Apparition Poem #557

 Another denver syntax (24) moment, and one singled out for Abby Heller-Burnham. 

Apparition Poem #1473 (2)

A post-script to the first post regarding #1473 in denver syntax. A bit flippant, I think, to use the randy pic of Mary & I for #1473, when the target of the piece, as I had to re-remember, was more Julia B(rodsky), shown here. What we have is 2008-ism, Year of the Rat-ism, as I attempted to come to terms with a failed marriage and move forward along any opening vista I could. Julia, who began as my student at Temple and also worked at the Center City boutique South Moon Under, engendered a very raw reaction in, and from, me, even as our tryst, disappointingly, didn't wind up leading to a marriage, as is explored, with some rawness, in #1488. 

Revolver: take arms against a sea of troubles...

The murk and sludge of 2008 engendered a wide variety of responses. When I could get high in 2008, it was on the wings of a writing bender which wound up seeing me into the Teens. In the triumvirate of e-chap/e-book publications in ’08 and ’09, Revolver distinguishes itself by a vested sense of sobriety. Revolver is not me burying myself in alcohol, nor is it me wallowing in the urban menace atmosphere of filth and scum. Revolver is where I respond to the sleaze and scum by fighting back. Wide awake, the protagonist here takes in the world around him, and sees what unholy, bitterly corrupted lights he can shoot out. Beneath the sobriety and the fury, Revolver also reads as a last will and testament of and for my relationship with Mary Evelyn Harju. I’m watching her moves, and watching mine, and trying to discern why the impasse between us must be, or seem, permanent. Blood on the Tracks time. There’s always a rift where the physical and spiritual play a violent, spiteful game of tug-of-war. The criticisms and recriminations which inform Love You To, lead to molten melt-down of She Said She Said and then the complete and totalized entropy of For No One. As the final salvo of the e-chap, Tomorrow Never Knows consummates a willful imposition of the physical on the spiritual and vice versa, into a sense of life being conceived in a dissolution of individual consciousness. This is where the lovers cease to exist, and commune in something like a Universal consciousness or Mind. Where sex means something. Where Mary and I are concerned, the final fuck (half-metaphorically meant) is the most profound. The revolver carried by the protagonist annihilates itself, as it self-exhausts, and the ecstasy does not exclude sobriety, faithfulness, or discipline. What actually happened between Ms. H and I in the second half of ’07 is tangled. Some of our raw material got transmuted, some rendered with (again) an adequate faithfulness. Released as a Scantily Clad Press e-chap in ’08, Revolver’s solution for recessional entropy is a commitment to cultivating presence, reality, individuality. These are seen to be worth fighting for. Entity, unthinking consciousness, is not to be trusted, as a weakening agent. All shot through with a patina of raw, divorced pain. One way home.

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                                          The Fall: Mary Evelyn Harju: 2008

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More on the death of love: Apparition Poem #1497 in denver syntax 20, Apparition Poem #1558 in Cricket Online Review 6.

Returns

 

Conventions are difficult to work around, in poetry and in books in general. Publishers tend to publish what they know will sell in the world, and both anomalous books and anomalous authors are often stung to death by an enforced status quo mentality. That having been said, when my first books were released in 2007, I was determined to book-publish, as much as I could, my way, and against the biggest publishing bete noir in English language poetry, i.m.h.o. The bete noir in question is simple— poetry collections, the convention enforces, should not cohere around any central theme or narrative, the way that fiction, drama, philosophy, and science texts do. With some notable exceptions, poets (American, UK) are encouraged to just throw the requisite number of poems together and call the result a manuscript. That, to me, is not a real book, folks. Like me or lump me (and in rock, lump me in with Floyd, thank you very much), I have a stringent definition, and a stringent standard, of what constitutes a real book, which I have now spent almost twenty years attempting to live up to. The standard means coherence and cohesiveness, built into the text, around a narrative, a set of themes, or a formal imperative, or all three at once. Some of my books are woven tightly this way, some are, as Jimmy Page would say, tight but loose. All are the nightmare of the poets I studied under to obtain my graduate degrees. Yet that, for better or for worse, is my books standard. C’est la vie.

No surprise then, that when in the late summer of 2010, a few months after the release of Apparition Poems, I finally published a grab-bag of a chapbook with Mipoesias, no story or narrative stood behind its creation and publication that much. I had it, they offered to publish it, in a collection of chapbooks they were doing at the same time. Fair. I called the thing Returns because I was returning, in a way that I could, to a sort of beginning again, before I was possessed by the literary will-to-cohesion. The individual poems I have discussed elsewhere— Wittgenstein’s Song, written at the Last Drop in spring 2005, debuted in Henniker in a Carol Frost workshop; After Andrew Marvell, about Jen Strawser’s best friend in 1996, reprised in 2008; and now, added, Twisted Limbs, double editioned in 2006, an anthem around the potentially perceived heroism of/in carnal entanglement, apostrophe, could be, to Mary or Hannah or Abby. The important sui generis thing here, the token thing, you might say, even after a few alterations have been made, is that Returns remains my contribution to the ultimate grab-bag sweepstakes. Here I am, standing with the folks at Henniker, and (more than half the time, and more than they would like to admit) at Penn and Temple, too. Being conventional, as I try not to be. Attempting, of course, to sell in the world nonetheless. Drowning, as the new cover suggests? Sort of. Who isn’t, these days?

Apparition Poem #1473

This is a resurrected 2010 page from denver syntax 20. This piece did get included in the 2010 Blazevox print book Apparition Poems. About primitive instincts and how they get honed and refined over long periods of time. Primitive instincts were, had to be, big between Mary and me. 

New Apparition Poems 2013-2014

The initial Apparition Poems series sprung right out of the heart of Center City Philadelphia. Everything about the twists and turns built into the pieces had to do with city life and an urban landscape. This, including what a major city is like in the middle of the night. The thirty-six pieces in New Apparition Poems 2013-2014 are not as necessarily nighttime as what’s etched in the two Blazevox books. They don’t need to be. All that stillness, that sense of slumber, are built into the suburbs, all day, every day. I had relocated from Logan Square to Conshohocken in 2012, and understood that what Conshohocken was, was about an emended sense of the active or activity, tilted towards stasis rather than dynamism. The 2013-2014 Apparition Poems thus have a backdrop about consciousness coming to grips with stasis, and with the sense of stasis doubled, owing to the aftermath of the 2007-2009 recession. As of 2013-2014, and as was later deemphasized, the media were still reporting the said recession as The Great Recession, and helping us to a realization that we were a nation of hamburger flippers. The national scene was not a prosperous one.

The other thing worth knowing about Conshohocken: despite all the somnambulant touches, Conshohocken is famed for its architectural grandiosity. The way Fayette Street works in Conshohocken is that, on an ocular level, it could appear sublime at any time. Thus, it would be fallacious to say that when I stepped into Conshohocken, I entered into any kind of dead zone. The building scene, as is often the case in Philly and the environs, was, and is, a magnificent one. So that, by 2013 I felt ready to do the work of re-imagining what an Apparition Poem could be, even in a context more static than I would’ve preferred. Morris Arboretum, on the cover, is set within the city limits of Philadelphia, but in a part of the city far from Logan Square and Center City, not far from Conshohocken and Plymouth-Whitemarsh. It is a tribute to the endless sense of diversity and graciousness built into Philly that it has within its boundary-lines a real arboretum. It is a photo, also, I snapped myself in 2022. What I meant to convey is that all these suburban, or sub-urban, elements, conspired to place me in a subconscious space in which the series called Apparition Poems could have a legitimate rebirth. That’s what New Apparition Poems 2013-2014 is all about.

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Two of the most major of the New Apparition Poems from the 2013-2014 period featured in this pdf appeared in Issue #60 of UK print journal Tears in the Fence in 2014. 

This edition of New Apparition Poems includes not only 2013-2014 Apps but 2024 ones. 

Plymouth-Whitemarsh: Book #2

The first book in my oeuvre to directly address Plymouth-Whitemarsh: autumn 2019's The Great Recession. As of late 2024, another missive directly from Ply-Mar begins its journey; the Beams sequel Dance Monkey, from Funtime Press. Will I  get to a trilogy? Who knows.