Exile and Exegesis

8/9/2019 Exile and Exegesis

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Exile and Exegesis

Adam Fieled



Preface

One thing this pdf points to is the self-conscious adoption, by me, of the

role of a kind of Renaissance Man of literature: I write the books, andthen proceed, in the manner of Wordsworth, to create the taste by whichthey are to be read. The irony of this imbroglio, in 2015, is that literaturein the Western world, outside my own endeavor, has fallen into a rather

pitiful trough of sloth, greed, mediocrity, and thoughtlessness. For me toadd to, rather then subtract from, the responsibilities of a thoughtfulauthor (and “responsibility” is a substantial Wordsworth critical motif as

well), would seem to cut so ludicrously against the grain of the 2015Zeitgeist as to be senseless. On the other hand, what Wordsworth wouldhave made of the Internet, as an egalitarian realm offering

unprecedented support and opportunity for literary thoughtfulness, isdifficult to say. In any case, the point is moot: I and this mystery here westand, and the clear, sweet mystery is how to break in the United States,from Philadelphia on out, as a country developed enough to withstandmajor high art consonant literature from within its own borders,imposters, press drivellers, cranks, drug dealers, and “oppers” in generalbe damned. This essential strategy: taking the broadly performative, anddoing more, rather than less: is hinged on the idea of building both arepertoire of literary skills and a stout body of work to subsist along withit, remaining mindful of striking while the iron is hot.

That the iron is hot is also strange; that, despite the mediocrity andthoughtlessness within the charmed circles of English languageliterature, a grass roots following has developed around my books andthe other Philly Free School artists, so that this arrow is not being shotinto empty space. I am proud to witness the transformations which areincrementally creeping up on the American literary and artestablishment, even as we have spawned many imitators (especially inNew York), whose rapaciousness and vacuity know no bounds. It has to

be said that, in the current conflict, if PFS is to succeed against theestablishment, it is because, as was not generally known, a sector of theUnited States population has been waiting patiently for serious art, highart, “the heavy stuff,” to break through the muck of scripted inanity,faux-rigor in the conceptual, and obvious insipidity to break through in adramatic, permanent crescendo. That crescendo is in the middle ofhappening. And so, as I ease the Renaissance Man burden onto my



back, it is with the sense that there is a reason and a purpose, acontextual one, for doing so, and that my and our work cannot beoverlooked by the gate-keepers of the media and the entrenched

American institutions forever. What I am initiating is all-encompassingin its ambition; and you, as a reader, can determine yourself from this

pdf whether my ambition has a sturdy foundation in literary truth or if itdoes not.

Adam Fieled 3-19-15



Phenomenology :Cheltenham Elegies Adam Fieled



The process of critical comparison in literature reveals and adumbrates,over a long expanse of time, that in the interstices between works ofliterary art, of perhaps equal value, a system of compensations binds and

fastens comparison and chiasmus. When positing the CheltenhamElegies in relation to Keats‟ Odal Cycle, and bearing in mind the

preponderant strength and subtlety of Keats‟ prosody, I would like tosuggest this compensatory chiasmus for the Elegies — just as Keats‟

prosody not only vivifies the Odes but justifies the entire Odal endeavor,the Cheltenham Elegies are vivified and justified by the exquisitetensions and dramatic intimacies between the specific characters who

populate them. Keats‟ Odes, it must be iterated, are populated by nospecific person other than the Odal protagonist — the intimacy betweenthis protagonist and Art and Nature must suffice. The intimacies thusexplored are Platonic intimacies. As human drama must compensate formetrical sublimity in the Elegies, what should be sublime in them arethe intricate complexities (scaffolding again) between the characters,and the sense of crescendo/decrescendo inhering in the miniaturizeddramas which unfold and coalesce from line to line, and from (as certaincharacters are carried over) from Elegy to Elegy. The precisesubstitution is humanism for formalism — and heightened psychologicalacuity for heightened diction. Poets and critics are free to decide, in theirown systems of compensation, which counts for more, within the context

of poetry, rather than in drama, philosophy, or literary criticism itself.

The phenomenological aspect of the Odes — what, as textuallyrepresented, is outside of Keats‟ mind and what remains locked inside— is matched, in the Elegies, by a sense or panoply of multiplicationsaround the myriad characters who inhabit them — that

phenomenological inquiry, when applied to more than one represented psyche, especially applied in a simultaneous fashion, manifests its ownbewildering complexity, and must be approached (on a critical level)

with a certain amount of caution and restraint. Thus, I will not yet

venture towards the sorts of appraisals I have already visited upon theOdal Cycle — I will only assert that the Elegiac protagonist (so to speak),in making (in each Elegy) a series of textual, narrative-thematicbifurcations (as in, with every introduced character we see manifestedanother cognitive interior and exterior), creates and orchestrates acircumscribed textual universe or cosmic egg, in which

phenomenological matter changes form, ascends or descends, without



ever altering the basic imperative drives of an individual, individuatedhuman psyche, as a smaller egg contained and encompassed within thelarger cosmic one. If prosody, commensurate with Keats‟, is not there tolend grace and beauty to the production, what is? To paraphrase GrecianUrn, the beauty of the Elegies is all in their truthfulness — that bychanneling the deepest possible levels of human intimacy, we see, onthis humanistic level, the human race revealed in totem, in a way ormanner impossible in the Odes, whose prosody still signifies everythingbut human intimacy and interrelation. As the work on various Elegiesbegins, the delicate, tentative work of unraveling the phenomenologicalsystems in the texts will gradually emerge from this earlyamorphousness.

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To introduce the inquiry into phenomenology and phenomenologicalinterest in the Cheltenham Elegies, I would like to include, in its totality,

Apparition Poem #414, which is placed early in the 2012 Blazevox printbook Cheltenham:

And out of this nexus, O sacredscribe, came absolutely no one.I don‟t know what you expectedto find here. This warm, safe,

comforting suburb has a smotherbutton by which souls are unraveled.

Who would know better than you?Even if you‟re only in the back of

your mind asphyxiating. He lookedout the window — cars dashed byon Limekiln Pike. What is it, he said,are you dead or do you think you‟re Shakespeare?

The chiasmus and comparison with Keats‟ Odes: the preponderant

weight, in the Elegies, of humanism over formalism and drama over prosody establishes that the Elegiac Protagonist consolidate an identityover and against the identity of the Odal Protagonist. The “I” here issocial, and brings his phenomenological biases and concerns into asocial context. In 414, the Elegiac Protagonist is confronted with an

Antagonist who sets into motion his own phenomenological interest orgambit. As per this phenomenological movement — the Antagonist in



414 maintains the conceit that he has made cognitive boundariesdissolve and has entered, and is speaking from within, the ElegiacProtagonist‟s mind (“Who would know better than you?/ Even if you‟reonly in the back of/ your mind asphyxiating”). His conceits are thusmultiple — first, that such a cognitive break-in is possible — that, by a

phenomenological movement, one human mind can break into andinhabit another with authority — second, that the Antagonist hassuccessfully jumped into and inhabited the mind of the ElegiacProtagonist — third, that he has not only broken into but (Zen) masteredthis mind. He is magically in possession not only of his mind, but ofsomeone else‟s.

In 414, tensions and ambiguities around this phenomenologicalconfrontation are left open and unresolved — to what extent the

Antagonist has (Zen) mastered the Protagonist‟s mind is not addressed. The truth, were it aired, might be quantifiable — as in, his mind is 50%mastered, or 60 or 70 — but we are left to surmise these calculations forourselves. It is also important to remember that this attempted cognitivebreak-in works as a metaphor for Cheltenham itself, both as an external,

physical reality and as, on a phenomenological level, a mindscape for theProtagonist. The phenomenological reality of Cheltenham, forindividuals, is that it is a dystopia of hostile aggression and violence, butalso (conversely) of the mind‟s enchantment with darkness,deterioration, and decay. The included concrete detail, of cars dashing

by on Limekiln Pike, fulfills a specific function in the Elegy — it breaksthe phenomenological tension (whether the Antagonist speaks from

within the Protagonist‟s mind or not), and enumerates how an enclosedcircuit (mind to mind) has been broken by an impersonal, outside themind reality (cars, Limekiln Pike), demonstrating as well the obduratehardness of outside the mind realities (the drabness of cars and ofLimekiln Pike), and that the Antagonist now (rightly or wrongly) feelshimself moved back into his own mind. Important with Keats: hisoutside the mind realities are almost always beautiful, conventionallyenchanting ones (forests, mountains, birds, trees, etc). Outside the mind

realities in the Cheltenham Elegies tend to be cold, hard, eerie, or evenrepulsive ones; but redeemed by superior truthfulness as regardshumanity and the human condition. Back to 414: once the attemptedcognitive break-in ends, and the phenomenological tension (mindagainst mind) disperses, a sense of discretion is restored to the vignette.

That the final interrogative iteration more or less concedes non-masteryis significant — and once again, because the answer to the question is



left unspoken, the ambiguities and tensions of phenomenologicalcombat (who is more inside the other‟s head) are left intact.

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In Elegy 261, there is a preponderant weight affixed to outside the mindrealities (initially), and the imposition of outside the mind realities onthe interior terrain of innocent kids:

Never one to cut corners about cuttingcorners, you spun the Subaru into a roughU-turn right in the middle of Old York Roadat midnight, scaring the shit out of this self-

declared “artist.” The issue, as ever, was nothing particular to celebrate. We couldonly connect nothing with nothing in our

private suburban waste land. Here‟s where the fun starts — I got out, motherfucker.I made it. I say “I,” and it works. But Old

York Road at midnight is still what it is.I still have to live there the same way you do.

In an American suburb like Cheltenham, the landscape is mostly

occupied by nothingness places — homogenized, generic strip malls andthoroughfares, along with neighborhood after neighborhood ofundistinguished, unattractive homes, parks, and schools. It is an outsidethe mind reality of entrenched nothing and nothingness — places whichnot only mean nothing to anyone, but which were specifically designedand manufactured to mean nothing to anyone — hostile places for kids

with brains and imagination. Old York Road is the archetypal suburban pivot point — supporting commerce, facilitating different forms of traffic,but generic enough to guarantee that cognitive-affective attachment toOld York Road is extremely unlikely for those who use it. Connecting

nothing with nothing, in 261, manifests the process by which the humanmind, surrounded by nothing and nothingness outside the mind realities(soulless realities), internalizes nothingness also as an interior reality;having, under the weight of perpetual imposition, no choice but to do so.Once the nothingness of the suburban landscape is internalized, themind‟s affective and imaginative capacities grow numb, and subsist in astate of dormant torpor. When the hero/anti-hero of 261 pulls his rough



u-turn in Old York Road, it is both to demonstrate rebellion againstinternalized nothingness and to (by risking death) express complicity

with it. It is an ambiguous gesture, which also encompasses expressionof an internal landscape incompletely homogenized with Cheltenham‟soutside the mind tactility.

This is why, ultimately, 261 is a poem about, and Elegy for,brotherhood — neither character is so absorbed and assimilated intonothingness (Cheltenham) that a sense of humanity is lost, and thedrama of the poem inheres of watching the Elegiac Protagonist connect(as an inversion) the “something” of bold-if-foolhardy rebellion againstnothingness with the something of his own artistic triumph. Whether thehero/anti-hero has established an “I” which “works” we cannotdetermine. What we see, by the end of the twelfth line, is both

triumphant and tragic — it is inferred that nothingness, wheninternalized at a young age, is impossible to completely eradicate inhuman consciousness — thus, the Elegiac Protagonist still lives, on aninternal cognitive-affective level, in a space vulnerable to nothingness.Over the course of the Elegy, we watch as Old York Road begins outsidethe mind and makes a phenomenological transition inside, moves from

physical to metaphysical textual subsistence — and signifies identicalnothingness realities in both realms. Likewise, between the two friends,the drama is initiated in physical reality and dissolves into ametaphysical or phenomenological drama between two interiors — who

has managed to expel, and thus transcend, the most nothingness, and who has manifested more presence in the world. The Fancy-equivalentin this Elegy (to lasso in Keats‟ terminology) is this phenomenologicaldissolution from outside the mind into the mind‟s interior (aconfrontation, rather than a break-in as in 414), from the physical intothe metaphysical (especially as regards Old York Road, what it is), andthe felt truthfulness of this dissolution, even if (as in 414), we completethe Elegy surrounded by unresolved tensions and ambiguities (neverlearning the current “location,” inside or outside, of the hero/anti-hero),and the omnipresence of the banal.

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In Cheltenham Elegy 412, what surfaces is the phenomenological realityof ghosts (apparitions or phantom presences), and the unsettling sensethat they can reside either inside or outside the mind, be attached to

persons or places, and (possibly) inhabit multiple entities at once:



Each thinks the other a lonesome reprobate.

That‟s what I guess when I see the picture. It‟s Elkins Park Square on a cold spring night; they‟re almost sitting on their hands. One

went up, as they say, one went down, but you‟ll never hear a word of this is Cheltenham. They can‟t gloat anymore, so they make an art of obfuscation. That‟s why I seldom go back. Elkins Park Square is scary at night.

There are ghosts by the ice skating rink.

The f irst hinge to our discourse, and chiasmus to/with Keats‟ Odes, is412‟s partial resemblance to Grecian Urn— that, in the Elegy, the

Elegiac Protagonist is presented with an inanimate object (a photograph) which contains a representation of human life. A photograph, like Keats‟ Grecian Urn, is an objective, outside the mindreality — and what we get, in contrast to Keats‟ enchanted forest, is thedinginess and haunted decay of Elkins Park Square, further made luridby the assumed coldness of the temperature when the photograph wastaken. The phenomenological leap is made by the Elegiac Protagonistinto the photograph — he attempts to inhabit the minds of bothrepresented figures (who are ghostly in their physical absence from theElegy itself), and conjectures, from the phenomenological “break -in,”

that both accuse the other of both isolation and lawlessness. Meanwhile,Keats‟ leap into the mind of the “fair youth” reveals only ease, comfort,and engaged sensuality — a sense of timelessness within sensuality as

w ell. If the “fair youth” is a phantom ghost/phantom presence, he isredeemed by the vainglorious conceit of inclusion within the parametersof art and major high art consonance; first, by those who built the urn;second, by Keats‟ memorializing of the urn in a later era. The twoantagonists in the Elkins Park Square photograph are redeemed bynothing; we learn that one has managed to find a place in the worldagainst the other, but the details of the situation are caught and clipped

by “coldness” and amorphousness. The Elegiac Protagonistdemonstrably has back-knowledge of the situation between theantagonists, and is on intimate terms with their strife (while Keats‟intimacy with his “fair youth” is suspect); but the photograph freezes foreternity the essential mystery of a beleaguered situation (why theProtagonist must “guess”), and the situation and the mystery themselves



become ghosts, as does Elkins Park Square and Cheltenham itself, as a phenomenological, as well as a physical, reality.

As we continue to interrogate 412, the mysteries, and the ghosts hewninto the mysteries, multiply — who is it that the Elegiac Protagonist istalking to, who is showing him this picture and demanding a reaction?Is it an Antagonist, as in 414, a competitive brother, as in 261, or someother combination of sensibilities and motives? The sense that theProtagonist is surrounded on all sides by phantom presences is difficultnot to discern — whether in the photograph, showing him the

photograph, or “ghosting” the entire scenario by having created thecontext out of which all these relationships and situations could haveunfolded. Because the Elegiac Protagonist is beleaguered by ghosts onall sides, and the phenomenological tension of their presence, of whether

they exist objectively or only within his own consciousness, it is easy toimagine why the Elegy ends with an apostrophe to the kind ofnothingness Cheltenham place which generates phantom presences andapparitions — again, the fulsome, lurid banality of Elkins Park Square,and the ice skating rink which does, in fact, sit on one of its borders.

What makes 412 a well-rounded experience, within all this empty space,is that all the situations and interrelationships are rendered withintensity, and with a certain intimate insight into the consciousness ofthe Elegiac Protagonist. Oddly enough, unlike 261 and 414, 412 ends withan outside the mind, tactile derivative image — the ice skating rink near

Elkins Park Square — which can serve as a metaphor towardsunderstanding the coldness (iciness) of apparitional life, the way it stayson the surface of things, forces interiority to objectify itself, givesconcrete form to cognitive-affective desolation and abandonment. Thatghosts are a phenomenological reality, objectively existing both encasedin and free from human consciousness, seems to be not only a subtextbut an overt theme; and the elegiac nature of the poem incises that ahaunted realm like Cheltenham not only generates ghosts out of itsfraudulence, pettiness, and cruelty, but makes it so that onceCheltenham is an inside the mind reality, ghosts and apparitional

presences must accompany and animate it.

Adam Fieled, 2015

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Apparition Poems :Before The Sun Rises Adam Fieled



In positing critical boundaries between Apparition Poems andCheltenham: Apparition Poems has in place something Mannerist, or“Manneristic,” which differentiates it from Cheltenham and theCheltenham Elegies. It has to do with sex, and sexuality; the sense that

one Apparition Poems Protagonist is exaggeratedly sexual, a kind of James Bond figure, who traipses from sexual encounter to sexualencounter, always with women (a hetero stud, again like Bond orBrando), always with a kind of grandiose Byronic angst about the strife,confusion, agony and ecstasy he encounters in the process. The pitfallsof this textual Mannerism are much the same as the pitfalls of pictorialMannerism: by focusing on exaggeration, the distending of literal andmetaphoric limbs, the reality or Realism component of the text isdiminished, and with it the sense of humanistic interest. That is why, for

all their iciness, dinginess, and phenomenological turmoil, the Elegieshave a hinge (for me) of being rated superior to the original ApparitionPoems. It also needs to be said that Apparition Poems is a book withmany facets: the meta-poems, dramatic monologues, and charactersketches (including a few persona poems), all present a far lessMannerist, or “mannered” textual picture, so that the epic in fragmentscan continue to enumerate its turf as just that. I also want to iterate thatthe chiasmus between the Mannerist, sexualized poems and the meta-

poems, dramatic monologues, and character sketches objectifies this James Bond protagonist as he intermittently appears in the text,

highlighting both his raw-nerved sensuality, its phenomenologicalimport, and its limitations, as different audiences will construe theselimitations to be drastic or not, depending on attitudes towards theMannerist. Some sensibilities dote on exaggeration, some do not.

Another chiasmus: between the James Bond version of ApparitionPoems protagonist and Byron‟s two alter egos, Childe Harold and Don

Juan: reveals how and where we have seen these phallocentric energiesin English language poetry before. In fact, the Bond Apps protagonist isa sort of composite sketch of Childe Harold and Don Juan conflated.

Childe Harold‟s exaggerated world- weariness is mixed with Don Juan‟sexaggerated libidinous innocence, and set into motion in twenty-firstcentury Philadelphia. If we could call Byron a Mannerist, it is because he

plays on his audience‟s expectations that he is willing to exaggeratecircumstances and contexts in his poetry towards outrageous ends; andif Don Juan and Childe Harold do not seem particularly outrageous in2015, it may be because even Byron‟s outrageousness was carefully



crafted not to antagonize the substantial public which had alreadygravitated to his work. It is also interesting to wonder if an ApparitionPoem like this, 535:

I was fucking this girlin the ass, late at night,and I looked out intothe parking lot acrossthe street and moon-light glistened on thecars, I thought, that‟s it, I don‟t give a shit anymore, you can take

your America, shove

it up your ass just likeI‟m doing here, that‟s when I came, and it was a good long one.

will seem outrageous in 2215, or even if it seems outrageous now; living,as we do, in porn-besotted times, where (in porn) couples fornicate inMannerist modes and formations, exaggerating what physicalintercourse is and means against the normative. Byron wrote against theRegency England backdrop of coyness and artful evasion; yet, he

manages to convey a sort of randy insouciance in his treatment of theDon Juan protagonist. In a way, it doesn‟t matter; even those who don‟tenjoy the James Bond level of Apparition Poems will see how “Bond”fits in like a puzzle piece towards a representation of both a Zeitgeistand a national psyche; even if, as I have suggested, the CheltenhamElegies perform roughly the same job with more authority and withsuperior, laser-like focus.

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Much of the book Apparition Poems was written in the middle of thenight, between November 2009 and February 2010. That winter wasn‟t

particularly an extreme one; and I established a regimen, in November,of going to bed early and waking up to write at around 3 am. I could dothis because it was a Fellowship year for me at Temple, meaning I didn‟thave to teach. I had already passed the dread comp exams and was

working on the prospectus for my dissertation. I was only on the Temple



campus once every few weeks. So much of Apparition Poems wasformed from this congeries of circumstances — waking at 3am in thedead of winter in a studio apartment at 23rd and Arch Street in CenterCity Philadelphia — that it seems apropos that darkness, and the middleof the night itself, be motifs in the book. Center City Philly in the middleof the night is not a conventionally attractive locale; more like amenacing one. Yet, I found in the urban darkness the cognitiveenchantment of a kind of inverse grace, a force that transmuted thebrutish into the beautiful, and made (in phenomenological terms) theoutside the mind realities which informed the book‟s narrative-thematiclevels compelling, magnetic to me. The darkness in Apparition Poemsmanifests both in the sex (James Bond) and in the meta-poems; it evenengenders its own graceful strain in a poem like this, 1326:

Before the sun rises,streets in Philly havethis sheen, differentthan at midnight, asthe nascent day holdsback its presence, butmakes itself felt in airlike breathable crystal — no one can tell meI‟m not living my

life to the full.

This was written in early December 2009, and soon published in The Argotist Online. It is also worth noting that this is not the kind of poem Icould have written, even in recollection mode, about Cheltenham, or inthe Cheltenham Elegies. There is a dynamism in the Philly streets, evenfor the duration of wolf hour, which, however menacing, is inverted bysleeping Cheltenham into absolute, moribund stasis. In fact, I use theurban in Apparition Poems, specifically Philadelphia, as a metaphor fordifferent forms and manners of dynamism, and even if the dynamism has

a hinge to confrontations with mortality and conflict in general, it stillgenerates the kinds of sparks (sexualized or not) which make it moreattractive and more graceful than the desolate banality of the suburbs.

That Philadelphia is an exciting landscape for me, and for different Apparition Poems protagonists, also differentiates it from Baudelaire‟sParis, where damnation is the price to be paid for enjoyment, and thefact of the urban landscape as a “game” cannot diminish the ennui of



human consciousness which has not made peace with individuality or processes of individuation. The Apparition Poems protagonists in Phillyare not, strictly speaking, flaneurs; they almost always have a definiteobjective in doing what they do, or looking at what they are looking at,and move through these texts with a sense of conviction. ThePhiladelphia game of interlocking circuits is being played in pursuit of

victory, of triumph; and the prize for triumph is to reprise the dominanttheme of the epic text — that behind every singular reality there aremultiple meanings, and singularity must always dissipate into multiplechannels, whether what is being dissevered is inside the mind realitiesfrom outside the mind realities, concupiscence from fertility, or arelationship with language from language subsisting as a reality in itsown space. It just so happens that this dissevering process, both the

phenomenological spark in my consciousness and its textual

counterpart, was born into being with greater facility in totalized, 3 amdarkness than in broad Philadelphia daylight, and from this singularity you may derive any multiple significations you wish.

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I met the painter Jenny Kanzler in 2008. I was sitting in the Last Dropone weekend afternoon in April or May, and she approached me andintroduced herself. She was very pretty in a cherubic way, not unlike

Abby Heller-Burnham. Over the course of 2008, we had coffee many

times. I wouldn‟t call these tete-a-tetes dates — Jenny was otherwiseengaged — but we got to know each other with some thoroughness.

Jenny, both in her paintings and in her life, had a fascination with “thestunted,” in general terms— stunted people, stunted situations, evenstunted animals (she found tarantulas exquisite, for example). She alsohad a fetish for violence and gore — the films she liked were violent, andthe art. Jenny had been at PAFA along with Abby and Mary, but sheusually declined to discuss them. I got the distinct impression that they

were not among her favorite people there. Mary‟s “The Fall” wasshowing at PAFA precisely when I met Jenny Kanzler, and she gave it a

mixed review. There was some sexual tension in the air between myselfand Ms. Kanzler, but she made clear that she was mostly a Platonic soul.

Abby and Mary were floridly liberated, eroticized, and romantic incomparison, despite Jenny‟s attractiveness. Yet, Jenny did have asingular mind and a singular vision, and she made a strong impressionon me. It seemed to me that the substitution, in Jenny‟s art, of violencefor love and sex was a deliberate one, but (this was my own prejudice)



not necessarily a healthy one. Jenny‟s penchant for violent, rather thansexual, smut, was what inspired Apparition Poem 1342, along with thesense, mistaken or not, that Jenny was sublimating so that the part of her

psyche which wanted her to remain a stunted little girl would stayuntouched, unchallenged, and inviolable:

What‟s in what eyes? What I see in hers ismixed greenish silence,somewhat garish, it‟s

past girlish (not much),but I can‟t touch her flesh (set to self-destruct),anymore than she can

understand the bookher cunt is, that no onereads directly, or speaksof, there‟s no love other than “could be,” but I think of her throat cut — that‟s her slice of smut.

The phenomenological import of the poem is a torque of Elegy 414 — I privilege myself to do a “break -in” into Jenny‟s brain, and have a look

around. The problem with phenomenological break-ins is that it isdifficult to ascertain whether what you are seeing is real, is reallysomeone else‟s brain, or if what you find is just a projection of your ownfantasies. It could be that Jenny‟s “slice of smut” is more involved in realemotion and intellection, not just a product of stunted adolescence, butthere was no way for me to tell, as I was writing, whether this was thecase or not. In fact, I believe the break-in in 1342 is brash enough,

pompous enough, even, as a male narrator violating a woman, that this Apps Protagonist seems like more than half a pig. If he is correct in hisassumptions, however, his piggishness has still won him entrance into a

woman who has denied him conventional entrance. It is worth notingthat I didn‟t fight Jenny this way— no passes were made, nor did I havethe experience of falling in love with her — but the bullying energy tounderstand her made for some strange, loopy mind games between us,and our “gaming” against each other on cognitive levels lasted a few

years. To broaden the context — by 2008, the Recession era was startingto sink in, and much of the grandeur of Aughts Philly, the romance and



the freedom, were beginning to fade. For Jenny Kanzler to enter my lifeat the time she did, and for us to become sparring partners rather thanlovers, was a sign of the times for me. It‟s also perfect for me that by2008, a painter I was conversing with preferred violence, gore, and thestunted to sexualized expressiveness; where all of America was headed

was into a meat-grinder of violence, moral/ethical bankruptcy, andgenerally entropic conditions, and those of us who wanted the Aughts,

which facilitated art around sex and romance, to go on forever, were tobe bitterly disappointed. Nevertheless, Kanzler is a substantial artist, andI‟m glad to have tackled her head-on at least once in text.

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Over the course of my studies, graduate and undergraduate, there are

few texts I got closer to than William Wordsworth‟s Preface to LyricalBallads. At best, it is one of the choicest exegesis texts ever writtenaround the disclosure of what motivates, sustains, and inhabits majorhigh art consonant poetry; at worst, it is a confusing mess. Wordsworthmakes clear his allegiance to the rural poor, and to channeling their

voices (which he calls “the real language of men”) in his poetry; he hasestablished this choice, he says, to represent the plain, emphaticlanguage used by the rural poor, uninfluenced by social vanity, hingedalways to the beautiful, permanent, durable forms of nature and thenatural world. Wordsworth also wants to explore cognition, the manner

in which emotions, once excited, cause the mind to associate ideas. Thedialogue I would like to initiate here has to do with Apparition Poem1488, which has already proven to have, among the Apps, a unique,compelling magnetism. I think I have found out why — it is becausethere is a “heart” to the poem, a center, which is plain, emphatic,uninfluenced by the vanity (and it is in some senses a social one)towards heightened diction, syntax, and thematic thrust. While 1488 isnot written in a rural dialect, it catches its protagonist in a state ofexcitement, associating ideas in such a way that the plain, emphatic“heart” of the poem is sandwiched by the wonted heightened aesthetic

terrain of the Apparition Poems series. That the heart has permanenceand durability owing to its emphatic plainness is arguable:

liquor store, linoleumfloor, wine she chose

was always deep red,dark, bitter aftertaste,



unlike her bare torso, which has in itall that ever wasof drunkenness — to miss someone terribly,to both still be in love, asshe severs things becauseshe thinks she must — exquisite torture, it‟s a different bare torso,(my own) that‟s incarnadine—

By the heart, I mean “to miss someone terribly,/ to both still be in love,as/ she severs things because/ she thinks she must,” and it is, as I said,

readily comprehensible on the surface, with (uniquely, in the context ofthis book) few multiple significations and no twists or torques towardsmultiplicity — one woman, one man, one relationship. That 1488 shouldinhabit a more typical, specialized Apparition Poems space, move intodirect earnestness, and then move back into specialized multiplicityagain — when Wordsworth discusses the real language of men, he neverestablishes how he would choose to approach, on a theoretical level, aLyrical Ballad which had inhering this kind of gear-shift, or for the reallanguage of men to develop an imagination (in one poem) and then shiftback into plainness. The effect, in 1488, is to make it so that a reader,

who might have limited tolerance for the multiplicity levels in other Apparition Poems, would find a kind of safe haven in the four pertinentlines, a textual oasis which makes palatable, and imaginatively feasible,the rest of the poem. It is also relevant to me that the substitution ofEros (broadly speaking) for what William Wordsworth perceives innature is one the Apparition Poems go out of their way to make — thebeauty, durability, permanence, and the “real” are all to be found in theerotic, and that the richness inhering in text-represented eroticism neednot fall beneath what Wordsworth sees in (for instance) Tintern Abbey.

Where the Wordsworthian text sits between Man and Nature, how the

text can guide men to a fuller understanding of the life we have all beenborn into on Earth, is another quandary which the Preface only halfaddresses, especially because the average reader is not guaranteed to besmitten with natural forms. Eroticism is different — because Wordsworthclaims that the poet supersedes other writers for singing a song whicheveryone can join in with, and because the erotic is of interest,

permanently and durably (and plainly and emphatically), to almost



everyone, it would that nature and eroticism should be at leastcommensurably ranked. As to the special magnetism, already manifest,of 1488, it has to do (as has already been written about at some length)not only with eroticism but intoxication — and the most importantintoxicating effect 1488 manifests, is the move from the heightened tothe plain and back again.

……………………………………………………………………………

Apparition Poem 509 offers the imaginative vista that a city can embody,in phenomenological terms, both a kind of circle and a kind of game.

While enclosed, both cognitively and physically, within the confines of acity‟s limits, any given subject can be pried open and exposed to thekinds of games the city perpetuates. I have written that Philadelphia is a

Gemini city — both blessed and beleaguered by dichotomies anddichotomous energies — and these dichotomies manifest as flashpoints within the Philadelphia circle — attraction/repulsion, beauty/ugliness,novelty/decay, enchantment/damnation. Heidegger‟s terminology forBeing-In the charmed (or damned) circle of existence — Dasein — isexplored in 509, in ambiguous terms:

There are gusty showersin Philadelphia, showersthat beat up empty lots,

down in sooty Kensington, you could almost believe what the books say about

being-in-the-world, I meanbeing in a damned world, itreally does seem that way

on greasy days in Philadelphia.

What Dasein means, as a phenomenological reality — a complete andtotalized integrity between inside the mind and outside the mindrealities — ricochets here along the polar cognitive axes ofbeauty/ugliness and attraction/repulsion. This Apps protagonist, even

while dissolving into Negatively Capable invisibility to represent both poles of these dichotomies, seems to favor beauty and attraction to their



antitheses, as a rain shower assaults the North Philadelphia slum wherehe finds himself. Why Philadelphia boasts so many of these spaces — spaces which appear both enchanted and damned — is part and parcel ofthe Gemini mysteries for which Philadelphians have no easy answer. As

per the phrase “greasy days”— I would like to confess that it is a liftfrom a poem written by a 90s Philly poet named Vladlen (Vlad)Pogorelov. On my semester breaks from Penn State, I discovered a

poetry open mike night at Philly Java Company, on 4th Street betweenSouth and Lombard. Vlad was a regular reader there. Vlad‟s wholeapproach to poetry was very Charles Bukowski — down to his mostmemorable, show-stopping poem enumerating his encounters with “thedirty whore/ taking a bath / smoking crack/ singing songs from time totime.” Vlad was the editor of a print poetry journal called Siren‟sSilence — who eventually published me, including the poem “Clean”

from my State College days. In ‟98, Vlad put out his first and only book— Derelict — and then disappeared. I paid homage to it, and to him, at areading at the Painted Bride in 2000, but I never heard of him seriously

publishing again.

Back to 509: the three adjectival incisions the poem makes — gusty,sooty, greasy — reinforce that the attraction/repulsion dynamic here is a

perverse one — ie, gusty, sooty, greasy places are not conventionallyconsidered attractive ones. Furthermore, as a catalogue of what NorthPhiladelphia contains, it is pretty despairing. Yet, another constituent

factor of the 509 dynamic is that, by gusts, soot, and grease almostmaneuvering us from enchantment to damnation and leaving us there,but not quite making it, the poem attempts to represent damnation andnever quite manages to do so, either. The complete, totalized integritybetween inside the mind and outside the mind realities has to assert, asfulsomely as possible, ambiguities — yet the see-saw tensions arestabilized by the protagonist‟s willingness to close the textual circle(which is also a narrative-thematic circle here) at the end, sans irritation,

with no attempt to rationalize (perceptions or sentiments) at all. NorthPhiladelphia is just what it is — no more, no less — and the relevant

internal flashpoints are absorbed into a circle containing multitudes,entities and perspectives.

…………………………………………………………………………..

What happens to a genuine artist forced to survive in academia? Ientered Temple University with the University Fellowship in 2006. I



already had a Penn degree and an MFA. What I noticed instantly abouthardcore academia is that everyone had a way or manner of frontingheavily involved with jargon and “jargonese.” To keep up, in academicdiscourses, I had to learn all sorts of idiolects and dialect tricks. If youknow the right jargon, in these situations (which ran the gamut, fromseminars to Temple-sponsored poetry readings to everyday, office-boundinteractions with peers), you can appear to be “in” the right way. By thetime I wrote Apparition Poems in „09/‟10, I was pissed off with the rigorsof academia and academic fronts, and was, in fact, more than ready totake the piss, in App 1607:

Every live body has a dialect:to the extent that bodies arein the process of effacing both

themselves, what they efface, Imove past dialect to the extentthat there are no no-brainershere, what‟s moral in this is the belief that properly used dialectsemanate waves to hold bodiesin place. As to who‟s saying this, I heard this on the street lastnight after a few drinks withan ex at Dirty Frank‟s. It was

a bum who meant it, it worked.

Temple English specialized in a certain form of academic feminism, where gauntlets were perpetually being laid down by ersatz powerhousesout to dazzle us with their gravitas. What I found charming about theirrhetoric is the sense that they always demonstrate a moment of “gettingreal” or “being real” with the audiences for their presentations, articles,and books; thus, throwing in “there are no no-brainers/ here” has to do

with the attempt to be imperiously earthy amongst all the verbiage, “in”references, other kinds of codes, and general aura of totalized pompous

pretentiousness. I had to set the poem at Dirty Frank‟s, because to me allthe blarney of academic feminism, its pretentiousness and faux-earthiness, belong in the gutter, and Dirty Frank‟s is as charming a dive-bar and a trough as any in Center City. In fact, Dirty Frank‟s was a majorPFS hang-out in the mid-Aughts — located at 13th and Pine, caddy-cornerto the Last Drop, and thus as easy access as it could possibly be, and a

place where the booze was cheap and the ambience about “ease in



sleaze,” down to the “Frank” mural painted around the bar‟s outsidefaçade.

………………………………………………………………………..

A tentative structure I‟ve divined around Apparition Poems has to do with what seem to be the four most salient themes of the book: the city,the night, sex, and art. The city is usually Philadelphia; New York,Montreal, LA, and Washington also put in appearances. So much of thebook was written in the middle of the night, and so many poems are setroughly in “wolf‟s hour” dimensions, that the night itself, its vicissitudes,has to be a major motif. Sex I‟ve discussed as involving, to use popculture as a reference point, a James Bond/Marlon Brando protagonist,

who is very successful sexually with women but also frequently

heartbroken and therefore emotionally vulnerable. Under the aegis of“the art,” I include the meta-poems, character monologues, and the poems which address philosophy and academia. So, that‟s how, when you configure the four motifs together, I allow myself to call ApparitionPoems an American epic, and an epic in fragments. No book is all-inconclusive, where human realities are concerned; but ApparitionPoems takes a vested interest in covering as much narrative-thematicground as possible. Divining also, for an Apparition Poem which bringsall motifs, the entire motif square together, I stumbled upon 1341:

Secrets whispered behind ushave a cheapness to bind usto liquors, but may blind usto possibilities of what deepsecrets are lost in pursuit ofan ultimate drunkenness thatreflects off surfaces like deadfishes at the bottom of filthyrivers — what goes up most isjust the imperviousness gained

by walking down streets, tipsy, which I did as I said this to her,over the Schuylkill, two fishes.

The first eight lines could be oracular, or just drunken babble — I preferto think of them as a little bit of both. Intimations and insinuations ofgossip soon give way to intimations and insinuations of murder, corpses,



carnage — death, in fact, hovers over the poem and its two protagonists,as does the night and the city. The Schuylkill is filthy; and, as the

protagonists cross the Walnut Street Bridge, drunk, perhaps in themiddle of the night, they have to make peace both with their ownmortality and with what, both inside their minds and outside theirminds, is filthy beyond repair. As to whether this semi-Brando stand-inis as impervious as he thinks — the thoughts of death, of “ultimatedrunkenness,” suggest that he is not. What sex is there is not revealed;and if the connection to art has to do with the end-rhymes and other

poetic devices which configure the formal structure of the poem, it roots1341 in a history which reaches back from Philadelphia to London andParis. I read 1341, and how it ends, as a fragment or apparitiondocumenting the pleasures both of intoxication and of psychicdissolutions into larger realities, both inside and outside the mind. It is

also worth noting that the eight lines of “drunken babble” may beanswering one of his companion‟s questions, maybe about gossip,maybe about death, or about both — she may bother to ask him if he hasany secrets, if he is hiding anything important from her, or if there isanything sinister in his past. Does his answer suggest he‟s a bullshitartist? Maybe.………………………………………………………………………..

***cover image by Thomas Couture***



Meta-Notes

Adam Fieled



Preface

To begin the serious work of building a body of critical writing

around your own oeuvre would seem to be an obstreperous pursuit. There are many valid arguments against it — that critical objectivityabout (or “around”) one‟s own creative writing would seem to besuspect; that the entire enterprise is jumping a number of guns at once,as this writing is major high art consonant enough to necessitate slow,

patient growth and dissemination; that, as an adjunct to the last thought,meta-criticism of a body of work when it is less than a decade (or even,

with the Cheltenham Elegies, half a decade) has passed risks beingmired in present concerns and forms/manners of present-mindedness

which will be short-circuited by how future generations of writers andcritics will see the work; and, ultimately, the congeries thought of all ofthese that the entire pursuit of meta-knowledge in involved critical(discursive/dialectical) contexts is just too strange, too haphazard, andtoo against normative literary grains to be taken seriously.

So, I answer obstreperously — if the advantages of meta-criticism(meta-notes) outweigh the deficits, it is because I have alreadydelineated a chiasmus which I feel to be a useful one between my owncreative efforts and British Romanticism — and that the “mind‟senchantment” shared between the Apparition Poems series and Keats‟

Odes may be enlivened by the discursive energy I can precociously if not prematurely generate. In these particular notes, focusing on Elegy 261, Ileave off the discourse around “noir” investigated elsewhere and focuson a close reading, in close textual proximity to Keats‟ “Nightingale,”

with results demonstrably intriguing enough that it would feel remiss notto put them into public circulation. Two of the other pieces do bring the“noir” designation to the surface; one game is slotted with Wordsworth‟sSolitary Reaper, one hops between two Apparition Poems. Importantly, Ifeel that enough critical objectivity has been maintained that none ofthese pieces proselytize in favor of my work. What they do, I hope, is

create the taste (in the classic Wordsworthian manner) by which they areto be judged; and if they achieve their aim, the Apparition Poems series

will have a hearty head-start in the games which will surround majorhigh art consonance in our new century.

Adam Fieled 12-1-14



Cheltenham Elegy 261/Nightingale

I am continuing to work within the parameters of developing

connective tissue in a critical context/framework between Keats‟ Odesand the Cheltenham Elegies. Taking “Nightingale” and 261 (“Never oneto cut corners…”), and a shared visionary sequence between the two

poems — Keats in his poem, through the process of composition (Poesy,and its “viewless” wings), is able to extend the reach of his vision intothe dark woods to comingle/commiserate with his synecdoche; just asthe protagonist of 261, on the viewless wings of Poesy again, is able to“pull a rough U-turn” (“Here‟s where the fun starts…”) on Old YorkRoad at midnight, and thus join the ambiguous hero/anti-hero of the

poem. This, doubled between the two poems, enacts a transmigration

process which is an outlet and a subtext of the visionary, and temporallyfreezes the sense that what the nightingale/ “rogue driver” of 261signify — night, death, physical mortality, but also an inverse (perverse)owning of dark freedom and power — are matched by a negativelycapable textual engagement.





Away! away! for I will fly to thee,Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,



Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;

But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;

And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Here‟s an interesting discrepancy: the “I” in 261 (important, also,to note that the rogue driver‟s U-turn being made in the poem may beturning back to Cheltenham) manages to turn the proverbial tables onhis companion (rhetorically/textually) twice (“But Old York Road atmidnight…”), thus re-living the U-turn twice, rather than Keats‟ singularjourney into the dark woods. Keats does not begin to develop any kind ofbravado against his Muse; conversely, the two textual U-turns in 261demonstrate first, an ostensible escape from Cheltenham (whichamounts to an assertion of artistic success), and then a renascence to a

position that what Cheltenham and Old York Road signify areomnipresent in the human continuum; and both express bravado inintellectual mastery. So does Keats enter the sensuous, shadowy paradiseof the woods and then sink downwards, first into being grounded, then(as an extension) into Lethe-consonant (forgetful) despondency; and

these are two textual journeys of visionary identification and self-transcendence. The possible inversion, in which Keats‟ Ode, through itsultimate sense of lost, demeaned, defeated consciousness, againsttextual flights or “Fancies,” constitutes a kind of elegy, while theCheltenham Elegy, through its ultimate air of sangfroid and mastery(empowerment over harsh circumstances) demonstrates, if not exactlyodal joy, certainly a sense of a kind of tour de force (textual fireworks)



being enacted in a compressed space, an ambience of the explosive, which is not in Keats. Yet, the nightingale and 261‟s rogue driver areboth phantoms, essentially: rhetorically addressed, evanescent. Thenegatively capable identification process occurs once in the present(Keats, appropriate for an ode) and once in a visioned/visionary past(261, appropriate for an elegy) — and it is merely textual, unperceived,unappreciated by one inhuman Other (the nightingale) and one humanOther (the rogue driver). The ultimate destination, why the identification

process is enacted, is for the reader-as-third party.



Reap Together: Romanticism and Noir

As to how I have designated possible discussions/discoursesabout my Apparition Poems; applying the moniker “noir” or “deep noir”to them, in order the explicate the aesthetic terrain they inhabit; I wouldlike to designate a possible chiasmus between “noir,” as defined intextual practice by me, and the theoretical underpinnings of EnglishRomanticism. What noir and Romanticism share is substantial — a senseof mysticism or enchantment in cognition itself, or cognitive processes;also, the engagement-in-cognition between textuality and the humanmind, and the mind‟s enchantment with levels of textual transparencyand opacity, back and forth; and a generalized sense of the necessity of

dealing directly, to a greater or lesser extent, with philosophy and philosophical issues in texts maintaining artistic/aesthetic consonance.In order to develop this discourse, I would like to look at “The SolitaryReaper” by William Wordsworth in a dialectical fusion with ApparitionPoem #1070 from my 2010 Blazevox print book Apparition Poems. Theissues of phallocentrism-in-text, imposition on the feminine, “theft” ofthe feminine, rusticity, chastity, and sincerity starkly given antithesis byurbanity, sensuality, and artifice, fused into meditations on textualinnocence and experience, virginity and consummation, and ultimatefemale empowerment in noir over Romanticism, are the ones which willlead us, hopefully, to a satisfying synthesis.

It will be necessary, to begin, to present “The Solitary Reaper” infull:

Behold her, single in the field,

Yon solitary Highland Lass!

Reaping and singing by herself;

Stop here, or gently pass!

Alone she cuts and binds the grain,

And sings a melancholy strain;

O listen! for the Vale profound

Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt

More welcome notes to weary bands



Of travellers in some shady haunt,

Among Arabian sands:

A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard

In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,

Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings? —

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago:

Or is it some more humble lay,

Familiar matter of to-day?Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,

That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang

As if her song could have no ending;

I saw her singing at her work,

And o'er the sickle bending; —

I listened, motionless and still;

And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore,

Long after it was heard no more.

And here is Apparition Poem #1070:

I said, “I can‟t even rememberthe last time I

was excited, howcan I associateideas?”

She pulledout a gun, a tubeof oil, and an aircushion,



and it wasa spontaneousoverflow,

powerfullyfelt, in which wereaped together —

To clarify: “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” is a famous phrase from Wordsworth‟s Preface (to Lyrical Ballads). If the two poemstogether initiate a sort of wrestling match or scuffle, it is because ofinversions in the two texts which come to a kind of textual impasse.

When Wordsworth (or his protagonist/”I”) co-opts the song of theSolitary Reaper, the interaction is a kind of unconsummated (“chaste”)one — she does not know someone is listening, and Wordsworth seems

eager to keep it that way. We are drawn in by her rusticity, the sense that(as Wordsworth would have us believe, and as he explicated in hisPreface) the rustic evinces a superior purity/innocence to the urban, andthe plaintive quality of her song advertises a kind of emotional grandeuror gravitas, a superior depth to her femininity.

The woman in #1080 is my antithesis. Because what is being presented to the reader would seem to encompass levels of sleaze (“gun,tube of oil, air cushion”), it is easy to miss that this protagonist is proudthat he does not have to surreptitiously co-opt something (song or skin)from his heroine; the sense that she, out of her own urbanity, anticipates

the need for a full consummation, or modicum of experience. Alsoimportant is that she initiates the action; whether we find it sleazy or not,she is in a more empowered position vis a vis the male than Wordsworth

would ever allow himself to be. That, ultimately, is what a noir sensibilityhas over Romantic sincerity, which tends towards chastity: the fullyrealized, mature notice and transubstantiation into text of the adult, andadult levels of awareness, both of the body (in noir, an “experiencedbody”) and of levels of metaphoric awareness which Wordsworth wouldnot have missed (that each realization of the feminine is a realization of acertain kind of text, textuality, and textual practice, bound together by

processes of incision and receptivity conjoined in a single writerlyconsciousness, male or female). By having me raise a “plaintive” voiceto my Muse, as I drolly invert another line from Wordsworth‟s Preface(“as to the way the mind associates ideas in a state of excitement”), Ifeminize myself so that my compatriot may incise into me herexperience. Thusly, the sleaze levels are superficial; my text empowers asensualized, adult woman to enjoy (“reap together”) an encounter both





Noir Resonances: 1341/1488

Built into Apparition Poems as a literary construct, and as a textualembodiment of what I call a “noir” or “deep noir” sensibility, areresonances from poem to poem, and from poem-sequence to poem-sequence. You could call these resonances textual “games” of a sort, and

when two or more poems “game” with or against each other, theresonances between motifs, linguistic structures, and approaches totextual development highlight, in microcosmic form, what constitutesthe text as an epic in fragments — an American epic. Here, I would liketo investigate the game between two Apparition Poems — 1341 and1488 — and thus demonstrate how a representative Apparition Poem

game works. The motifs I see intermixed in this game — drunkenness/intoxication, possible alcoholism, Philadelphia as a site forboth interpersonal drama and textual creation, heterosexual (here)games between men and women, over both sexual and psycho-affectiveissues, and an unnamed epic protagonist‟s relationship with languageitself, and with his own cognitive capacities — recur throughout thisnouveau epic text, and as it weaves its wayward course, this particularnexus serves to underline the labyrinthine depths (and heights) towards

which the text attempts to ascend. So, here is 1341:

Secrets whispered behind ushave a cheapness to bind usto liquors, but may blind usto possibilities of what deepsecrets are lost in pursuit ofan ultimate drunkenness thatreflects off surfaces like deadfishes at the bottom of filthyrivers — what goes up most is

just the imperviousness gainedby walking down streets, tipsy, which I did as I said this to her,over the Schuylkill, two fishes.

And here, to initiate the game, is 1488:



liquor store, linoleumfloor, wine she chose

was always deep red,dark, bitter aftertaste,unlike her bare torso,

which has in itall that ever wasof drunkenness —

to miss someone terribly,to both still be in love, asshe severs things because

she thinks she must — exquisite torture, it‟s a different bare torso,

(my own) that‟s incarnadine—

The motif of drinking/drunkenness has to occur throughout ApparitionPoems — the characters who inhabit the text tend to be excessive ratherthan moderate, and indulgent rather than abstemious. Why 1341 and 1488both make incisions into the nature of drunkenness — “ultimatedrunkenness” and “all that ever was of drunkenness”— is thatdrunkenness is seen not to be simple but complex, a multi-tiered state ofconsciousness which might move consciousness itself (and therelationship of consciousness to language) in any number of different

directions. Yet, the dark-hewn nature of Apparition Poems, its stance inshade rather than light, draws us to the abyss that whatever the “all” ofdrunkenness is, it must be redeemed in our re-exploration of states ofdrunkenness in text, not necessarily as a state of consciousness in itself.

The obvious facets of the drunkenness game here — that social contextsand sexualized relationships can drive us to drink in 1341, and that somehumans choose to dwell permanently in drunken states of psycho-affective torpor in 1488 — are undergirded by a meta-consonant sensethat engagement in certain forms and levels of textuality have “all thatever was of drunkenness” built into them, and that the seemingly sober

composer of the two poems has inhering a drunken sense of the possibilities of dual meanings and other “games” as redemptive of/forthe self-respect of cognition, and its possible enchantments, of whichdrunkenness is one.

“Drunkenness” is also a specialized version of Philadelphia; as acity of romance and intrigue, intoxication, passion, and as an inversionof banal media clichés. Aughts Philadelphia was, in the broad sense of



the word, romantic — freedoms to indulge were enjoyed there. Many ofus did descend for periods of time into realms of semi-alcoholism; evenif, even for us, the Schuylkill remained filthy.

The sense of heterosexual, sexualized relationships between menand women — one of the backbones of serious art for the length ofhuman history — had been edited out of serious avant-garde poetry along time before Apparition Poems, for no good reason and against thenatural proclivities of most would-be poets. I have no problems withqueerness or queer art whatsoever — many of my Aughts Phillycompadres were queer — but I felt that, for myself and for the greatergood of the art-form, a re-introduction of passionate, sexualized(“experienced”) hetero interest would be both healthy and germane tothis text‟s sense of itself (sentience) as an American epic. Sexualized,hetero relationships with drunken, semi-alcoholic Philly as a

background, sequestered in the racy Aughts, up the tactile ante againstthe merely cognitive, or even merely cognitive-affective, gaining anupper hand; and these two Apparition Poems together seem to be aboutthe same relationship. That the relationship is tempestuous, “encounter” based in the broadly Wordsworthian sense, and also hinged to a secret-

whispering social nexus, add a broad range of coloration and perspectivetricks which make the poems work in an engine like way together,towards the conclusion of 1488 in heartbreak and a sense of entropic loss.

The loss, it should be noted, is epic, even if rooted in a series offragments — pitched to a high frequency both of intellect (level after level

of semantic scaffolding from line to line) and of emotion. The sense ofgravitas-in-passion, mixed in with sex, booze, and Aughts Philly energy,is uniquely situated so that some audiences will miss the intricate senseof the poems as word-machines, systematically checking and balancingthemselves for achieving the unique, simultaneous effect of maximumcoherence/maximum complexity. Those who tend to favor “light”

poetry, need not apply — but what noir can do, in terms of instillingontology and pornography (of a sort) into epic fragments spinning outgames among themselves in different directions, has something to do

with a poetic response simultaneously (again) both to Deconstruction

and to English Romanticism, never losing lyricism‟s sense of inspiredimprovisation, or forgetting its sense of self-acknowledged, self-ownedtextuality, both representing human moments or instances and proudlydisplaying cognitions which can encompass them later, recollected intranquility or drunkenness, or both.



Notes on Posit: “The Seminal”

To recognize a nexus of cyclical energy in Posit, involving the poetic “I”— inhering, an association of asserted subjectivity withheterosexual sexual arousal and the phallic — specifically, the phallus inthe act of sexual intercourse — I begin with “Come to the Point.” The

poem “Come to the Point,” with its blatant/rhetorically dual-minded,subtle essence (to come to the point in an argumentative, discursive, ordialectical context, and to come as in to ejaculate), has a parallelstructure inhering in the first and last line — “I am that I.” The line-breaks (“I am/come to the point”) emphasize the curious juxtapositionof discursive and phallic potency — that critical cruxes can (literally orfiguratively) be seminal. Here, in this self-critical meta-crux, manifesting

in the unlikely context of a work of verbal art, the positing has to do witha critical line (or self-perpetuated discourse/dialectic) in favor of thereemergence of first-person singular perspectives in order to inauguratea new era of textual freedom and “I” propelled experimentation for poetsand dialecticians. The first person singular, expressed in poeticlanguage, is also revealed to encompass phallic energy — just as Positcourts the acknowledgment and embrace of certain forms/manners of

phallocentrism. To Posit something, in this compressed matrix ofinterests, is to enact a textual pelvic thrust. The “slipping down” in“Come to the Point” is meant to convey both seduction/sensuality (the

slipping down, perhaps, of underclothes), and a sense of ease andfreedom in the slide back into first person perspectives in text.

I am that Ithat stations metaphor

on a boat tobe carried across.that makes little

songs on banisters, which are slipped down.

that slips downantique devices,

china cutlery & white.I am coming to

the point. I amcome to the point.I am that I.



“I” must climb up from a whirlpoolswirling down,but sans beliefin signification.

“I” must say I w/out knowinghow or whythis can happenin language.

“I” must believe in my ownexistence,droplets stoppingmy mouth —

alone, derelict,“I” must come back, again, again,„til this emptiness

is known, & shown.

I married into blood &broken necks, endless

anemic privation, but

no regret. You see,hunger fills me. I like vampire hours (no

sleep), a blood-vessel pay-check, diabolical

companionship, tag-team

seductions, guilelessmaidens about to



be drunk.

We know what sweetnessis in starvation. We‟ve

found, satiety

is death‟s approval stamp.If you crave, there is

room left in you. If

you want, you are a work-in-progress —

being finished is

a cadaver‟s province.Better to suck whatever comes.

The manner in which Posit slips down into “Dracula‟s Bride” toconclude — what we see about the first person perspective being arguedfor or “crux‟ed” in “Bill Allegrezza,” that the poetic “I” perpetuallymanifests a kind of emptiness, which needs to be known, and shown,leads to the revelation of a persona (Dracula‟s Bride), whose relationship

to the phallic first person is both vampiric (infantile, even) andsubservient; to, as the poem ends, “suck/whatever comes.” Therhetorical heft of Dracula‟s Bride and her perspective has to do with“sweetness in starvation,” against satiety, consonant with the worship ofthe first- person phallus (which needn‟t be brandished only by males, thisis all metaphor), which delivers both sweetness and emptiness in itsmechanistic performance. The emptiness of the first person singularcontradicts or baffles its own power to inseminate — but thatcontradiction, when applied to poetic language (emptiness/fullness,infertility/insemination), is the bizarre synthesis which is the telos of

Posit as a textual dialectic. The positing, or discursive thrust, is into bothempty textual space and whatever proverbial Dracula‟s Bride can receivethe full/empty seeds the right way — and Posit both empties anddeconstructs itself in the same motion or positing. A possible allegoricaloverlay — better to starve (sweetly) then to enter (inseminate) third

person places.



***cover painting by Pablo Picasso***



Meta-Notes Part 2 Adam Fieled



Notes: On Le Chat Noir from Posit

Another twentieth century lesson: New York is a fool‟s paradise. Anyonein America, especially along the Eastern seaboard, who lives past thirty-five will probably notice that, despite a tremendous press build-up toreinforce the “mega” quality of New York City, New York has no morematerial power in America than several other commensurate, or morethan commensurate, cities: Atlanta, Baltimore, and, of course,Philadelphia. Indeed, the inversion between Philly and New York isalmost perfect: i.e., Philly is precisely what New York is supposed to be,and vice versa. Philadelphians over thirty-five will usually have

discovered the labyrinthine dimensions and depths of Philly, reachingout in myriad directions (including why the press has to put up NYC atour expense), and touching Philly‟s tremendous, forcibly underratedmaterial and spiritual power in the United States. There are few

American power-structures without Philly roots somewhere; yet, thisstructuring is largely “operative,” and not directly verbalized. So, olderPhiladelphians must live with what we can and cannot express on thesurface, the way in which, in Philly and out, we must be criminallymisrepresented in the media, and also the false luster of NYC (and LA)

lording over us their empty, bloated narratives and mythologies.

New Yorkers, in comparison, are a naïve race, who understand little of what they see, and make every attempt to stay on the surface andembrace the false idol which is the city where they live. Yet, as they age,there will always be something missing for them, a sense that everythingthey see is a mirage, and that New York is the kind of city where foolsrush in and almost no one else. New York art stinks. And, to the extentthat I am winding this around the note something about the poem “LeChat Noir” from the Posit chapbook, it stands to reason that I should

express where I feel New York School poetry needs to go: into thegarbage forever, with all the other gamer crap from century XX. WhatI‟ve discovered is that “Le Chat Noir” can be taken as a heave-ho to theNew York School, if we take the protagonist of the poem to be spry, pop-culture consonant, semi-hysterical, never profound or verbally giftedFrank O‟ Hara (and this poem improves on his stunted prosody):



I pressed a frozen faceforward into an alley offof Cedar St., herb blowingbubbles (am I too high?) in

melting head I walked &it was freezing & I walkedfreezing into pitch (where‟s the) blackness around a

cat leapt out & I almostcollapsed a black cat I

was panting & I almostcollapsed I swear from

the cold but look a cata black cat le chat noir oh no

The poem is a sonnet, but the form doesn‟t seem to be as important hereas the thematic gist and the spin I want to put on that particular ball. Ifthis is Frank O‟ Hara, stuck in the bowels of North-West Philadelphia(the Eris Temple was located at 52nd and Cedar in the Aughts), and heimitates a Lana Turner-ish (for those who know his poems) collapse, itmay be because the real decadent glamour on the East Coast is not

where it‟s supposed to be, in the West Village or Soho, but in Philly. I would like to argue that the real glamour has always been in Philly forthe truly hip and worldly- wise, and O‟Hara‟s New York is a non-existentjoke in comparison. People forget what Le Chat Noir was in Paris in the1890s — a Bohemian haunt where artists like baby Picasso and Lau Trekused to hang out, in absinthe-laden, concupiscent decadence. So that, ifthe real Le Chat Noir vibe on the East Coast is here, in Philly, then allthe NYC stooge celebrations in the world can‟t redeem O‟Hara fromknowing that his aesthetic number is up, and we‟ve got it.



Notes: Cheltenham Elegy 420/ St. Agnes Eve

The twentieth century didn‟t bequeath us much, literature-wise. But I dolike T. S. Eliot‟s famous aphorism: “Immature artists borrow; matureartists steal.” The Cheltenham Elegy I would like to discuss does steal acrucial image from Keats‟ “The Eve of St. Agnes.” If you put the Elegynext to the relevant stanza of Keats‟ longer narrative poem (not an Ode,but sharing the Odes preoccupation with celebrating oddities andinverting poetic clichés), what emerges is a paradigm model of wherethe last two hundred years have landed us, as regards what constitutesinnocence and experience, virginity and consummation, expectancy andsatiety, and what historians chose to call Romance against what I chooseto call Noir:

The Junior Prom deposited me (and fifteenothers) on the floor of her basement. I couldbarely see daylight at the time, and at three inthe morning I began to prowl. I was too scaredto turn on any lights. She emerged like a mermaidfrom seaweed. I needed comfort, she enjoyed myneed. We had gone out — she was bitter. The wholedialogue happened in shadows. No one was hookingup in the other room, other. You spiteful little princess.

Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degreesHer rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:Half-hidden, like a mermaid in seaweed,Passive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

Oddly enough, Eliot‟s mermaids in “Prufrock” occupy a median spacebetween Keats‟ innocent, angelic Madeline, and my “spiteful little

princess.” Eliot aside, both “St. Agnes” and 420 involve festivities— andthe celebration of St. Agnes Eve in the Middle Ages (where Keats got hisnarrative plot) was just as garish and ostentatious as a Cheltenham

Junior Prom. Yet, the Elegy and the semi-Ode share a preoccupation



shared, as a concern, by myself and Keats — what happens in darkness,in hidden or concealed spaces, far from the proverbial madding crowd,against what would be known on the surface levels of society and itsterms of acceptance or acknowledgment. Porphyro is asking for anelopement, and is accepted; the first person protagonist of 420 asks forsolace, on any level, and is rebuffed. That both poems emerge as fullysexualized, on a hetero level, is fore-grounded by this comparison — amermaid is a kind of siren, and carries feminine glamour with her

wherever she goes, and even in darkness (underwater, perhaps, in thiscontext). 420 foregrounds this ambiguity — is the protagonist asking forsex (a renewal of what has been extinguished, in the poem), or just aloving verbal interchange, or both? He receives, from his mermaid,neither, while Porphyro eventually receives both. That is a critical cruxbetween Romanticism and Noir, as a new mode of visionary Realism —

many stereotypically Romantic poems end happily, with a sense thatconflicts have ended in a kind of fulfillment, textual or narrative,intellectual, emotional, or physical. The bleakness of Noir significationsguarantees that what is anodyne in Romanticism can never appear — and readers may find either Noir airless and claustrophobic orRomanticism weak and cloying. Now, Romanticism is a major, vital,complex movement, so that variability of signification still applies; but,reliably, that the English Romantics, even the “Satanic” secondgeneration (Keats, Byron, Shelley) were positivists in comparison to Noir

Apparition Poems like the Cheltenham Elegies would be difficult to

deny.

Back to the two poems: the two versions of adolescence, one British andone American, one in third-person omniscient and one in first, are astudy between adolescence retaining its wonted luster of freshness, joy,surprise, self-discovery, and unselfconscious risk, or adolescencedegenerating into the space of already-thwarted dreams, premature(even atrophied) adulthood, and a sense of the crepuscular towardsrealizations of mortality even before adulthood is officially reached. Thisis part of what the Cheltenham Elegies are for — to acknowledge the

ludicrousness of adolescents leading their lives like little adults,fornicating, wheeling and dealing, wielding material power ininappropriate ways, and attempting to cope with these realities in thetotal darkness (“basement”) of non-existent family structures and no realguidance. It is an interesting torque, and one I did not necessarily plan,between Madeline emerging from her clothes “in” seaweed (whilePorphyro watches her from her closet), while my antagonist emerges



“from” the seaweed of what? Another shady business transaction, roundof gossip, or dossier check that all the right Cheltenham heads are

playing their parts correctly? Keats‟ version of “seaweed” is merely anoptical illusion (i.e. that‟s how she looks to Porphyro from his vantage

point in her closet), while my “seaweed” is a metaphor for an entire wayof life — kids bedraggled by onerous, gross practical realities which clingto them whether they like it or not. The “mansion foul” where Madelinelives as a ward is (we may guess) no less corrupt than an average housein mostly upper-middle class Cheltenham; yet Madeline has retained herinnocence. My anti-heroine swims through seaweed-strewn waters, andis far from innocent. If she is spiteful, it is because others are spiteful toher, leading to the usual nihilistic Cheltenham chain reaction. So that,the steal I made, to transpose something from the Romantic canon intoa Noir reality, inverts but also sheds light on where English language

poetry is willing to go in the twenty-first century, which is into the totaldarkness of the American landscape, where the only joy is telling thetruth about what shadows you happen to encounter.



Notes: When You Bit…: Clustering

Since Fortune tends to favor the bold, I am going to make a boldassertion: until me, there is no serious prosody in American poetry. Frostand Dickinson write Hallmark-level jingles; Whitman‟s use of anaphorais cheap and barbaric the wrong way round; and even semi-AmericansPound and Eliot do not build the kind of melopoeia into their poeticconstructs to vie with the Romantics and those who preceded them. Icall my wonted prosodic manner “clustering”— that is, I avoid regularend-rhyme structures and build in melopoeiac devices (rhymes, near-rhymes, off-rhymes, assonances, alliterations, anaphora, etc) in aclustered fashion, where the devices fall in the poem where they will,

which grants me much greater narrative-thematic freedom as a quid pro

quo for musical solidarity and traditional poetic scaffolding techniques.In terms of my books, When You Bit… from 2008 is the most musicallyrich, with an intense focus on melopoeia in the context of a traditionalform, the sonnet. Sonnet means “little song”: and the When You Bit…sonnets are crazy little songs indeed, with sonic webs inhering whichlook and sound like they were spun by a spider (or scorpion) on LSD. It

will be informative here to compare a sonnet from When You Bit… toone of Keats‟ early sonnets. Keats, for my money, is the supremeEnglish-language lyric poet of all time; and audiences can judge forthemselves how his exquisite lyricism compares to my wild, wayward

approach to music in poetic structure:

(a) My spirit is too weak — mortality(b) Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,(b) And each imagined pinnacle and steep(a) Of godlike hardship tells me I must die(a) Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.(b) Yet „tis a gentle luxury to weep (b) That I have not the cloudy winds to keep(a) Fresh for the opening of the morning‟s eye. (c) Such dim-conceived glories of the brain(d) Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;(c) So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,(d) That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude(c) Wasting of old time — with a billowy main — (d) A sun — a shadow of a magnitude.



(a) Asinine, as is, this ass is:(b)

ass I zip down into zero:(a)

anal, a null, a void this is.(c)

I‟m behind a behind that (d) sits smoking, rubbing, pink-(e)

tipped, tender, butt, button.(f)

She watches me watching as(e) I go brown-nose in another.(g) Only her car-ness, averted by(g) eyes to the wall, seems happy.(h) Only she can stomach rubs(h) of the kind that want plugs.(h) Sparked tank, here comes( h) no come, & aggravation.

Keats‟ Elgin Marbles sonnet here conforms tightly to the Petrarchanmold — both in the end-rhyme scheme, and in the way the volta (turnafter the first eight lines, a sonnet convention) plays against the first

portion of the poem. My “spider on LSD” rhyme scheme demonstrateshow cluster-forms of prosody can work — the end rhymes fall in and out,and the last four lines sharing an end-rhyme have a sense both of(potentially) absurdizing the poem and giving it an adequate crescendo.



The formality of the When You Bit… sonnets hinges on an originaladmixture of formal elements. Rather than usual pentameter linestructures, here I tend to favor five beats per line , or what I call “halved

pentameter.” What chopping standard pentameter lines in half will do to

a sonnet would seem to be an open question; but certainly the formalnod is to brevity, concision, and the impulse to compress poetic data:

(a)

Three sets of teeth: who(b)

can check for cavities?(a ) A three-way circuit: who(b) will start the striptease?(c) Three lovers in three ways:(d) how merrily the dance

(e) begins. We spin, we spin,(f) we forget our instincts,(b) anima, the part of teeth(h) that cuts. We are sluts.(d) There is an “I” here that (h) stands for all of us, but(b) its eyes are shut. Sleep(b) lulls it to rest, not think. Or speak.

Besides the Ops feature of halved pentameter here, there is also a system

of internal rhymes inset to enrich the end-rhyme scheme, which is(again) unconventional. Thus, (for instance), “three” and “teeth” in line1 work with “cavities” in line 2; just as “three” twice in line 5 reinforcethe end-rhymes of lines 2 and 4, “cavities,” “striptease.” Keats called thisk ind of melopoeiac reinforcement “loading” lines “with ore”; and hecomplained to Shelley in a famous missive how scant Shelley‟sreinforcement techniques were. Surely, if the regular number of beats perline is halved, it stands to poetic reason that what is left must be asloaded with prosodic ore as possible, and I attempted to accomplish thathere. It is also a feature of this particular sonnet (“Three Sets of Teeth,”

which opens the initial third of the book called Sister Lovers) that thefirst quatrain (four line stanza) is written in the Shakespearean manner — Shakespearean sonnets tend to begin with a/b/a/b. Shakespeareanrhyme-schemes in sonnets are dramatic to the point of being overripe;Shakespeare liking to imagine his sonnets being read from onstage,

perhaps. The “sturm und drang” facet of Shakespearean sonnets is notanswered by the Petrarchan mold employed by Keats (and, of course,



Petrarch), which is subtler, more intricate, more about interstitial craftthen dynamic fervor and bloody passion. That, through the firstquatrain, this sonnet emerges as “semi-Shakespearean” is something I

would like to posit. In being semi-Shakespearean, I attempt to open thebook in as dramatic a fashion as I possibly can; even as the last,“clustered” ten lines, in all their irregularity, move the sonnet intouncharted formal territory, towards a kind of wilderness zone whichmirrors the narrative-thematic wilderness zone the protagonist of thebook inhabits in his ménage with his two Chicago Muses in the firsttwenty sonnets of the book, which emerge also to mix convention andinnovation in all kinds of “semis.”



Notes: Cheltenham Elegies and WYB Sonnets

In examining prosodic structures in my body of work, it is noticeablethat discrepancies present themselves in how prosody in general isapproached. One interesting dichotomy subsists between the When YouBit sonnets and the Cheltenham Elegies. Where melopoeia is concerned,the WYB sonnets are lavish leaning towards overripe: they cluster end-rhymes with internal rhymes, assonances, and the rest to heighten thecarnival sensation of overwhelming romance, sexuality, intrigue, andtransgression:

I ache: dull, sharp,in a heap of paper.

All paper: picture,bright, bold, dark.I have nailed youto a piece: black.I darken touchedthings: I‟m used. I write you, you,

you, as if kissedby a fresh body,rose-petal bliss.

I drowse: numbas cocaine gums.

The nods to Shelley (“I pant, I tremble, I expire…”) and to Romanticismand the lyric “I” in general are right on the surface, and the whole gameis the consummation of total aesthetic richness. It is a sense of wantingsomething, and getting it. The consolidation of end-rhymes with internalrhymes heightens this process. This is 2007 (the book was published in‟08, but much of it was written in the autumn of ‟07). Four years later,and with the added encumbrance of a deepening national (and global)recession, I was ready to write the Cheltenham Elegies, and the note oflacrimae rerum was placed into them by impersonal circumstancesbecoming personalized. The melopoeiac dimension of the CheltenhamElegies, next to the When You Bit sonnets, is hollowed out, emptied,reflecting a state of impoverishment; internal rhymes must suffice tocolor the poems, while end-rhymes are left out to preclude the rosy senseof ravishment in the earlier poems. Elegies, as a poetic form, need to be



hollowed out, to reflect a narrative-thematic sense of loss and (again)impoverishment; what is hewn in granite must be against the “half -lyricism” of a construct like When You Bit, towards elegiac restraint withits elegant elisions:

And out of this nexus, O sacredscribe, came absolutely no one.I don‟t know what you expected to find here. This warm, safe,comforting suburb has a smotherbutton by which souls are unraveled.

Who would know better than you?Even if you‟re only in the back of

your mind asphyxiating. He looked

out the window — cars dashed byon Limekiln Pike. What is it, he said,are you dead or do you think you‟re Shakespeare?

Different audiences over a long period of time will find mete to embracedifferent kinds of prosody. For myself, I would tend to value thehollowed out starkness of the Elegies, their implicit vow against thetraditional ripeness of end-rhymes, against the twisted, torqued half-lyricism of the sonnets (if I call them half-lyrical, it is because they are

welded to a narrative structure which is book-length and involves other

characters, rather than the traditional lyric, which sticks to a first person perspective.)



NOTES: OPERA BUFA/ WYB

As to how conventional prosody functions in unconventional contexts:Opera Bufa, my first full-length from 2007, consists of a comic opera

(such its conceit runs) in sixty prose poems. Prose poetry, as a hybridform, must lose from prosodic richness what line-breaks, end-rhymes,and other lineation games like projective verse might add; even as theconstraint of line-breaks, end-rhymes, and projective verse being liftedfrees up a space for new conglomerates of narrative-thematic and formalrichness. The semi-lyric “I” of the When You Bit sonnets is replaced by

what might be called a “hybrid I,” a way or manner of presenting thefirst person singular in poetic language loosened from certain kinds offormal confinement by an engagement with the rules/stipulations of raw

prose:

I was a cadaver in a copse until a cop arrestedme. I was a convict in a jumpsuit until Ijumped bail. I was a hitchhiker under galacticmoon dust until I saw the sun. I was the sunas it rose and I shone on my dead self. I was acopse under the sun. I was a convict and acopse. I was all of this until I learned that youare what you see. I was what I saw until I saw

that my eyes were shut. I opened my eyes to akind of vacancy. I opened my arms todelinquency. I do not see anything now, and itrings.

Important to note: the line-breaks here were created by the size of the print book. They could be anywhere. But notice how a kind of absurdincantatory rhythm is created b y “I” and “I was”; if confined by anecessity of line-breaks and (intermittently) end-rhymes, or other artfuleffects like enjambments, the piece would not have the loose, free-

wheeling quality that makes it a kind of adequate operatic crescendo inthe context of this textual opera bufa. Some writers enjoy employinghybrid forms, some find that, falling between two aesthetic stools, theycreate an unpleasant chasm to tumble into. Hybrid forms are widelyused as an expression of avant-gardism and for the avant-garde; it is noaccident that Opera Bufa was released by a small overseas avant-garde

press in 2007. What remains “prosy” about the piece is that it reads more



like a soliloquy than a poem, something to be staged (or made operatic). The When You Bit sonnets most caught up in drama have inhering inthem a traditional formality that is not so free-wheeling, but emphasizesformal precision and the punctiliousness of refined prosody in a way theOpera Bufa pieces cannot:

I want you to be like a bull.I want you to call me a fool.I want to be ass-proud for you.I want you to call me to screw.I know this iambic is dry.I know this excess has to stop.I know I can laughably cry.I know blood can come drop by drop.

I come for you kicking my ass.I‟ve come to be making a pass.I‟ve come undistracted by “I.” I killed off my “I” as its dry. I start off these lines in the sand.I want to end up in your hand.

Audiences can decide for themselves whether nouveau hybridity orextreme traditionalism is more to the point as in 2014. The quid pro quo:freedom for formal precision: is an equation worth investigating for all

time.



Notes on Equations/Opera Bufa

Equations, like Opera Bufa, is a prose/poetry hybrid. The difference issimple: while Opera Bufa leans towards poetry and the poetic, setting upcamp in an abstract, surrealistic realm of riffs and images which neednot cohere in particular ways the way the novelistic prose does,Equations leans towards being straight prose, as it has a narrativestructure built around precise representations of particular, complexhuman situations, without a hinge towards abstraction or surreal games(operas). The “I” in Equations is not lyric, but a concrete protagonist,moving through a decipherable world. Furthermore, Equations is builtaround a precise dialectic: the thesis arrives instantly, that sex and

sexuality are what make us most human, the antithesis arrives when the protagonist meets and courts Jade, and the synthesis at the end of thebook decides that the thesis is partially correct, no more. Yet, theEquations prose poems have just enough poetry in them to make thecadences and rhythms noticeably not what you might hear in a novelisticcontext:

Here‟s my equation: sex is more human than everything e lse. Let me putsex to the left of me and you to the right of me. In the intersticesbetween me and sex, I have achieved my greatest consonance with

humanity. In the interstices between me and you, I can (hopefully) give you a greater consonance with humanity, just by showing you the seams,the zippers, the ruffles, the cuffs, all the accoutrements that dress us upto be naked, in a text with its own nakedness.

The little catalogue (seams, zippers, ruffles, cuffs) gives a hint of theincantatory, as do the parallel structures and semi-chiasmus formations.Meanwhile, the fanciful world of Opera Bufa is free to do whirlingdervish tricks that the Equations prose poems cannot, though it also

loses solid grounding enough not to be able to hold, harness, andconsolidate serious dialectic energies, imperatives, and motivations:

I am beginning an inventory. I am in possession of songs. I am in possession oflabor, and love‟s labors lost. I am capable of experiencing Mini-Marts. I inhabit an operatic



landscape. I have loved a girl. I have alsoloved a Maria. I am noticing a strange povertyin richness. I am cleaning up the stage for thisto happen again. I am counting on scones tobutter themselves. I am haunted by remorsefor missed notes. I am nonetheless proud tohave escaped the flatted fifth, el Diablo enmusica. I am lucky because the Devil paid formy stage props. I have torn up our contract. Ihave contacted my attorney.

Joyous, comic, operatic noise for its own sake, and for its ownamusement: that‟s Opera Bufa. It‟s light on its textual feet. Equations isheavier, and denser, steeped in prose necessities. Yet both are hybrids, in

a new mode of textual hybridity. Sequences of prose poems have neverbeen asked to carry this much cognitive depth before. As always, aneducated audience are free to decide for themselves whether hybrids canmaintain the same level of gravitas that straightforward poems, like the

Apparition Poems and the Cheltenham Elegies do, and also what otherhybrid forms might arise out of necessity as the century progresses.



Notes: Equations and Cheltenham

Translation is another key issue my body of work needs to face. The

truth is simple: prose tends to translate better than poetry. That is why,on a world level, Flaubert is read more than Baudelaire; musicallanguage, melopoeia, etc, which animates poetry, infuses it with vitallife, tends to be at least partially lost in translation, while prose remainsintact. So, if you cannot read The Flowers of Evil in French, there wouldseem to be no reason to read it; while reading Madame Bovary intranslation may be as edifying as reading it in its original dialect. Oneadvantage Equations has in my canon is this (and it is shared by Letters

To Dead Masters); another is that Equations, through ending on an

affirmative note, may be more companionable than Apparition Poemsand Cheltenham, with their philosophical musings, conundrums, andelegiac remembrances. Equations affirms, in its precise dialectic, thathuman relationships are worth investing time and energy in, that love isreal and a powerful force for good among the human race, and that sexneed not be the only issue on the table for men and women (or men andmen, or women and women). Oddly, the protagonist of Equations endsthe narrative in a state of solitude:

When you get in a train, you transcend an entire life you leave

behind. Yet every human life has to balance stasis and movement. It‟s something Trish never learned — how to move and not movesimultaneously. Trish demands absolutes — absolute movements,absolute stillness. I have learned that the only absolute in the universe isexistence itself — something will always exist. I don‟t pretend to knowhow, or what, or why. I‟ve left all the shot-glasses out; Jade forgot hercigarettes, American Spirits. I fish one out of her pack and light it.

With the memory of Jade still strong in his mind, he is free to affirm,rather than negate, all the sensory data he sees before him, and his

responses are free to be warm and lively. Opera Bufa and When You Bitalso end on comparative, affirmative high notes; all are steeped indynamic energy around human growth and progress towards differentforms of enlightenment — about love, sex, the body, art, and textualityitself. Equations has the advantage over the other two of being heavily

prose-based; thus, a text which can translate into other cultures and doother dances in other (or Other) contexts. Against the triumphant



solitude of the Equations protagonist by the end of the book is thisCheltenham Elegy, and the tragic interaction it recollects in visionarytranquility:

Huddled in the back of a red Jetta, I thought we were in aSpringsteen song. But there areno backstreets in Cheltenham.It‟s only the strip-mall to houseand back circuit. Anyone could‟ve seen us. It wasn‟t a full consummation— for want of a graceful phrase, we

were too smart to fuck. There wasno playing hero for me. Nor did I

force you to confess. What could you say?Cheltenham was soft, and all too infested.

Whether the deeper truth is latent in the Equations or in the CheltenhamElegies brings to the surface what the ultimate nature of humanity as a

whole is. Equations artfully affirms, and the Cheltenham Elegies artfullydeny. As the composer of both, I predict that the numbers will alwayslean towards Equations, both for its being (mostly) prose and for itsbeing affirmative; even as I know that the more profound and terribletruths hidden in the Elegies will draw in those brave enough to face the

darkness and the emptiness of raw humanity at its very worst.

***cover painting by Pablo Picasso***



Meta-Notes Part 3 Adam Fieled



The Posit Trilogy: Dracula on Literature

As of late 2014, I am, in some ways, in a relatively fortunate position:more than half of what I would like to be widely in print circulationand/or officially released on a high level is. Nonetheless, only patiencecan make it so that all the books find the right home (hopefully) at theright time. The Posit Trilogy, which begins with Posit and wascompleted in 2013, and also consolidated into this year‟s e-book Two

Teens Trilogies, has its own unique identity as (like Equations) a possible dialectic in poetry/literature. I am looking into the way thatDeposit and Re-Posit complete the Trilogy, and attempting to discern

whether or not the dialectical form of discourse

(thesis/antithesis/synthesis) is properly fulfilled. One thing I will sayabout The Posit Trilogy is that, in its fanciful sense of characterizationand levels of imagination, it reads to me like a more advanced, subtler

version of Opera Bufa. For instance, the absurdist chiasmus betweenSaint Augustine and Dracula as propelling the Trilogy forward; and thatthe manner in which Dracula, who is allowed air-time in precisely two

persona poems which end (respectively) Deposit and Re-Posit, girdshimself around with rhetorical heft against both Augustine, purity, andconfession, and then the purity and potential transparency of major highart consonant literature, demonstrates that The Posit Trilogy is playing

games both with pop culture, with poetry-as-theater and texts as“staged,” with intellectual seriousness being balanced with playful vistasopening, and with a deconstructive interrogation of literary seriousnessitself, on guard against overrating texts and textuality. Here is howDracula closes The Posit Trilogy, as though onstage:

You can‟t tell me you don‟t feed on the mysterious disappearance

of the need to do this — that raw life & blood

would suffice to

satisfy, & gird youagainst the grindingtowards sphere-music

http://www.youblisher.com/p/1026134-The-Posit-Trilogy-Bold-Format/



http://www.youblisher.com/p/1018921-Equations-Bold-Format/



http://www.youblisher.com/p/1037969-Opera-Bufa-Bold-Format/








you fancy you make.I‟ve lived a thousand

years among human

souls, all in need ofblood, little else, and

words are no blood

at all — what sufficesfor such as you is(as you say) a

simulacrum of blood,

with limited flow- potential, & as such

I counsel you (if you ask) to feed onsomething more wholesome-

don‟t scof f — wholesomeis not relativefor the human species,

& your words are dirt,feeding no one directly,& those who feed are

suspect, chilled byexposure to terminalfrosts, unable to bite

what might suffice in the end…

We may or may not choose to take Dracula‟s critique seriously; ThePosit Trilogy in steeped in investigations of subjectivity, and Dracula‟s“I,” his sense of himself, is manifestly abased. There is also the sensethat the ironies of us, a human audience, reckoning a vampire whohopes to convince us of the obsolescence of textuality, are potent ones:Dracula can stand in, however whimsical he seems, for mechanistic,



brutish, repetitive, materialistic society, as a kind of door slamming shut, warning us not to take the textual action here too seriously, thatmenacing forces hover behind even what texts are germane to us. That,ultimately, Dracula (and those masses he is a synecdoche for) is an“anti-I,” and thus the greatest threat to the poetic “I” when properlyemployed, is another subtext beneath the whimsy. However, I mustadmit that it will take many more readings for me to fully plumb thetextual depths of The Posit Trilogy, to discover if the dialectical form isseriously at work in it. Equations goes out of its way to make its essentialdialectic explicit, which bodes well for its surface-level popularity at alltimes; The Posit Trilogy is more shadowy, and until I investigate and/orinterrogate all the shadows as fully as possible, I cannot fully refuteDracula the way I would like to. When Dracula wins, in a context likethis, it may be a sign of the times.



The Posit Trilogy: Ambient Ghettos of North Philly

Connoisseurs of urban areas and urban life know: dilapidation, in urban

contexts, has its own kind of glamour and ambience. There is a richnessand a decadent glamour to dilapidated neighborhoods simply from thesense of solid time, decades and even centuries, passing through them,hollowing things out towards a kind of perfection; especially if thearchitecture is interesting. North Philly is mostly ghettos, mostlydilapidation: but the nicer bits of North Philly are so potent withambience that, for PFS, North Philly would always be one of our Ops.Part of the PFS vibe was a certain kind of laissez faire around where we

would go in Philly, which was anywhere, at any time. We were nothemmed in by fear, because Aughts Philly was not a fearful place. So

that, when my friends Radio Eris set up shop at 52nd and Cedar in themid-Aughts, smack in the middle of a North-West Philly ghetto, andcalled their shared, co-op abode The Eris Temple, it became natural formy routes to begin to include The Temple and its environs. The Eris

Temple is where the two Apparition Poems videos were shot; and thesite of endless readings, performances, and adventures. It‟s not like the

violent undercurrents of that particular „hood were invisible to us; but wemoved within the charmed circle of a germane time which subsisted forflaneurs, art-heads, and misfits. I also have to say that the glamorousdilapidation of North Philly (and West Philly, too) supersedes the closest

NYC analogue, which is Brooklyn, most of which is merely hideouslyugly, sans the elegant architecture which distinguishes almost all ofPhilly, for all time, from other cities. This poem from The Posit Trilogy, “Tranny Dream,” catches the sense I have that, as the Aughts wore intothe Teens, impending doom in the form of a Sword of Damocles hungover all of our heads here, even as I did not manage to write/publish thisuntil 2013:

I find myself in bed with a woman

with a man‟s crotch, & find this unacceptable, & so excuse myselfinto an autumn evening in NorthPhiladelphia, looking for a trainstation, finding more nudie bars.I get trapped in an enclosed space

with a stripper, done with her work







for the night, who counsels meagainst taking the train home, thatI can sleep with her backstage ather bar. I push past, into the nightagain, & am assailed on all sides.

The first person orientation of the poem aligns it with, not only theoriginal Posit, but Opera Bufa; what is even more important, on anarrative-thematic level, is the association with autumn, and itsharbinger of winter, which amounts to a confrontation with mortality. Asin, the way North Philly subsists in 2014, even for all its ambience (whichincludes also, a sense of the spectral or apparitional), has becomeunmanageable for those of us who remember the frisson of being there

pre-Great Recession. I wrote the poem from a dream, and from the

„burbs; pining, as usual these days, for a precious era which is now past.I will always be haunted by what Philly was both for me, and for all ofmy friends and lovers in the Aughts, and by the sense that we managedto capture, from Philly, another, higher world out of the ambience andarchitecture here. The second poem I would like to share is more noseon the face about the sort of goings-on which transpired at The Eris

Temple in the Aughts, is a sonnet, and bears the simple moniker “Eris Temple”:

That night I got raped by a brunette

chanteuse, I lay on the linoleum floorof the front room sans blanket, & thought

I could hack it among the raw subalternsof the Eris Temple, who could neverinclude me in their ranks, owing to my

posh education; outside, on Cedar Street,October gave a last breath of heat beforethe homeless had to hit rock bottom again, &

as Natalie lay next to me I calculatedmy chances of surviving at the dive bardirectly across from the Temple for the

length of a Jack & Coke, North Phillyconcrete mixed into it like so many notes —



As to what the “notes” here are or might constitute, that there was araucous charm even to the violent undercurrents which create NorthPhilly‟s ambience, and the “concrete” of man‟s desire to kill, maim, anddismember man, was never far from my thoughts while I patronized the

Temple at any time. Speaking of Temples, Temple University, where Iheld the University Fellowship from 2006 to 2011, is a North Philadelphiaestablishment, and is every bit as garishly lurid as the Temple is. What

you can see from Anderson Building, where the English Department islocated, is quite frightening in its stark attraction-repulsion circuit. Tobe on campus all day was to be challenged by a harsh landscape to findcharm in a fracas, and to embrace a kind of alienation built into what

Temple had to offer on ocular levels. Why it should be that this dynamic,attraction-repulsion, is so important to an appreciation of the ambient

ghettos of North Philly, is that it takes a certain kind of sensibility to bemagnetized by sites that are simultaneously attractive and repulsive; andPFS, especially the painting branch of PFS, were all heads for this kindof contradictory approach to the city we lived in, and loved.

http://www.youblisher.com/p/887303-Nine-Paintings-by-Abby-Heller-Burnham/






Apparition Poems: Ambient Ghettos of North Philly Pt. 2

North Philly is about, not only the charm of dilapidation, but the eerie

charm of the desolate. One reason Apparition Poems got its title is that,between the spatiality of different sectors of Philly and its ornatearchitectural elegance, one gets the sense of ghosts, specters, andapparitions here, hanging in the air in a way that some find intoxicating,some do not. Like I said about Temple University and the Eris Temple,those who find an interest in attraction/repulsion circuits (things, ocular

vistas or otherwise, which attract and repel at the same time) will havemuch to ponder as they walk Philly streets. Attraction/repulsion alsoleads, circuitously, to thoughts of salvation and damnation; and who thesaved and who the damned are is another pertinent PFS subtext, in our

art and in our lives. If Philly has an interesting relationship (also) to philosophy, it is because the relationship of our architectural constructsto the sky, the heavens, and to a widely disparate scene on the ground,lends a sense of transcendentalism to the city, and to attempts to forgehigher worlds, aesthetic and otherwise, from it. This is all leading to this

Apparition Poem:

There are gusty showersin Philadelphia, showersthat beat up empty lots,

down in sooty Kensington, you could almost believe what the books say about

being-in-the-world, I meanbeing in a damned world, itreally does seem that day

on greasy days in Philadelphia.

The circular nature of the poem around Philadelphia-as-topos gives it anair of being self-enclosed, self-completed, a whole, round circuit. Thecircle has to do with time, temporality, which has as one of its moregraceful manifestations the temporal circle, where (in whatever context)

you finish where you started. One of the grand subtexts of

http://www.youblisher.com/p/1018251-Complete-Apparition-Poems-2009-2014-Bold-Format/






Philadelphia — architecture versus time/the temporal, is mirrored here,as the scaffolding of the poem creates a square around the circle of the

poem‟s temporal conceit. The “gusty showers” and “greasy days” ofNorth Philly depend, if we posit some aesthetic satisfaction in them, ona broadening of viewpoints towards a recognition that surfaces belieinteriors, and what looks damned might actually be saved, and vice

versa. This is Baudelairian territory — salvation and damnation are notup the alley of the Romantics that much — and the PhiladelphianProwler may well be more, in his/her Noir orientation, simpatico withthe Symbolists then with those consonant with the replenishing powersof trees, birds, and flowers. To be forced into a kind of Purgatory,against century XX, by architecture — such is the fate (through PFS andotherwise) of Philadelphia in 2014. Yet I am no poet maudit; andinscribed in this Apparition Poem is the sense of hidden depths filling in

spaces which surfaces cannot.



Keats and the Prosody Meter

Having committed myself very willingly to a position that ranks Keats‟

lyrical gift (for melopoeia, prosody, etc) above all others in the history ofthe English language, I have now gotten around to configuring what Icall a Prosody Meter to posit other rankings. It begins with thesupposition that Keats‟ gift supersedes all other competitors, and the100% of the scale is the 100% of Keats‟ prosodic achievements. On thelevel of 75-80%, I would place (at their respective prosodic pinnacles)Donne, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare, all of whom create and sustainexquisite poetic music, but lack Keats‟ edge of fulsome solidity, ofloading lines from every angle with ore. When Keats, for example, offers“mortality/ Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,” the effect of

assonant sounds repeated so that almost every word in the line isincluded has no echo in Donne, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare. At thelevel of 66.66% I place myself and Shelley. “Clustering,” as I call my

prosodic method, has the advantage of clearing up narrative-thematicground so that I am not chained to my own music at the expense ofnarrative or intellectual interests, but also loosens a chunk of what couldbe formally golden into a purgatorial realm where what sticks, sticks and

what is lost cannot be retrieved. Shelley I deign (as Keats did) to be acompetent but rather lazy craftsman, who falls (despite a substantiallyrical gift) into lazy phrases and inappropriate repetitions: no one whoreads the Romantics seriously can quite forgive “I fall upon the thorns oflife! I bleed!” and its like. The lowest, 50% rung of the Prosody Meterhas on it a cluster of poets habitually formally lazy enough that “ore,” inthe Keatsian sense for them, is always over or under-employed: Byron,

Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Yeats, and Eliot. All of these poets canbe “jingly,” facile the wrong way round, and prosodic bells ring

perfunctorily.

Back to Keats: if I do pick nits with some of Keats‟ sonnets, it is because,

by the time he begins writing the major ones in 1816, his “chops” are sodeveloped that, in his innocent delight with his own magnificenttechnical facility, he sometimes undercooks his voltas (the volta in asonnet occurs around line 9, which is supposed to turn or torque thenarrative of the opening octave.) Keats‟ early voltas can be “auto- pilot”contrivances:



O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell,Let it not be among the jumbled heapOf murky buildings; climb with me the steep — Nature‟s observatory— whence the dell,Its flowery slopes, its river‟s crystal swell, May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep„Mongst boughs pavilioned, where the deer‟s swift leap Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell.But though I‟ll gladly trace these scenes with thee,

Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, Whose words are images of thoughts refined,Is my soul‟s pleasure; and it sure must be

Almost the highest bliss of humankind, When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

The volta here undercuts, weakens the octave, by making the protagonist seem irresolute, and also unimaginative; in other words, it would have been more challenging for Keats to find in his solitude someobjective correlative in nature to express what he wanted to express,rather than giving us the affective data nose on the face. It is, in

American MFA parlance again, “telling” rather than “showing.” Theirony of American MFA-land is that American poetry before me displaysso little prosodic heft that American poetry gamers should worship theground Keats walks on; but, in American MFA programs, the Romantics

are little touched on. American poetry until now has been writtenuniformly by cretins. The gifted poets in the American canon are none.But back to Keats and his voltas: his more successful sonnets havestructural dynamics that make the major turn interesting:

When I have fears that I may cease to beBefore my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,Before high-piled books, in charactery,Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain;

When I behold, upon the night‟s starred face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour! That I shall never look upon thee more,Never have relish in the fairy powerOf unreflecting love!- then on the shore



Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

The double crescendo here — the revelation of Fanny Brawne, and Keats‟deeply felt passion for her, and then the plummet into the visionarylocale of “the shore of the wide world” where Keats is confronted by hisown powerlessness in the face of mortality (Keats‟ Scorpionic courage inconfronting extinction being one of his great poetic strengths), take us,

with the requisite magisterial music (assonances like “of unreflectinglove” backed/solidified by strong end-rhymes, and anaphora from “of”as well), to a place of complete, totalized textual fulfillment, where anextreme gift is made to serve genuine narrative-thematic gravitas. Thatis genius in major high art consonant poetry.



Intimations of Immortality: Odes, Elegies, and Politics

The critical fallacy inheres in discussions of English Romanticism that

Keats is the least political of the major Romantic poets. Ostensibly,Keats‟ subject matter is not directly political: the odal cycle or visionaddresses subjectivity, temporality and spatiality, history (classicalantiquity), epistemology, and the poet‟s relationship to tactility,especially in the form of natural objects and vistas. Yet, specifically inOde to a Nightingale (which I credit with a precise half of the gravitas ofthe odal cycle itself), a reckoning is enacted which takes Keats straightto the heart of a political dilemma which has plagued mankind sinceclassical antiquity and before: what is the place of extremely developedand expressed individuality, visionary individuality, as it were, in an

individual, against the conformist masses, held under the protectiveaegis of conformist societal contexts? Adorno‟s “Lyric Poetry andSociety” initiates many pertinent inquiries on this level; how I would liketo elevate the discourse to the next level is to up a certain kind ofdiscursive ante by tackling a trope that has lost some status over the lastfew hundred years: immortality. Specifically, as a topos to investigate in

poetic texts and other literary contexts, who is more immortal, the visionary, with his or her extremely developed interiority, set in placeagainst societal norms, or any generalized normative, and the ethos and

praxis of the conformist masses themselves, with their standards of

regulated behavior and (more importantly) regulated cognition. Theseissues present themselves nose on the face in the penultimate stanza ofNightingale:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heardIn ancient days by emperor and clown:Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hathCharmed magic casements, opening on the foamOf perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.



Nightingale puts Keats‟ entire visionary odal system on a tightrope, ashe boldly confronts this system‟s potential obsolescence. What makesthe nightingale immortal, here, is its sense of being indistinguishablefrom all other nightingales, whether singing for Ruth or not. Those nottouched by the stigma of extreme individuality (here of a visionarynature) have their safety and immortality in numbers; while an “I”developed to an absolute peak of sharp cognitive-affective incisiveness isso vulnerable, through its singularity into isolation, that it can only feelthe pangs of mortality and impending death beating behind and in frontof it at all times. The politics of this dilemma is simple: any given societymust decide for itself to what extent individuals may develop themselvesas distinct, autonomous entities, against the normative, or to what extentthis process must be nipped in the bud. The critical commonplace of theisolated Romantic genius does apply here, as does Adorno; but what is

added is the sense of potential longevity in configuring things from oneend of this to the other: who gets to be immortal, Keats or his replicantand replaceable Nightingale? This fits snugly into (also) an explorationof the Cheltenham Elegies. The analogue to Nightingale, 261, manifestsin no uncertain terms the same syndromes and dichotomies:





The protagonist of the poem has the same sense of systematic, incisive

insight as Keats does in the Odes. Here, the antagonist, who represents(among other things) the typical and the normative individual trapped ina society which values destructiveness and the continued predominanceof short, stunted lives, is not a Nightingale but the driver of the Subaruin question. For gaming‟s sake, let‟s call him “Chris.” Who Chris is, asan American archetype; the suburban daredevil or show-off, with thesame blarneying sense of indestructibility, backed by the despair of



immobile, low-minded interests; is meant to appear as immortal as the visionary poet, who laments in an elegiac way the pointlessness of the world as it exists for both characters. The problem here (or tightrope,over which the elegiac system must walk) is that, for those for whommajor high art consonance is anathema, Chris will always remain a moreeternal character than the autonomous, visionary artist.

What, or who, is immortal here is a political issue; not just because themasses tend to propel the masses forward, and Chris is resolutely one ofthe masses, but because even the notion of immortality-in-art (a fixationfor both these Odes and Elegies) is a vulnerable one, before the mind-numbing force and obduracy of mass indifference and resentment. TheOdes have been given a high place, over two hundred years, in the canonof English literature. The Cheltenham Elegies have only begun to have

the life they are destined to have. Yet neither the Odes nor the Elegiesare for the obdurate masses, who are (very much) eternally andimmortally impervious to the siren call of advanced textuality. That highart is nonetheless a political force on high levels and for all time is alsomanifestly and demonstrably the case, no matter how eternallyimpervious the masses are. The artist must stand alone, with his or her

visions, against the imperviousness of the masses; perhaps with aRomantic sense of sublimity, perhaps not; but the politics of Keatsdictates that the politics of what endures, of what is meant to beimmortal and what is not, of how far an individual may go to extend his

or her individuality against the masses, is one that will remain atightrope to be walked for as long as anyone wants to create major highart consonant work.





Keats, Trish, Mind-Scapes

The rights and privileges of extremely developed individuality againstthe masses is a pertinent political issue raised by Keats‟ Odes and odalcycle. A second issue is even more pertinent — what the politicalramifications are when a sector of a given population decides to

prioritize intellectuality, to value cognitions and cognitive ability overraw, animal (“sensible,” in Kant‟s terms) life. Keats makes clear in theOdes, via many incisive impositions, that for him the human mind is itsown landscape, capable of generating entire worlds and universesagainst tactile reality, or what is generated for us by a society which

would fill our heads with its own value systems, narratives, and visions,

usually of different forms of material consonance. Keats‟ Psyche ismerely a vision, and a cognitively generated one, out of the mythology ofclassical antiquity; the mind-scape he builds for his vision is aPlatonically perfected representation of natural, tactile realities,abstracted metaphorically so that Keats odal mind generates its ownflora and fauna, in tune with Keats‟ beatific sense of quietness, murmurs,silence, frozen perspectives, sweetness, and all the levels of happy pietyhe sees in this Neo-Paganistic tableau.

The important thing, for the argument I am attempting to make, is that

Keats respects and venerates his own mind and cognitive abilities,against the idea that the human mind is not (potentially) its own self-enclosed, self-sustaining, self-contained universe. Were a sector of the

population, in America or anywhere else, to come to a similarconclusion; to decide that the mind can perfect what the body cannot;the country would (potentially) undergo a seismic reaction, towards therevelation that the “animal masses” would be forced to wrestle with theirown feelings of inadequacy, resentment, and general discontent. This is

why America has been soft on public intellectuals; they are too upsetting,

too unsettling, too likely to pierce through the blarney levels which stainand stunt American society. Were a group of powerful publicintellectuals to come to the fore, and be granted the ability to tell somesubstantial truth some of the time, America would commence to be

variegated the right way, towards developing a populace which has atleast some propensity for higher thought and concern with serioushuman issues. My prediction is that the twenty-first century will spell the



end of anti-philosophical, post-modern America, towards a system whose politics are capable of being altered and generally effected by public intellectuals, whether writers and artists or scientists and philosophers.

Oddly enough, Trish, which just took to the airwaves on Youblisher yesterday, was written to represent the immediacy and vividness of themost sensual kind of human life. Trish, unlike Equations, is anincomplete dialectic; the thesis emerges at the end, that, for someunaccountable reason, some individuals need a sense of romance in theirlife and some do not. I do, and most Aughts Philly stalwarts did, too. Yetthe congeries of elements which populates this sonnet cycle manages tocover how advanced cognition might interact with sense and sensuality.

The art of the mind completing the body‟s work and vice versa is a major

one for high artists, and thus a major one for those of us in AughtsPhilly. The political reality of the PFS way of life is a challenging one. We prioritized cognitive ability and developed individuality against themasses, and (more importantly than some might think) we also had adamned good time doing it. When our lifestyle in Aughts Philly hits theairwaves, so to speak, it will be an issue for America to deal with.Philadelphia was our “rosy sanctuary” and a self -generated mind-scapefor us, as well. If we chose to pursue politics in a lateral fashion, it doesnot mean a pertinent political statement was not made.

Adam Fieled, ‟14-„15

***cover image by Jenny Kanzler***



Documents

Exile and Exegesis