Somewhere, over the rainbow, there he stood,
before Mary, with all ducks lined up in a row,
everything she could need or want: Lord Byron.
When Mary casts herself past John, or, later, me,
who she sees is always Byron. What she sees
attendant on the crown prince of the Satanic
School never changes: big motorcycle, big penis,
big drugs. Motorcycle, of course, in its nineteenth
century equivalent. Not to mention big brains.
The man who has, and is, everything. Neither John
nor I could ever be good enough. Mary is often
quiet, but the monster in her of awesome greediness
leers at the thought she should submit to anyone
but the mad, bad, dangerous to know one, who reigns
supreme in her heart. Mary wears contacts, of course.
When she reads, she uses specs. It could never be
guessed, she thinks, that her own personal Loch Ness
Monster, of ferocious appetite for every kind of experience,
could ever be spotted beneath all the mutable water.
With her Nessy lurks the sense of using people like
John does, as vassals & vessels, & luring useful ones
to their doom. Willy-nilly, she reads, & has imagination
around reading. I had her, before I had her. Even if I
did turn out to be rather a Plato’s Cave shadow-play
version of her beloved, who was (she never forgot)
another January birthday, another eccentric rebel.
She liked Shelley, too. He was a demon-conjuror.
As for me, I did what I could. I scored as Keats.
Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "Strange Side"
There’s the strange side we were on— the ones
who most mean it about high art— in earnest, of
course, about form & content on high levels. Then,
the side which accrues to & against that side, about
pedestrian reality, paying bills. Then the side which
attempts to mediate these realities, day by day,
out of which other sides emerge, escape valve sides,
wanting to get drunk & high. And so on. The strange
side means a strange life of partial or total alienation,
surfaces found insulting. The recompense for Mary
& I— our nudity to each other was strange nudity.
On the strange side, how much interpenetration
could be possible between two human beings, as
something worth investigating, could land us on
alien terrain, so that at 3 am, in a fit of blended
love & lust, being inside her could be participation
in the space-innards of the Milky Way, language
expanding from images, vice versa, simple white
sheets ample space for stars to be born, live entire
lives, & die on, as though our bodies scooped up
primordial ooze to allow the universe to be born
from them again. Now, I sit in a diner on Fayette Street,
still on the strange side, & take from pedestrian
reality what I can take, sort of alienated on sort of
alien terrain, sort of drunk & high, & nothing has
to end, sort of. I still mean it about high art. No
sort of there. I think of Mary then, love still blends
with lust. Stars live & die all over again. Strange.
The desire to lay down a gauntlet, in 2019, in English-language poetry, about formality and its importance, is a complex one. So much ground has been lost around formality in poetry over the last century that it is difficult even to know when, how, or why to start the process. If I deem it efficacious to be blunt, it is for the simple reason that millions of blunt weapons have been employed, in the United States, for the purpose of killing off the highest forms of artistic formality (in poetry and elsewhere), so that I am simply matching the energies and task-forces arrayed against me. So, to be blunt: poetry that does not employ heightened language, and which does not seek to incorporate musical effects, is worthless enough in the world to be considered both parasitic, and a form of anti-poetry. Furthermore, the ability to incorporate musical effects on a high level into poetry can only partially be learned: those who perform this task at the highest level are generally what could be called gifted, or talented (unique and irreplaceable), individuals. What this implies is, as is anathema to the parasitic forms and cabals who enforce them, which American and English-language poetry has accrued to itself in the past hundred years, and is also a mastering of the obvious: poetry requires talent, giftedness, something innately built into individuals. The idea that, in poetry, there is no talent, there are no individuals over anyone else, is a satanic denial of all that poetry can accomplish when it is handled by the right individuals; and the sense of formality in poetry, ability to artfully incorporate heightened language, is what distinguishes the men from the boys, the women from the girls, the gifted from the impostors (whose elision of poetic music can be construed as an attempt to sanitize poetry, for the greater good of entities, such as corporate ones, who are afraid of artistic formality at its apogee).
In an era less debauched, these things would not necessarily need to be said. But, as I have said before in other places, century XX was a radically inane time for serious art in general. Century XX poetry in the English language, even the corpus which is supposed to be of note, is mostly formless garbage. When poetry loses its connection to music, heightened language, and the sublime which inheres in musicality, it also loses its connection to individuality (uniqueness), and the giftedness (irreplaceable quality) of individuals. The anti-poets are there, with the ulterior motive of attempting to destroy poetry from the inside out; and, for many decades, there has been no one there to stop them. The formal tasks I have chosen to perform are arduous ones, including the odal task inherited from Keats; and the task of expressing how far English-language poetry has fallen over the last few centuries is arduous, too.
First Friday, Olde City, autumn: I watched Abby
seduce a curator in the Artists House Gallery, clawed
my way past buskers & vendors, up again to Logan
Square; up 21st Street, over to the Franklin Institute,
out onto the Parkway, where a slight tilt will show
you the Art Museum; back over & around, & wandered
into my flat. The soft October warmth told me what
I needed to hear, for a hot minute: eternity, ecstasy,
elevation, riding waves on an ocean of buildings.
A general recession of waves was latent, built into us,
destined to pinch some of us to death, but in the end,
it didn't matter— Abby's striped, clinging gown that
night, leaning towards maroon & plain red, marked my
brain as permanently made incarnadine, for her & us—
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