Over the Schuylkill...

Putting together a package deal around Aughts Philly, I chose the title "Over the Schuylkill," from one of the Apparition Poems. It seems to me that, as a seed to plant, this is as comprehensive a statement as we're likely to make. Why it would have to be that I'm particularly proud is that my finger-in-the-air vibe indicates that, for those of us left standing in the stalemated iciness of this recession, there's really no sense left of being in a rush. We have many issues to face- the cost of living, of food and health insurance especially, is so inflated in 2014 that the media's continual unwillingness to admit population depreciation in the United States is an abusive molestation of the remaining population, and a pestilential one to boot.

In a situation like this, art has to be over to the side, to be picked up or dropped as needed. People interested in the arts have varying and variable reactions to why/how art works for them- some can only immerse themselves in the aesthetic in times of prosperity, while others can receive necessary stimulation from art even during a steep recession and its aftermath. I am of the latter type- the recession has not particularly dulled my appetite for the aesthetic. One thing "Over the Schuylkill" can do for whatever audience we wind up having is to manifest for them a kind of ideal around possibilities of intimacy, deep companionship, and the redeeming power of profound human connections. I have called 2014 a "scum-scape," in which genuine individuals have largely been replaced by well-protected, powerfully-backed goons, corporate drones, and other types/forms of fraudulent hucksters. For those genuine people, especially genuine artists who have survived the deprivations of the recession, who need to have their humanity affirmed (against the scum), we can offer that particular good/service to them, among others. This collection is a big, bold voice assuring its audience that they are not alone, and that the '14 human scene is not a complete pigsty. So, as the Aughts Philly/Neo-Romanticism juggernaut ambles along, the door is wide open for others of our ilk to follow us. There was/is a certain amount of armature covering us and our endeavor, but we were /are a scene and a city with a soul.

Abs and Keats

Here's an unlikely juxtaposition which works: Abs and Keats. Both packed a world of worthwhile aesthetic vision and knowledge into a small oeuvre. Abs is rather more extreme than Keats: Keats' major achievements, the "Odes," which redefined Romanticism and opened an eternal vista onto conceptions of art, artifice, and temporality in chiasmus with them, only fill up (depending on the volume) 10-20 pages. Yet, there's enough middle-weight and minor Keats material to fill up a small, if compact, volume, with introduction, scholarly critique, and endnotes. Abs' position is more precarious- she has JUST THE ODES, little else- no padding, no middle-weight or minor jive to fill things out. So, an Abby Heller-Burnham coffee table book, of the sort that museums like to sell with exhibitions, would seem to be an impossibility.

This syndrome, the JUST THE ODES syndrome, is what I have to work around, and it applies to Mary too, with even more stringency. I'll spend the next five-ten years working intermittently to overcome this obstacle, and continue to sneer, here and there, at who Pablo Picasso was, whose high-points, for me, are no higher than Marys and Abbys, but who diddled off so much treacle, kitsch, and other dross that coffee table book culture around the man is formidable, and profitable for those appealing to the faux-cultural and sort of art-consonant.

Nature, do you Mind?

Haven't decided whether Elitism/Classicism is finished yet. One way or another, I have some plans about what to do with it when it is. As I've been planning, I decided to do Keats again. His endings are sharper, harder, and more uncompromising than Wordsworth's, his prosody richer, even as WW has more intellectual ambition/depth some of the time. Mind-Nature-Mind or Nature-Mind-Nature are both interesting algorithms for the ages. And that Sex is shorthand for Nature is pure proto-Neo-Romanticism.

Noir Fayette

This is a view, looking down Fayette Street towards the highway which attaches Conshy with Center City Philly. This manuscript I've put into circulation I thought would look decent with this as cover shot; the mss itself, "From Conshy: New Apparition Poems," recently finished, attempts to capture the noir aspect of the Philly 'burbs rather than the noir overlay of the city itself.

The Wonders of Abs

Enjoying writing about Abs as usual.

Flailing Around

I am flailing around with the New Apps (Conshy Apps) mss. These new Apps were written from unfinished, abandoned fragments I still have floating. They may prove to be part of the gold I'm looking to strike, or not. And the chill is off...

Fighting the Mob

It's an absolutely massive pain in the arse. But with fighting the way I'm fighting, it may be that it won't take twenty, thirty, or forty years for the world at large to notice Abby and I, even as our work even now is securely placed.

Philly in the Aughts: Blissful Ignorance?

The last time I had a prolonged interaction with Ms. Heller-Burnham: just as Apparition Poems was beginning to take shape, in late '09. Abs was in a despairing state, and she seemed to feel that her life was already over. I had called her to see if she wanted to contribute to Trish, a sonnet-sequence to Mary H, one of the efforts I had going at the time. After all, Abs and I were equally intimate with Mary Harju. I am also unable to deny that the recession imposed an ending of misery and desolation on many of us, partial or complete. The Philly Free School's luck is a sturdy body of first-rate artistic work set in place, which means (& as is rare) that our apotheosis of Bohemia and Bohemian city-life was not for nothing. The pain the plebeians of the day must be in involves the opposite recognition- that, as the mob is also ripped to shreds by the Recession, the frivolity of the mob, or mob life, as an enterprise, guarantees that it was, in fact, all for nothing in the end; as all their plastic, cheaply made monuments tumble to the ground. C'est la vie.

Killer Nets, Catalysts, and Knife Fights

Some of the knife fights I've been getting into on Facebook are interesting. Generally, if I see a post where enthusiasm is expressed, and claims are made, for a poet or movement of poets I suspect of utter fraudulence, I get the knife out. If the recessional US is going to turn over, I'm a decent catalyst for it in the cultural sector. What I have to say here, though, is a tangent to me personally: the Internet is the largest, most ferocious enemy the Mob in this country could ever imagine. It's a realm of real, palpable freedom right now. Who knows for how long? So, let's keep it coming with ambiguous spaces like Facebook where what's stated may or may not count, the egalitarian spaciousness of Blogger, right here right now, as vistas towards saying whatever the fuck we want to say, as dominos fall.

He who walks behind the rows/rose

I dug "Children of the Corn" when I was a kid; yet, as an adult, I'm bothered by its lack of specificity. Is the demonic super-force which powers "The Organization" whose shenanigans Malakai and Isaac perpetuate "He who walks behind the rows" (as in, rows of corn) or "He who walks behind the rose" (as in the flower)? For convenience sake, I'll call him "He who walks behind the rows/rose."

Gothic Literature and Rock Music

Gothic Literature tends towards extreme stylization of form- Satanists and witches are always hiding their worship and witchcraft; a sinister plot always unravels gradually towards a tremendous, destructive, harrowing climax; and a tone of forboding always permeates the whole production. I read Matthew Lewis's The Monk when an undergrad at Penn; released in 1795, it typifies this whole genre. I've been thinking, as a tangent, that there is something profoundly Gothic about rock music (past, obviously, The Cure, Bauhaus, and rock's own "Goth" sub-genre); invented, I now suspect, only to be a front for other things, run by goombas no strangers to the Draconian, exceedingly ill-starred as a composite blend of high and low art impulses, generative of false idols for a public who have been robbed of the impetus to find genuine ones, and so very dark, in its compromised position, that even Mr. Lewis's ill-fated monk might snicker at his own comparative integrity. There are things in rock music here and there worth preserving; I believe that; but the foundation was all wrong to create anything sturdy, or for rock to be hailed as a newfangled art-form over a long period of time. As clouds gather...

As Pazuzu rolls up...

If Pazuzu rolls up on whoever visits this blog, it's because I'm unleashing a tornado of cardinal air in a certain balance against a century's worth of garbage. But seriously, folks, my guess is that Pazuzu doesn't mind a sense of absurdity accompanying his arrival, because it portends something serious, and wind demon-ish. And tomorrow there will be more, and perhaps I'll get Captain Howdy to show up too. I grew up with Jason Miller, literally.

Eerie/Shamanistic

In October 2009, I'd finished about 1/3rd to 1/4th of the Apparition Poems manuscript. Then, for a long month, I hit an internal power block about continuing. A long, eerie, frustrating, shamanistic month later, I resumed and wrote the rest of the book. I've stopped temporarily with the Conshy Apps, because I know what I want to crown the new manuscript: a run of poems about blood, family, and Conshohocken itself, analogous (if on a different thematic level) to the run of poems which begins "Cheltenham." Writing is my yoga, and I'm not ready to empty myself yet; and the eerieness which hangs in the air reminds me of 11/09. Say hello to "visionary deadness" again; even as what's creeping in is so fulsome a sense of deadness about '14 America that only a serious shaman could deliver the visionary goods in reaction. We'll see.

Dazzling orgies with famous courtesans

I've come to a few generalized conclusions about my recent writings. The New Apps seem to me to be about on the level of When You Bit..., but lack the sublimity/urgency of the '09/'10 ones. They're casual. I may or may not continue with that mss. There's a vacuum operative now around English literature, and I've stepped right into it. But I like writing too much to quit. And I'll have some new adventures to write about soon.