Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Riot Grrrl on P.F.S. Post


Riot Grrrl, double sonnet from the Aughts Philly section of Something Solid, on P.F.S. Post.

Riot Grrrl is also available as an individual mp3 file on PennSound.

Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Undulant on P.F.S. Post


Undulant, sonnet from the Aughts Philly section of Something Solid, on P.F.S. Post
Undulant is available as an individual mp3 file on PennSound

Something Solid: Aughts Philly: The Studio on Argotist Online Poetry


From the Aughts Philly mid-section of Something Solid, the double sonnet The Studio is now up on Argotist Online Poetry. Many thanks to Jeffrey Side.

The Studio is also available as an individual mp3 page on PennSound

from LTDM (Letters to Dead Masters): "#11"

         Percy, 

         In December 1915, Picasso wrote a missive to Gertrude Stein which begins, “my life is hell.” The world was largely a charnel ground, then and now. And as you live through the decomposition of an empire, you realize that everything gets burnt, nothing is spared. But then, I wouldn’t be having these thoughts if I watched television. It is an opiate for the masses on an unforeseen scale; a thought-repellent that guarantees, like certain sedatives, a good night’s rest. What do I do between 7 and 11? Nothing— I look at the walls, note how shadows start creeping with greater and greater rapidity in August, then try to ignore the light created by the top of the utilities building across the street (as it flashes the time, temperature, advertisements, etc). That kind of time, raw time, filled by interior realities rather than exterior ones, has been losing ground for sixty years. That’s why the academics can never be too penetrating about someone like Beckett; you’ve either lived with raw time or you haven’t. It doesn’t have to be a lazy wallow— all kinds of surprising connections manifest, as your mind creeps out into the universe. Who knows, you might think; maybe there are races of beings out there who’ve subsisted for 200 billion years. They probably perceive us to be spoiled babies. If you choose to stay grounded, you may have the realization that each of your lovers secretly hates you. The human race who bother to love at all, love what they hate and hate what they love. That’s why Trish Webber, for example, was always giving me things and then taking them back: devotion, attention, willingness to submit in a wifely way. Love and hate in her could never resolve. The application of a non-palliative becomes palliative just in itself, in this kind of daze, with thoughts of this depth— you feel subtle currents run through you, moving you towards some kind of totalized realness or reality. Throw in kids and a wife, and you can forget about raw time; on this level, I still savor bachelorhood. A conventional situation will never do for me; I have no idea how I’ll be permitted to configure these things. Except freakishly. 
                Talking about conventional situations, I got to the Grind early today, in order to give me some time with Picasso unimpeded; I like his early stuff. Across from me sits Reed, who fronts a large jazz-rock band in the mold of the Weather Report. He’s got on a Gilligan hat, and a black vest over a blue polo; he’s working at his laptop. This guy is my friend on Facebook, and I’m on his e-mail list. After we exchange brief nods, I realize he’s lost about fifteen pounds since I last saw him. He’s either four or five years younger than me, I’m not sure. But he carries himself with the affected assurance of the eternal up-and-comer; the one who always wants to tell you, boy have I got plans; and this time (for once) there’s no looking back. Truth be told, I was in this position for many years; I’ll never forget that claw in my stomach that always said the same thing— something remains unproven, and you may or may not be able to prove it. That’s the arts— a high school with few graduates. And if you’re a poet, you can graduate and stay broke. To be Darwinian, I’ve got all the varsity “Vs” I need, and this guy doesn’t. All the same, I wish him the best. Especially as there aren’t too many graduates in Philly, and our version of “Arts High” is the inverse of Ridgemont— slow-paced and dull. But you better not start whining about what’s in Manhattan, because nothing is. 
                Yours,                                        
                     Adam

Equations #20 (draft added July 2023)

But what the Devil does falls down around the heels when withholding is the only option. Ginny teaches me this, despite the great difference in our ages (my thirty-three to her twenty-two). When we try to escape, its’ to a place of no consummations; when we go up, it’s like a tarantula’s leg that points back down again. Ginny must withhold because she belongs, in every sense, to her family. The luscious red hair, bulging green eyes, extreme voluptuousness of her appearance belie her raison d’etre: to bind and fasten. As she binds and fastens, there’s more looseness than she realizes: you have to give in sometimes to get the goods. The truth emerges, after several months of “almost there”: Ginny is a virgin. Ginny withholds because her parts have defects. Because she is sickly, her gorgeousness is one of the universe’s cruel jokes. The joke is on her and her would-be lovers, and, like most of the best jokes, it isn’t that funny. Ginny is one of those strange girls that seems to have no interests in life; that thinks that her body is her only mind; and that her body that is her mind must be so much an issue of blood that to blood it must return. To be a tart is simply recreation; but there is no sense of seriousness or duty behind it. Yet Ginny stands on the mountain of her own pulchritude, and surveys the carnage at the bottom with calculated niceness. She has never known submissiveness, even as part of a strategic plan, and never will; so she perpetually awakens to see she’s done no real damage. Her mountain is a reverse mountain, which runs from the soil into hell. At a key moment, in the middle of a summer at the end of the Aughts, with Trish unhappily in Manhattan, Tobi fading, the Free School a memory, Ginny and her friends take the Drop hostage. I earn the right and privilege to be in Ginny’s apartment (on Pine Street, down the street east from the Drop) several times, which resembles Julie’s, high ceilings, wooden floors. Ginny sits next to me on her sofa and watches children’s movies on her laptop. I try nothing. She wields an axe, and her physiology is resolutely shut-down, compacted. The Drop waves the white flag, and, as I knew even then, an era was ending. Everything about her group signaled that we’d all been having too much fun, and that the Center City-wide party was over. Actual sex was passe, beside the point. Besides, it was noticeable that when I walked around Center City that summer with Ginny, which I did, everyone looked at us as though we were a couple. Only I knew what was being withheld. The image crafted made me look studly. To her, that was more than enough. Funny: she wouldn’t do bars. She just did her translation of bar-life into coffee shops, Temple classrooms, occasional drama productions. She was, herself, her own production— when she wore low-cut tops, or dresses, she was showing everyone who she was, and her breasts were a bared switchblade. That equation: sex used as an over or undertone to or for violence, or just the threat of violence: was big for her. Her tits were a weapon which could extort from the world what she wanted. All our idealism was replaced with back to the grind cynicism. Ginny’s favorite dress for special occasions was black, and bared the fangs of her cleavage the right way.

Desmond Swords on Apparition Poems: UK List-Serve (2011)

Built into the structure of the Internet is a certain amount of depth and density. Google searches do not bring up everything; some sites are "embedded" more than others, and it varies from country to country, continent to continent. Excavation can become a wonted task, and old texts that were not widely noted upon release can be recuperated. Excavation and recuperation are not just Internet processes; they are artistic processes as well. One goal I set to/for myself with the Blazevox book Apparition Poems (2010), was to excavate and recuperate certain aspects of the Romantic ethos. More specifically, the ethos that was set in place by William Wordsworth in his Preface (to Lyrical Ballads). That the task of the self-respecting Author was to enlarge the mind-capacity of his/her audience; that the dignity of the human mind is inherent and indestructible; that the human mind may be subtly, rather than grossly, stimulated; and that common situations can embody portentous meanings when recuperated with and by imagination; this corpus of notions hinged on other interests that were certainly not Wordsworth's (what about sexuality and sexual situations?) Almost precisely eighteen months after the release of the Blazevox book, I was able to excavate the following List-Serve directed (and quite jocular!) missive from a UK website, scribed by Desmond Swords:
Bob Sheppard's Star Student Scott Desmond's Words Flyte Fielded,

Yes, yes, one read the pose by this 'poet, critic, and musician' colleague, currently where erm, you were a year ago, nearing the end of that long hard road to attainment as a pro in doctoral po-biz, Jeff - collegiately alleging a claim that nearly everything to follow Four Quartets has been 'dross'.
One chuckled at the ambition, audacity and foolishness of deploying such a term in the forum of Letters; before turning one's focus to adducing the verse and other critical prose assays by the author Adam attempting to pull off such a theatrically audacious play as this.
"She told me I love boy/girl poems, love scenes in them based on a deep degeneracy
inherited from too much heat around my
genitals, as manifest in tangents I could only
see if I was getting laid. She told me this as
I was getting laid in such a way that any notion
of telling was subsumed in an ass as stately as
a mansion, which I filled with the liquid
cobwebs of my imagination."
Yeats would be proud of the cant and ergo argoist, very very classy Adam Fieled's verse. Proper spillage. High Art indeed from our playboy crown-prince doing what one does.
Effecting agreement among this reader, on X and Y being the only two one is on collegiate amity and perfect accord with Adam about, as a bosom buddy chum and prophetical practitoner with the imbas to know why, when, what and how, for example, Eliot can successfully operate as a symbol for agreement between Fieled and oneself.
High and Low Art in the 'making' of verse activity, you know, as a 'poetry' there's often very little agreement about, and in America, poetry atomized into 10,000 different individual, unique and original practices, all curated by a genius with big ideas about what kind of reality Poetry is, adam, the only critical debate in AmPo parish at present, as you know, has one essential point of agreement most practitioners of contemporary American poetry found as your datum: MFA.
After this, a forking occurs and we diverge into our own pool of plod and production sailor, not believing any of it matters. That our thinking is nought but a performance in print, anything other than that: Not real. Thought, Fielding.
Have a think about it. I'll get back to you.
What is interesting (and gratifying) to me about this piece is the context it arose from. I had just published a piece in the UK online journal The Argotist Online entitled Century XX after Four Quartets. The gist of the piece was that poetry in the English language decayed horribly in the second half of the twentieth century. Other critical forays from this period, like On the Necessity of Bad Reviews and The Decay of Spirituality in Poetry got a bigger instant public reaction than this one did. A response that defended me with my Apparition Poems, and their excavated/recuperated Romantic ethos, was written and placed in a manner that straddled public and private spheres. Did Mr. Swords know he was being archived? The letter mixes jocularity (even, at points, to the edge of absurdity) with serious overtones. What could have been a post-modern performance from Mr. Swords was nudged in the direction of the Romantic by earnest edges. The dynamic between Century XX..., the Apparition Poems, and Mr. Swords piece are interesting; on one level, radical and provocative conservatism is getting "filled in" by the ironic humor which is post-modernity's metier. The Apparition Poems form a middle ground here, as a site not bereft of absurdities or earnestness, ironies or direct statements. The meta-nature of the poem quoted is heightened by an intellectually challenging and substantial narrative. Mr. Swords chose to defend me with a poem that would be offensive to a "pure" Romantic ethos. It includes sexual slang, and pornographic overtones. But that I was excavating and recuperating something Romantic (and many consider Yeats a latter-day Romantic) is hinted at. The structure of the Internet has created many circles like this in poetry. Excavation and recuperation are processes that force the issue of repetition. What is, and matters most, must be repeated.

Equations #45 (added July 2023)

Growing up with Emma, who had been in my class at CHS, wasn’t like growing up with Roberta. It wasn’t like anything. Emma, a lanky blonde with long, lank blonde hair, a chiseled, cat-like face, and long limbs, looked like a stunt double for Trish, and had been merely an acquaintance. She was quiet, and kept to herself. Her friends were among the geeks of the class. Why and how Emma knew to show up now, in the midst of all this turbulence with Trish, I have no idea, but she did. I laughed because she so resembled Trish, but I was also aroused. I liked the idea, past N and Roberta, of a real hook-up within my class, even ten years after the fact. She was there, at the Last Drop, on a succession of key summer days, in a sleeveless white blouse. After all these years, her cat-face grew on me as enchanting, compelling, suggestive of something her whole presence insinuated— she identified heavily with Trish, and had a female impulse to demarcate turf which could also be hers. Whether she’d been stalking us or just heard what was happening with us from the suburbs, I still don’t know. I knew she was commuting to Center City from somewhere. What she wanted was just one night with me, I later concluded. When, on the one late afternoon I made my way with her back to Logan Square, we were ensconced, she took out a bottle of Robitussin as though it were an aperitif, and she were Trixie Belle. She wanted, as she said, a Robo-trip. It was part of the magic of that night that Emma wound up encapsulating for me so many different partners at once, including partners merely being anticipated. I found it easy to begin making love to her, because she made it easy. Her equation was interesting, about female levels of awareness— everything about her physiology screamed, you always wanted me the most, but you just didn’t know it. You’re a man— you don’t know these things. I have delivered myself to you because you need me now, and I need you. Now you may begin to learn who you are. And we made love with great fluidity and rapidity, and then we made love again. Her fluidity was like Heather’s would be, and the sense of being lulled into a trance of perpetual, high-intensity intercourse, on the bed, then on the living room floor, on the couch in the living room, from the front, from the back, was like Jena. We each gave the other a show-stopping performance, manifesting (as was odd, and as I was not too dumb and callow to notice) an inversion of our years of starving for each other. The absolute ecstasy of several mutual orgasms was the tactile insignia, as it might’ve been with Roberta and N, of an eternity of denial overcome. This, even as what was built into us both had been noticed only by her. Why, in sex equations, women usually hold the cards: women are receptive to sensory data on a deeper level than men, and have a primordial understanding of physiology, of bodies and more bodies, which men do not. When bodies speak, women listen more. Emma and I shared a home, but only she registered what our bodies shared, what was in them. When Trish showed up, it was a red flag from nature that it would be Emma’s time to show up too. Even if it proved to be the cosmic design that after one night, I would never see Emma again.

 

From Galatea Resurrects, 2008

Beams by Adam Fieled is an e-book from Blazevox. It is a multifaceted work that is both formally and typographically inventive, as well as being linguistically intriguing. To do full justice to the poetry in this volume would require a much longer and detailed review of essay length; such is the complexity and multifaceted nature of this work. So, all I will attempt in this review is to isolate certain features that can be readily recognized. Beams comprises four titled sections: ‘Beams’, ‘Apparition Poems’, ‘Madame Psychoses’, and ‘Virtual Pinball’ (this latter being composed with poet Lars Palm). Each of these sections contain poems stylistically different to those of the other sections. An important aspect to the ‘Beams’ section is Fieled’s poetic aesthetic regarding it. The poems in it represent his concept of the poetic “beam”. The following is an extract from his exposition of this poetic, which can be read at http://artrecess2.blogspot.com/2005/08/beam-hypothesis.html:
[A beam is] a short poem, 8-20 lines [not] necessarily impersonal or personal, but it must transcend mere subjectivity […] single lines interspersed function as “beams of light”. They're pure shots into poetic space, flashes of imagery, insight, gist-phrasing, etc. Light-beams illuminate built-beams [ie architectural structures], built-beams support and buttress light-beams. Together, they posit the BEAM as a kind of “light-house” or “light-structure.”
The manifestation of this poetic aesthetic in the ‘Beams’ section applies to all of its poems, but other aspects tangentially related also pertain, particularly where colour (light) and matter (objects) are made to amalgamate in such a way as to produce an almost iridescent affect which draws attention to the “variability” that underlies phenomena (according to quantum theory). The aesthetic result is that material objects are seen to display less than palpable qualities: light becomes semi-palpable in ‘Creep’ (p.7) were it is described as ‘Sponge-light’, and in ‘Leaves’ (p.12) matter becomes semi-iridescent:
Leaves tonight are leaning spots of light […]

The use of such affects serves to give us a sense of the underlying subatomic volatility that forms the objects of the observed world. It has a sort of Blakean sense whereby the visible world is seen to envelop a subtler one. The world is not all it seems to be. In doing this with words, Fieled makes almost tangible to our senses what can but remain only rational inference if we are reliant on same from a study of quantum physics. No small achievement for a poet. However, the poems are not limited to such affects. They also manage to concisely represent the vicissitudes of human experience in all their variations. In ‘Razor’ (p.8) we find lines such as,
edged like needle-scars along arm-veins
everything I can’t puncture is there


which in association with the lines,

bottoms grow hardened from rubs
& sharpness be a baby’s candy

not only produce an interesting juxtaposition, but also represent birth and death. They suggest the bitterness, regret, and frustration that is the lot of humanity, yet they also suggest hope in that we become hardened in order for that suffering to become almost as acceptable to us as candy is to a baby.
Throughout this collection, a recurring motif relating to sexual struggle is evident. In ‘Sex Hex’ (p.9) we have a deft account of man’s unremitting desire for sexual fulfilment described in almost “biological determinist” terms, yet alluding to the nuances inherent in any discussion of male dominance within a given society, as is suggested by the mention of Foucault:
take her up, stroke her belly, she’ll think of Foucault

The biological controlling impulses of the male driven to physical action is counter-balanced by the cerebral passivity of the female who, by thinking of Foucault, both gives in to the male’s seduction ploy but also demonstrates an intellectuality that is not evident in the male at this particular time in their relationship. The problematical relationship between the sexes is further evinced in terms of consciousness in the ‘Madame Psychoses’ section. In ‘Sarah Israel’ (p.33) we see how memory almost reinvents or remodels the past regarding a yearned for “other”:
I saw her in a seeing not seen by any eye,
& the “I” that saw, saw my eye not at all.

Here, identity and perception become entwined as the punning of ‘eye’ with ‘I’ demonstrates. This punning acts as a poetic device to illustrate the very real inextricable union that identity and perception must necessarily have. It is a union so binding that the two become mutually exclusive causing the poet confusion as he struggles to wade his way through something of solipsist maze. In ‘Paula’ (p.37) we see the ultimate expression of male sexual and emotional yearning that represents the lot of Everyman:

chaos, order, clipped bird-like into
wings & cries. I could only ever
think; paula. all the thrusts &
pumps that could never be. "all"
that must be withheld, & that
it might be better that way.

you gave me the gift; savouring
wanting. how it really was you
I wanted. not a body but a soul.

I tell myself I've "been through
you", forever & never. zero here,
same as two. empty.saturated. dark


I have quoted the entire poem. Such is its universality pertaining to male desire any commentary by me would be more than superfluous. Indeed, it would not be outlandish to suggest that in this poem Fieled has articulated more than John Donne allowed himself to in those poems of Donne’s that evince similar concerns.

Jeffrey Side