet’s talent will allow. Imagination in the text establishes its own body— possibilities glimpsed, starting from sense. Undulant, an early standout from the text, performs this task— layering sensual and imaginative data, the tactile over and under the imaginative, so as to solidify, both pleasure in the text for capable readers, immersion in time-zone or zeitgeist awareness, and formal innovation for what peregrinations can be compressed into fourteen lines. This ambitious task subsists past the manner of Keats and Wordsworth, in their respective sonnets, into a Neo-Romanticism (the presumed aegis under which the text falls) of all these conflated elements, coalescing in simultaneity. Not philosophy, but not simple either. Frequencies begins from more sophisticated ground— the meta-aesthetic— one artist addressing another. Then, the poet’s imagination somersaults into an assaying of the imagination of the Other. That the meta-aesthetic manifests alongside a raw revelation of carnality makes Frequencies ring out or emanate, with a Manneristic, perhaps, sense of exaggeration, on double, triple, and quadruple levels. As is not irrelevant, both Frequencies and Undulant are darkly colored, with under and overtones of chaos and violence. They do have a way of echoing Apparition Poems. Eros is not dulcet here but foreboding, edgy. Textual interrogation reveals no perceived placidity. The language knows its place, is polished; the represented situations are raw.
The text’s extensive immersion in visual art, through the prominent placement in the text of Mary Evelyn Harju, Abby Heller-Burnham, and Jenny Kanzler, tilts the text towards a perpetual sense of ekphrasis, as an owned level. This level achieves a status of semi-dominance, developed along semi-dominant lines. The semi-dominance of a travelogue sensibility, from Philadelphia to New Hampshire to Montreal to Chicago, is also developed in tandem. The grounded quality of the text, against Apparition Poems, answers perversion with exuberance, a haunted house with an eternal salon, down to a series of Creatrix muses who imbue the text, as has been said, with ekphrastic intention. This coloring or imbuing culminates in Starlight I and II, a miniaturized dialectic that takes (as Equations does not, exactly) the mysticism of romance and intoxication and confers judgement or an answer on the pursual of such, amid darker (“raw”) material. The objective is thus established as one (Neo-Romantic) aegis for the subjective to sit under, in a text which takes its stripes both from the cognitive and the intuitive.
The sonnet, as a poetic form, is traditionally an enemy of philosophy. Brevity and compression of data are both adversarial to the development of discourse and discursive contexts. Why the sonnet here was chosen and set into dynamic motion was to undo preconceptions regarding what the sonnet’s possibilities are, in practice, if hinged to a solidly placed premise. For the book, the poet invented a form— what he calls a double sonnet— one sonnet atop another, as a twenty-eight line poem, rather than a fourteen line poem. Precisely half the poems in Something Solid are double sonnets. The expectation horizon of twenty-eight lines is, or can be construed to be, radically dissimilar to the original mere fourteen. In twenty-eight lines, the little song, angled against intellectual expansiveness, takes on a new stripe as a vessel or vehicle more pliant, more nimble, more about widening parameters so that memory, sensuality, and drama, have a more adequate stage to perform, do their tricks on. The stage should then be both adequately lit, and adequately built to support their weight. Yet, the precision of the form— twenty-eight lines— renders some compression necessary, so that the traditional sonnet geist of willing confinement, enforced brevity, and the phenomenological tension which ensues, for both poet and reader, still stakes a claim and imposes that poetry remains poetry.
For Something Solid to transcend the merely tautological— poetry being poetry, long-established tropes within poetry digging in their respective heels to reestablish their subsistence and contemporary relevance— the combination of elements which inhere in the text must gather themselves together and travel, as if thrown with substantial velocity, to a unique gestalt locale. The locale, as a congeries of all its component parts, is crystallized, in miniaturized form, in Undulant, and in more representatively newfangled form in Frequencies— the charm, sense of transgression or danger (chaos and violence) thwarted, neutralized, or at least assimilated, and frissons built into a life, unconventional amidst all the conventionality, consecrated against bourgeois pursuits. The poet is not domesticated. Rather, in his travels, the pursuit is for the richness of flight, and the phenomenology of flight, travel, as an end in itself. The poet, as an arrow flying through spaces at any moment enchanted or damned, is in love with the very principle of dynamism perpetuating itself. What gravitas is expressed, what objectivity is reached for, has to do with an understanding reached, through the composition of the book, what human life can offer to this form of consciousness, which craves a mien of the unsettled. Here’s how motion or dynamism is achieved, here’s how pieces may fall around it. The rogue poet is no one new, to be sure. This rogue poet is not attempting to be new, even if he is, often, inhabiting a new form. What he wants is a new kind of textual voyage, for himself, to mirror and ricochet against, and thus enhance, his fleshly, and cognitive, voyages.
Always a harangue, to get anywhere near the avant-prof clan from twenty years ago with the idea that hetero sex might be interesting to write about. Queer sex got off the hook, for being trailblazing. But men and women, forget it. Better to spout the usual stylized gibberish. In any case, who you see here is Danielle (Dani) Diendorf. And the major, newly revised double sonnet about her is Flaming Red Hair. The tie-in to Stoli from earlier this year is simple: the kinks.
In a game not unlike Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the newly revised Side-Armedcan sit right next to Frequencies. I saw a version, incidentally, of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in London as a teenager. It was almost as risque as the movie. I would also choose to note that these two pieces incorporate dialogue in a theatrical way. Is this a technique I learned in Pittsburgh? Not quite. The Pittsburgh zinger, if there is one, is that a Pittsburgh '92 actress did show up for me in Manhattan in the mid-Aughts in a major way. There it is again: Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
Classicism is, and the process of classicizing is, angled against what post-modernism is supposed to represent as an ethos. Yet, fuck it, right? Someone has to look at what cultural artifacts were produced by post-modernity and decide what to keep and what to throw out. So, I offer my two cents on that particular subject here.
Salvaged from the PennSound Personal Mythologies II mp3 file (2003), What Needs No Myth, homage and counterpoint to Yeats and The Second Coming, makes its way to Eratio. Many thanks to Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino. Chopped from Personal Mythologies II, me reading What Needs No Myth in 2003.
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