How societies frame high art, when it happens for real, has never really changed much. Without undue cynicism, it's easy to see how the sanitization process works. High art tends to be smeared with the same patina of associations— something sanctimonious, fraught with pseudo-religious over and undertones, Sunday School-ish, "eat your veggies," something to be endured. Something uncool. This is all a price to be paid for the ability high art has to conquer long durations of time. No to mention the accrual of enormous sums of invested money to works of high art, making it game to say it, and they, earn their keep in the world. Yet, no fun. And the fraudulence around popular art and popular culture products takes "eat your veggies" and begets "eat your gristle." Aughts Philadelphia has something else in mind, which sounds simple but isn't. Mary, Abby, and the rest work in an unprecedented way, and on an unprecedented level in America, as classicists who can also be elite as pin-ups. There is no reason Abby and Mary should not be pin-ups. They were steamy, racy, and very sexualized. Why not? Well, society may say, because that doesn't fit the cathedral mold. Doesn't allow for proper sanitization. I am asking people to appreciate and accept an ambitious agenda from us. I am proselytizing that what came out of Philadelphia in the Aughts should be allowed both rights, both privileges. Pin-ups in the cathedral. Let us throw away the molds, throw away the formulas, and enfranchise this body of work to do what it wants to do in the world. Both. Thus, we create for ourselves parameters in which we can have and maintain the dignity and integrity we deserve. Peace.
Nights I staggered drunkenly, down the winding,
white-walled corridor which led to two major Highwire
entrances (the ware-house space & the gallery itself);
how it was that our version of freedom (Free School),
stitched to good old-fashioned luck, had been allowed
to recreate cultural Philadelphia from its insides out, I
could never figure out. The set-up, me calling the shots,
added a patina of raw power to my persona which had
never been there before. I looked loose, worldly. I was,
unwittingly, being scoped out by eyes raised on the rigors
of politics, blended with also-raw eroticism, raw determination.
In the sense of a quintessence of material action, the world.
With that quintessential world, the possibility of quick,
painful obsolescence— alongside the drunken rapture.
II. Beleaguered In Lasting
Two bottles of half-finished whiskey gaped on
the island space, mid-gallery; green odors emanated from
corners. The crowd, teens & twenties, ribald,
projected an O-mind, as though a Pandora’s Box
had opened, allowing them to float in a stark bardo
where salvation was granted to those gutsy enough
to ride the rollicking waves. We had turned the right
keys to let these people free, taught them the rigors
of real freedom. My satori, then, was about responsibility.
Knowledge had to be passed what we’d accomplished
here, in Philadelphia. Only I could give form to all
the shapeless exuberance. Prizes yet to be granted
to me strutted around, bathing in the warmth of our masses.
Another satori, more responsibilities. Beleaguered in lasting.
III. Crowned
The routine social maintenance of our domain—
another drunken night at McGlinchey’s, eyes & ears
to the ground as usual, broken then only by your
arrival. It must’ve been Nick who met you first,
I don’t remember, but I saw you were fixated on
him. Hannah: novelist, politico, of course, but looks which
teetered ambiguously into divisiveness for those
who knew you— heavy brows, wavy hair, tall, a bit
tomboyish, also, but articulate, a charmer, & yet I
registered the sense that if I ever got you, it would
be something gratuitous, a surprise, because closed
seemed to be the fortress, & choosing Nick seemed
to betray a masochistic streak. That night, his front
swelled visibly with your arrival— I stepped back.
You were, must’ve been, I later realized, underwater
somehow, surveying currents, examining the wildlife,
surreptitiously & invisibly carving a watery path to me.
I had only what the male of the species always has—
the equipment to complete your circuitry, potent or
impotent in any time or context, waiting latent to
take our moment, make it crescendo through the reef,
weed, rock, as though destined, written into ocean’s
records an eternity ago, when all life dwelt in the ocean,
all encounters occurred in resplendent semi-darkness.
And all this still sitting with the gang at the Glinch,
holding your own with a bunch of macho punks, who
were taking something in Philadelphia by force, me
selected silently, the tomboy an Ocean Queen, crowned—
IV. Undulant
I’d made plans to meet you in Bar Noir
on 18th; you were there; we drank. What
happened after that, in the Logan Square
flat, is that in defrocking you knocked over
an antique lamp bequeathed to me by my
aunt in Mahopac. Serendipity, I thought,
stunned then into silence by your bedroom
élan. Outside, a sultry night simmered; this
night of all nights, scattered green glass littered
my bedroom floor, & I finally got taken, past
liquor, to what eternity was only in your mouth—
as though you’d jumped from a forest scene
(ferns, redwoods), a world of pagan magic,
into a scene still undulant with possibilities—
V. Denouement
Was it even you anymore? You took the podium,
began your screed: here’s what Philadelphia could be.
The night proceeded from act to act— our enemies
were taken aback— I now boasted big-boy curating
entanglements. I knew that place— the wrong kind
of underwater, piranhas hungrily looking for what might
be real to rip to shreds, offal everywhere—
was not for me, just as (to be stern) you were not for me either.
All your politico postures were about barnstorming fortresses
set against you, ravishing them through pure force
majeure. You were pure angel/demon, Hannah. I’d
have to retreat to the back of your consciousness—
an old conquest, not especially vaunted, burrowing down
into binds to find reality, missing unreality’s deliciousness—
Henniker, New Hampshire is located eighty miles outside of Boston. This Something Solid sequence recounts Henniker and its inhabitants, transient and otherwise, in the mid-Aughts. From the Miscellaneous Sonnets section of the book.
Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): "Frequencies"
for Mary Walker Graham
I.
“We’re at our most bestial when threatened not
with hatred but indifference; what our blood wants
is reaction of some kind.” New Hampshire night,
our own reaction, you pliant, penetrable, laid out beneath me as
flies fidgeted our room, pirouetted moist air. Yet
we sank beneath bestiality to do just what indifferently
we wanted, beneath our glut of blood, so the summoned
beasts might react with this: ripped limb from limb,
buried in low-lying Virginia swamp marsh, given what
aphorism is only got in extinction, darling, as I quote
what you said at the bar before. In other words, they
hated us. The one-night stand wouldn’t matter if your
brain didn’t have the right words in it: stories, sequences,
slammed-down metaphors of a singed self. Frequencies.
II.
As the world between her legs tightened around
her, what she saw in bed with me was stark: okra,
stamens, roots, all that in nature coalesces in erect
growth; and a shadow father bent, then erect, then
bent again, perverse from amassing wealth in a world
whose submissiveness poisons him. Beneath the sultry,
wooded surface, what I saw was a semi-frightened
animal, along for an all-night ride (gruesomeness of
4 a.m. New Hampshire sun), knife thusly thrusting
into the backs of everyone around her, managing
to have stamina enough against constraint to take
what she was taking. The mattress thumped: above,
an angel was unable to conceal laughter, understanding
it was all in the script, including the garish sun’s leer.
Adam Fieled (Logan Square, Philadelphia, USA): "Run Away With Me"
for Dani Diendorf
I was thinking as I listened to her about Byron’s relentless nihilism,
that only found out in intoxication any kind of remedy for the things
she was telling me about abortions, forced entries, deaths, and how no I won’t go
home with you, and how Byron alone among the Romantics dealt
overtly with sex, not just love like Shelley or fantasy like Keats or Nature
like Wordsworth the dull sheep, and all the blokes in the bar were
staring at her— green eyes, red hair, bust, you know the kind that blokes
will stare at, and I thought Byron really caught something a seed,
a kernel of what Nietzsche ran away with (recurrence!), so I said please run
away with me and she laughed, looked down into her beer and was finished—
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