The new Adam Fieled Argotist Online e-book is The Great Recession. Many thanks to Jeffrey Side.
"The Great Recession focuses on several specific issues in poetry: the first, and most salient, is an attempt to rid the text of first person singular influences, and deliver a series of vignettes or miniaturized dramatic monologues, narrated by characters attempting to cope with the harsh, desolate landscape, the abrasions and depreciations, of the last decade to pass in the United States. This era the U. S. press often calls The Great Recession. The text should thus demonstrate a kind of cleanliness, apart from the ego concerns and obsessions of the poet at hand. The second issue is ancillary to the first: once characters are established within poems, how to make them interesting, and how to make the incidents and situations they are forced to confront emotionally and intellectually resonant on a wide basis. The third is what kind of language specifically this textual ambition calls for."
Of the approximately eight months I spent in West Philly in the Aughts, approximately four of them were spent here, in a flat at 42nd and Baltimore which Mary and Abby moved into in January 2003. Which means, in the economy of things, that I did spend four months living with Abby in the Aughts. Chez Mary & Abs was not maintained chaotically; it was kept relatively tidy; but Abby liked to throw parties, and Mary & I would have to help her clean up. Mary's windows faced 42nd Street, and she would sketch in her room, but serious painting had to be done elsewhere. Abs more or less had the same situation. Mary's room was also the big hang-out space for the three of us in the flat, where we could lounge, get high, watch movies, or do other meanwhiles.
Over the course of the Aughts, especially in the concentrated periods of 2002-2003 and 2007, and through my relationship with Mary Harju, I probably spent about eight months living in West Philadelphia. Mary probably spent about a year living in Logan Square right back. I have a sense of pride about this now: more territory for both of us to take, and conquer. Logan Square and West Philly are also an interesting contrast: the rustic (West Philly) against the newfangled, ruggedness versus sleekness, weathered wood & green yards balanced by a perfect view of an exquisite skyline. Even as our dramas unfolded both within and between the two neighborhoods, too.
P.S. Also worth noting: I spent the fall 2012 semester teaching two sections of first-year writing at the University of the Sciences in West Philly. I made the Green Line Cafe at 43rd and Baltimore my office!
Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): "Harrisburg"
I’d always noticed the pronounced, large squareness
of her forehead, giving her a thoughtful (philosophical?) look. Then,
the cascade of black waves, thicker than average neck,
medium build. Tall— strapping, even. She paced in
front of me, my cheap luggage, as blistering sunlight singed the Harrisburg
bus terminal, without acknowledging me directly. I
knew for a fact— she was not an undergraduate at PSU.
She could only have been here, in Central Pa, tracking me.
The years of my childhood and adolescence in Cheltenham,
she’d been an indifferent presence. I had, as I well knew,
been a reprobate to her and her kith and kin, but for
abstruse reasons. As of this summer day, I continued
not to care. Except to say, that the School District
and its minions should have known better, belabored zero into sub-zero—
“as if, Adam; as if I had any idea how to handle
you, or us, or what Cheltenham had turned into
by then. You: always special, always different,
always such a fierce disruption against our lives.
Remember— I never liked you much anyway.
There’s no room for special people where I
come from. What’s special is the order of
who gets placed where when, and why. So, as I
followed you out that stupid door, it’s with
no special anything. Philosophy? Where I
come from, it’s this: where you come from is
who you are, whether you like it or not. You
were lower than us, lower, and still are, you little shit—
and that luggage you had was pretty cheap, wasn’t it?”
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