Two Last Apps for 2009

#1491

To wake up in frost,
ineffectual sun up in
blue sky bruised gray,
is to huddle into these
words, burrow down in
them until you hit a spot
of warmth, like memories
stuck like bark to roots,
of this or that, of she or
her, if this trope is over-
worn so be it, I’ve had
enough of pretending
this crux isn’t one, so
I’ll lean into it, again—


#1080

If I had Neko Case
for one night, I’d
dip her red hair in
red wine, suck it
dry, bathe
her in
honey,
dive
into what’s
pink and blue,
roll out the red carpet.

If I had Neko Case
for one night, I’d
part the Red Sea
to make her
come, come
pangs,
needles,
she’s
stiff from
ecstasy, I’m
freckle-fucked.

If I had Neko Case
I would never
leave my bed
again; I’d lay,
awake to
music,
voices,
ether,
never doubt
Heaven exists
on Earth, between

throats, notes, legs.

The Perfect Sequence?

Monday was Alex Chilton’s 59th birthday. As such, it seems like an opportune moment to talk about some work I’ve been doing with Sister Lovers. It’s resolutely non-commissioned work, done for my own edification, but nonetheless, a labor of love. Sister Lovers has never, to my knowledge, been definitively sequenced. The version most of us are familiar with is the 1992 Rykodisc CD. There were also a handful of LPs that got released between the initial pressings of Sister Lovers in 1978 and 1992. Modern technology allows us to take audio files and sequence them however we like, as play-lists (in my case, on I-Tunes). I’ve spent some time experimenting with this, and I’ve come up with what I believe is the ideal Sister Lovers sequence. The tinkering wasn’t that severe; four deletions, two tracks juggled; but it makes an enormous difference to how Sister Lovers sounds, and turns something semi-cohesive into a complete, cohesive whole. So, here it is, the Adam Fieled sequence of Sister Lovers:

Kizza Me
Thank You Friends
Big Black Car
Jesus Christ
Femme Fatale
O Dana
Holocaust
Nature Boy
Kangaroo
Stroke It Noel
You Can’t Have Me
Nighttime
Dream Lover
Blue Moon
Take Care

Without wanting to be insistent about it, I’d say that this is as good a sequence for Sister Lovers as any other I’ve seen. There seems to be absolutely no reason for the album to end with anything but Take Care, and Dream Lover and Nature Boy fit seamlessly into the flow of the middle of the album. The subtractions I’ve made may be contentious, but again, please listen to these tracks in this order before you make a judgment. Another, even more fascinating question is this: what about the first two tracks, Kizza Me and Thank You Friends? Do they really fit the mood and the vibe of the rest of the album? It would be possible to make the argument that the Sister Lovers we know and love really begins with Big Black Car, the first song that shows the creepy edges that characterize the rest of the album. I’m on the fence with this. My next task (just for my own edification, as this is), is to make a playlist identical to this, but that takes out the first two tracks, and begins with Big Black Car. That will make it easier for me to ascertain how necessary the first two tracks seem as a constituent part of the album. For now, then, this is my perfect sequence. It would be interesting to know whether others have played around with Sister Lovers this way, and what their findings are.

In poetry news: Jeffrey Side has published the rest of Kelley White’s wonderful Salt Suite series in The Argotist. You can read it here.

P.S. Since having written this, I pursued the idea of listening to Sister Lovers sans the first two tracks, beginning instead with Big Black Car. Even though the first two tracks are significantly less creepy than the rest of the album, I think they work as an essential foil to the creepier tracks that follow. So, for me, the first two tracks remain, but I stand by the four deletions and the two tracks I’ve juggled.

Response to Mairead Byrne: Gendered Subtexts

Mairead Byrne posted an interesting response to my Argotist article on the Buffalo Poetics List. Mairead desires a “candid definition of terms”; in this case that means “hardness” and “softness,” as I used them in the essay, given more concrete significations. Byrne finds that “gender is the obvious subtext” of the essay. I will say this; their may be a certain phallic thrust to the manner in which I addressed my chosen issues in this essay, but I was not consciously aware of gender (as a subtext or anything else) as I was composing it. Byrne brings up an essay by Anne Carson regarding gender and boundaries; in it, Carson discusses the classical connotations of hardness and softness: men=hard=positive, women=soft=negative, and women having the potentiality to undo the positive hardness of men. However, there seems to be a confusion regarding why Byrne would bring Carson into an encounter with my essay; in the essay, I specifically take poetry teachers (who may be of either sex) to task for excessive hardness, while also lamenting the softness of younger poets. The truth is that, in different contexts, both inappropriate hardness and undue softness are chastised. I do not fall into the fallacy of perpetually equating hardness with superiority; by the end of the essay, I attempt to make clear (and this is explicit) that it is a balance of hardness and softness that is most desirable.

If my essay necessitates a “candid definition of terms,” and candid implies something subjective (as it usually does), it will be necessary to give my own definition of softness and hardness (which I do not, in the essay). The first important statement to make is that my own definitions of hardness and softness have little to do with gender. Gender discrepancies that occur in physical athletics, for example, are difficult to deny; but there is an inherent androgyny affixed to the endeavor of being an artist that makes traditional (perhaps classical, though I have not read the Carson essay) attributions hard to sustain. Art requires qualities that mix these classical attributions of hardness and softness: receptivity and force, passivity and activeness, ability to thrust and ability to withstand. “Hardness,” in the essay, is a complex entity that functions on many levels: courage to rebel and courage to create; ability to stand one’s ground and ability to move; initiatives to innovate and initiatives to diverge off beaten paths. “Softness,” for a large portion of the essay, is dealt with in pejorative terms, but I was addressing a specific context (poetry teachers dealing with students) rather than a general one. By the end of the essay, the desirable aspects of softness (that is left un-gendered) come to light (though they are not explicitly stated): giving praise where praise is due, expressing tenderness as well as rage, being intimate as well as disinterested. The basic idea was simple: to tell, not the truth, but my truth, while encouraging others to the best of my abilities. Nevertheless, I am glad Mairead asked for something a bit more rigorous, and I hope this answers the concerns she raised.

Essay in The Argotist: "On the Necessity of Bad Reviews"

Jeffrey Side has published a new essay of mine, On the Necessity of Bad Reviews, in The Argotist.

You can read it here.

To Jeffrey, many thanks.

Apps for Winter

#1649

Oh you guys, you guys are tough.
I came here to write about some
thing, but now that I came, I can’t
come to a decision about what I

came for. What? You said I can’t
do this? You said it’s not possible
because it’s a violation and not a
moving one? It’s true, you guys

are tough. You know I have tried,
at different times, to please you in
little ways, but this one time I had
this student that was giving me head

and she stopped in the middle to tell
me that I had good taste and you had
bad taste, and I’ll admit it, I believed
her. She was your student too, maybe

you’ve seen her around. She’s the one
with the scarves and the jewelry and
the jewels and the courtesy to give the
teachers head who deserve it. Do you?


#1307

She hovers above planet
Earth, making strategies
for safe landings, but not
able to see that she is also
on planet Earth, watched
like a crazed cat, a maze-
rat, or a tied-up mime, I
cannot save someone so
high up or far down, it’s
like a black thread about
to snap, as it strains past
breaking point she reaches
for champagne, to celebrate—
bubbles lunge up to break.


#1341

Secrets whispered behind us
have a cheapness to bind us
to liquors, but may blind us
to possibilities of what deep
secrets are lost in pursuit of
an ultimate drunkenness that
reflects off surfaces like dead
fishes at the bottom of filthy
rivers— what goes up most is
just the imperviousness gained
by walking down streets, tipsy,
which I did as I said this to her,
over the Schuylkill, two fishes.


#1488

liquor store, linoleum
floor, wine she chose 
 was always deep red,
 dark, bitter aftertaste,
 unlike her bare torso,
  which has in it
  all that ever was
  of drunkenness—
to miss someone terribly,
to both still be in love, as
she severs things because
 she thinks she must—
 exquisite torture, it’s
 a different bare torso,
(my own) that’s incarnadine—

Two Books on Issuu!

Didi Menendez has re-released two of my books on Issuu.

Posit was originally released as a chap by Dusie Press in 2007. The Issuu page for this also includes a podcast of me reading the poems from Posit. You can read/listen to Posit here.

Beams was released as an e-book by Blazevox in 2007. It has since been taught at Wofford College in South Carolina. You can have a look and a listen here. There is also an excellent review of the book done by Jeffrey Side on Galatea Resurrects.

Thanks again to Didi, Susana, Geoffrey, and to everyone that reads my books (whether forced to or not)!

Brian Jones: A Degree Of Murder

These clips feature music from the soundtrack of A Degree Of Murder, a 1967 film starring Anita Pallenberg. The music was composed, produced, and arranged by Rolling Stones’ guitarist Brian Jones. The rest of the soundtrack was, unfortunately, never released, but these few brilliant bits attest to Brian’s mastery both of song-craft and of several different instruments. Let’s hope that at some point someone does bother to release to entire soundtrack.

Chaps: Major and Minor

As I’ve sorted through my possessions (I’ve done an apartment purge), I’ve realized something interesting that I’d never noticed before: some of the best poetry writing I’ve seen done in the past few years has been in chapbooks. The Bernstein/DuPlessis course I took a few years back was all about “the major and the minor.” Although there’s some pretentiousness to making these designations, it’s pretty widely accepted in poetry circles that chaps are “minor,” while books are “major.” But I find this hard to reconcile with the fact that my “chap basket” that I keep near my bed is always filled with good stuff, and I enjoy perusing these chaps as much as I do going through the books of poets I love. Chaps are portable, cheap, and perfect for poets who write short, compressed serial poetry. Another advantage of chaps is a certain organic quality they can have, when they’re made by hand. Juliet Cook’s chaps (and the soft-bound journals she publishes) all have a kind of funkiness that books can’t, and the way Juliet packages things make them seem like Dickinsonian “fascicles,” rather than products off a conveyor built: pre-made, pre-processed, delivered with clinical precision and not much feeling. I have a Nick Moudry chap called High Noon that looks like it was tied together with a kind of sewn thread; High Noon is a wonderful little poem, and I can’t imagine it taking any other physical form, as delicate and tiny as the chap is. Some cohesive units are just too small to be books— Brooklyn Copeland’s chaps are a good example of this. Again, there’s preciousness (in the non-pejorative sense of the word) to these chaps that I find irreplaceable, and that I cannot designate as “minor.” Is Red Wheelbarrow minor, or the fascicles themselves?

On the other hand, I will admit to having soured slightly on e-chaps. I like what Andrew Lundwall and Lars Palm have done with their e-chap presses— they are both excellent editors— but generally, I’ve been finding e-chaps unsatisfying. There are genuine credibility issues with e-chaps— enough to make me think twice about publishing another one. Publishing in online journals is different; there’s more a sense of healthy limitation. But e-chaps are difficult, because the brevity of the form, combined with the difficulties in reading sustained things on the Net, can be irritating. I find e-books easier to read, because you can prepare yourself for them. The same applies to lengthy articles in journals like Jacket. The thing about chaps is that their substantiality as tactile products balances their small size and the compressed nature of what they contain. E-chaps are small, compressed, and non-tactile. They are also taken out of the context of a journal format. It’s just so easy for poets to knock out ten or fifteen poems and publish them as an e-chap. Poets tend to use e-chaps to publish their secondary work (though this is not always the case, as with Andrew and Lars’ presses, and many Ungovernable releases, including mine, are more like e-books). Then, “quick fix” folks on the fringes of the poetry world make snap judgments about certain poets based on their e-chaps. This has happened to me, and to others I know. So, to use the dread designations, print chaps to me are “major” while, for the most part, e-chaps are “minor,” though perhaps the advent of the Kindle is changing things around.

More New Apps

#1335

terse as this is, it is
given to us in bits
carelessly shorn
from rocky slopes,
of this I can only
say nothing comes
with things built in,
it’s always sharp edges,
crevices, crags, precipice,
abrupt plunges into “wants,”
what subsists between us
happens in canyons lined
in blue waters where this
slides down to a dense
bottom, I can’t retrieve
you twice in the same
way, it must be terse
because real is terse,
tense because it’s so
frail, pine cones held
in a child’s hand, snapped.


#1330

When the sky brightens slightly
into navy blue, “what’s the use”
says the empty street to parking
lots elevated four stories above.


#1316

Hunters get smitten with their prey,
but to kill is such am amazing rush
who could possibly resist, I’m into
these thoughts because you dazzle
me away from words into your red
pulpy depths, which I resent, but I
can do nothing about, because you
have nails in your cunt and crucifix
in your mouth, when I come I’m a
perfect personal Jesus, but the gash
is all yours, did I mention I love you?

#1313

we can’t stop trying to conceive,
even though our bodies are dead
to each other, and nightly deaths
I took for granted are razors in a
 part of my flesh that
 can never live again—
certain possessions possess us.

New Apps in The Argotist

Several of my new Apparition Poems have just come out in The Argotist, the excellent online UK journal edited by Jeffrey Side. You can read them here.

It is my hope that these poems capture some of the "visionary deadness" I've noticed in Philly. That's certainly what they're designed to do.

Reading: Jason Bredle's Pain Fantasy.

Getting German, Linguistic

For anyone that reads this who might speak German: well-known German linguist and Professor Emeritus Dr. Manfred Bierwisch has used some little interviews I did with Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle in an abstract for a paper to come, entitled Linguistik, Poetic, Aesthetik. The bibliography includes me, and you can have a look at the abstract here. It's something exciting to be included in, and I'm going to see if I can find a way to have it translated into English.

Blazevox!

So much good stuff is being published by Blazevox now that it seems to have, not a kind of monopoly, but a status like Subpop did in rock in the late 80s/early 90s. Subpop was the springboard for both Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana, and under the leadership of Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman became the foremost independent rock record label in America. It also created Seattle as a rock haven for the world (the Pumpkins happened to be Chicago drop-ins). It’s uncomfortable for me to realize that more than half of the good poetry books I read are coming from one publisher, and even more uncomfortable for me to realize that I’ve already published two books (one e-book and one print) with them. Talking about Jordan’s, Amy’s, and Larissa’s books makes me feel small and clannish. I’ve spent my entire adult life rebelling against the clannishness of groups, and here I am, becoming part of one. But, like it or not, I think the emergence of Blazevox as a major force in experimental poetry may be historically significant, both because of the quality of the material Blazevox is publishing, and because the way it is run is almost entirely digital, though it deals in print. If there are levels on which taking this position is self-serving, I apologize. The hegemony of retail outlets for the purchase of poetry books: dead and buried.

On the other hand, not every poetry world is converging around Blazevox, just as many popular music worlds didn’t converge around Subpop. Around 1990, you wouldn’t have heard many people talking about Subpop at the Grammys, nor would you expect to see many Subpop records in big chain stores like Tower Records. Likewise, if academia gives Blazevox respect, it’s grudging respect, and not tinged with the awe that other poetry institutions elicit. Blazevox is not something I can brag to the chair of my committee about, though on some levels a book is a book and Chimes is all to the good. On many levels, I resent the stiff academic prejudices that dictates that some of what I do matters and some of it doesn’t. It’s a system solely based on appearances and status-symbol names (of journals, presses, and prizes), but that’s just how academia is. Because pretty soon I’m going to be looking for serious academic work, I have to play the game in a straightforward fashion. But I, like many of my peers in experimental poetry, have gotten used to maintaining a bifurcated consciousness. So I (like my friends) play the game, without believing in the game’s reality. What’s funny for me is the prospect that in fifty years Blazevox will be legendary, and the American academic system circa ’09 will seem like total rubbish. Remember: if this were, say, 1872, the American academic system would insist on believing that Longfellow and Whittier were big-shots, while Walt Whitman was a parvenu barely worth acknowledging. Some of us who have seen through status-symbol systems won’t get fooled again. And, where experimental poetry in ’09 is concerned, the kids really are alright.

How much place is there in poetry (and art) for hard-headed practicality? Not much, but the place it has is most relevant for those who use art as an instrument to do other things: get a job, get respect, even (sometimes) get laid. Blazevox is a press run for (and by) aesthetes, people who do art for art’s sake, and this is significant. It means that Blazevox books have a kind of purity to them that books from more “establishment” presses do not. I don’t want to valorize Geoffrey and Blazevox completely; I haven’t liked everything I’ve seen from Blazevox; but there’s enough stellar stuff that I think a general acknowledgment must be made. This also isn’t intended to snub all the other independent publishers I’ve worked with (like Dusie and Otoliths); many of them are very good. But there’s an ascendancy vibe around Blazevox now that I’m excited to be a part of, even if it does inadvertently deposit me into a clique. My only wish for Blazevox is that more UK poets latch onto it as a viable place to publish (both books and poems), and that Blazevox will thereby plant the seeds of an enduring international success.