Art Recess 2

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.

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.

Rubber Soul: The Word

I said to my friend, “love”
was the one we both missed,
w knit stockings, red gloves,
apple-pie eyes. She ran away
from booze, smoke, our beds.
She was too good for us. Now
all we have is the word: “love.”

He told me I misunderstood,
that it’s the word not the girl
that matters: “love” is self-
creating, a verdict delivered
on creation, a benediction on
all manners of bullshit, hung
on our days like stalagmites.

Well, I said, as long as there’s
something in the world other
than bullshit, I guess there’s
something to hope for from
each moment. Not much, he
said, but we have to go, I need
a beer, & he was right, & we went.