Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): "Lull"
Attendant on the mystery— that a house could exist for us,
where we all felt at home, us misfits— is the inevitable dark
side of the equation. I could never get any writing done at 4325.
Mary, Abby, Diana, were all too distracting, not to mention
Zooska, the loquacious house-cat, who would often settle on
Mary’s bed when we had parties in her room. In fact, the entire
period of the early Aughts is marked, for me, by a sense of
indeterminate writerly infertility. The big creative surge I’d
experienced, towards the end of my time in State College, I’d
knocked down what walls were in my way, put up my own
new architecture. The cocktail of what in my head stood behind
that writing— the Symbolists, the Beats, also several years of
philosophy coursework at PSU, including the Continental jaunts
they were famous for— didn’t need the later elixir of English
Romanticism to establish its own fertility. Within its own modest
parameters, it allowed me in text to be the Rimbaud I wanted to
be. That— a variant of Rimbaud’s punkish adolescent— is the persona
which manifested in State College. I had the wherewithal then to
follow it through. Seasons in drug-hell fed the flames the right way.
By 4325, this had graduated into an awkward transitional period.
The discovery of Romanticism as a wellspring I found less instantly
useful than the Symbolists. It was no longer appropriate to wear
the mask of a bratty, if visionary, adolescent anymore, either. I
was stuck. What bled out of me, during the early years with Mary,
was miscellaneous. Mary’s literary conservatism meant that what
she looked for in poetry was lyricism. So, I wrote lyrical strophes
to her. The electric charge into vital action came later— received from
plugging into the international English-language avant-garde. This was a lull.
© Adam Fieled 2026
where we all felt at home, us misfits— is the inevitable dark
side of the equation. I could never get any writing done at 4325.
Mary, Abby, Diana, were all too distracting, not to mention
Zooska, the loquacious house-cat, who would often settle on
Mary’s bed when we had parties in her room. In fact, the entire
period of the early Aughts is marked, for me, by a sense of
indeterminate writerly infertility. The big creative surge I’d
experienced, towards the end of my time in State College, I’d
knocked down what walls were in my way, put up my own
new architecture. The cocktail of what in my head stood behind
that writing— the Symbolists, the Beats, also several years of
philosophy coursework at PSU, including the Continental jaunts
they were famous for— didn’t need the later elixir of English
Romanticism to establish its own fertility. Within its own modest
parameters, it allowed me in text to be the Rimbaud I wanted to
be. That— a variant of Rimbaud’s punkish adolescent— is the persona
which manifested in State College. I had the wherewithal then to
follow it through. Seasons in drug-hell fed the flames the right way.
By 4325, this had graduated into an awkward transitional period.
The discovery of Romanticism as a wellspring I found less instantly
useful than the Symbolists. It was no longer appropriate to wear
the mask of a bratty, if visionary, adolescent anymore, either. I
was stuck. What bled out of me, during the early years with Mary,
was miscellaneous. Mary’s literary conservatism meant that what
she looked for in poetry was lyricism. So, I wrote lyrical strophes
to her. The electric charge into vital action came later— received from
plugging into the international English-language avant-garde. This was a lull.
© Adam Fieled 2026
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