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, Mary, 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 Evelyn 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/brutality 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 flimsily 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. Right, Jayne? 

Hobby-Horses in Conshohocken/Manayunk

The morning writing session produced these. As winter has debuted early this year, some of the early morning vistas from Fayette Street are very pretty. Although for a burb, Conshy leans towards the concrete-ish. Jeremy's Manayunk is even better...

Winter Wonderland

Took a long walk in the snow this morning. Thought of the photographer...what's his name..."Joy Before the Object"...Albert Renger Patzsch. Snow on Ply-Mar looks good. As I spent the morning writing, I noticed that I seem to be channeling harsh frequencies. Sign o' the times, peeps.

Saturday, Plymouth-Whitemarsh

Wrote these at the Conshy Starbucks, listening to the X-Mas music they were playing and also watching the Main Line dance down the proverbial aisle.

Outbound Cafe: Outbound Apparition Poems

I spent the morning (a rainy one in Philly) writing these at the Outbound Cafe, here pictured, adjacent to the Conshy Septa station. The Outbound is quirky: they only play 70s music, and you haven't lived until you've attempted to write Apparition Poems to the sound of "Crocodile Rock" and "I'll Be Around."

New Apparition Poems

I'm happy to say that I'm continuing again with the composition of Apparition Poems. Hopefully, the epic I leave behind when I die will be Homeric in scope.

Writing the Cheltenham Elegies

When I wrote the Cheltenham poetry sequence in the fall of '11, I was still living at 23rd and Arch. But the 'burbs had begun to close in: I started writing the series because I discovered, at a relative's house in Conshy, my high school '94 yearbook, and it took me on a very strange, eerie voyage.

Blogger Gauntlets

I started using Blogger seriously in 2006. In 2012, formatting rules changed and it has taken me a year to catch up. It's been a year of rampant embeds. Now, things have come full circle into total fertility again.

Volo Coffeehouse: The Posit Trilogy: summer '13

One of my discoveries this past summer was Volo Coffeehouse, on Main Street in Manayunk, Philadelphia. I wound up writing Deposit and Re-Posit, which form The Posit Trilogy, with the original '07 Posit, mostly there. It's another ambient locale.

P.S. A return to Volo ten years later (2023) resulted in Volo: A Chapbook, or Posit Part 4. 

Otoliths Equations: September 2010

The Otoliths Equations went up in September 2010. By then, I was into teaching English 902, a syllabus I designed myself. The centerpiece was Zadie Smith's White Teeth, with Donald Barthelme and Anne Sexton on the side. Shown here is Anderson Building; I actually taught the course in Gladfelter Hall.

More Equations/Wagon Train Deli

Some of the Equations came out in Peter Philpott's Great Works in late '10. Also, I was building up support for the book using Red Room. The Red Room pages for 54, 48, and 10 have been revamped/improved this year. Wagon Train, here shown, between 21st and 22nd on Race Street in Logan Square, was where I usually picked up my morning coffee from late '99 to '12. Thanks John!!

More '10: Roots of Equations

Equations, the first draft of which was released as a print book in '11, was written co-terminously with Mother Earth in '10. If Equations has been misunderstood, it's because readers don't realize I was largely writing from life. The encounters in the book are not all bluffs or braggadocio. As of '09, slightly earlier, they opened the Arch Street Market on the corner of 22nd and Arch Streets in Logan Square.