Opera Bufa: "Divertimento Giocoso" or Coping with Absence?

   Opera Bufa: “Divertimento Giocoso ” or Coping with Absence?

Time, as a linear construction, tends to herd people into viewing their lives I in terms of memory, present sensual stimulation, and hypothetical premonitions. The English language reflects this structure by allowing us to speak in various verbal tenses, and narratives that employ multiple temporal settings can transport the reader or auditor into emotional states contingent upon a temporal location designated by the author. We construct our perceptions of the world based not only on language, however but also on images that elicit emotional responses and generate new thoughts or ideas. Memory works in a similar way, by cataloguing images corresponding to one’s emotional and physical state in the past, like a physical stamp on one’s brain that tries, then, to translate it into words. Memory, which can take such a strong hold on one’s perception, depends upon loss for its own creation, such that one must lose something in order to look back on in it memory. Poets have long been tackling the problem of forgetting and memory, coping with grief, mourning lost lovers or friends, and feeling out the concept of nostalgia through their work. In Opera Bufa, Adam Fieled builds an entire opera out of prose poems, weaving through it themes of sex, music, literature, and drugs, all of which become threads that attempt to explore this concept. His emotional release onto the page is a highly poetic form reduced to potent and poignant prose that describes losing as a means of artistic creation.

Throughout Fieled’s opera, he remembers past lovers and the loss of physical objects, but he continually highlights the arbitrariness of the “what” that is gone, profiting from a focus on the expression engendered by absence. Afterall, the first line of his poetic musical score reads, “Losing is the lugubriousness of Chopin.” (5) By equating “losing” with an interpretation of Chopin’s style he transforms the concept of absence into the great work of an infamous composer in six words. Fieled underscores the importance of what comes from the emotional reaction caused by deprivation rather than the object or feeling originally lost: “It is simply bereavement that leads us here, to these images.” (16) Loss engenders these “images” that eventually lead to new thought, creating inventive juxtapositions and fresh concepts. He goes even further by drawing attention to his own creative process and his reconfiguration of mourning when he says,

What has been lost thus far? It’s just tar on a highway, bound for ocean. Or, it’s the migratory flight of a carrier pigeon. It is all things that move and breathe, coalesced into sound…It is octaves, repeated in a funhouse mirror until a decibel level is reached that a dog alone may hear. I am the dog that hears, the dog that conducts, the dog that puts bones on the table. (50)

In this citation, the poet refers to himself as the ramasseur of the fragmented pieces created by loss. He “conducts” the broken pieces into poetry to be put onto the table for the public to digest.

Furthermore, Fieled directly mentions memory, saying that it is “as sweet as reality” (59) and then relates the two of these to dreams. This statement disregards any difference between the past and the present in terms of experience and one’s emotional state. His comparison to dreams, then, links them all together through their capacity to provoke strong emotional experiences and vivid imagery. However, he separates the dream world from the others by saying, “I have learned to what extent dreams are real. They may not be solid as a cast-iron pot, but they are enough.” (59) But enough for what exactly? Here Fieled suggests that dreams suffice as inspiration for artistic expression. A few, short lines after, he sums up this theory of creation in stating, “It is the hour of feeling, when singing must cease.” (59) Here, “the hour of feeling” refers to the present, profiting from the woman he finds himself next to in order to experience the moment as the present. However, as he states himself, these privileged instances of living in the present moment exclude the possibility of creative release; during these moments, “singing must cease.” In one of his other poems in which he references the power of imagination, he says, “I know that I had to dream an opera to really sing. I know I had to dream singing to really write.” (54) The poet’s creativity cultivated in this dream world derives directly from the concept of losing control. Once his subconscious eliminates all barriers constructed by reason or rationality, Fieled really starts to sing.

Opera Bufa bulges at the seams with drug references to describe an elimination of control. Cocaine and mescaline dispossess users of their governance over their own visual faculties, causing hallucinations and amplifying all external stimuli. This state of being induced by drugs parallels the dream state that Fieled exploits for tapping into new creativity. Drugs, however, grant extended access to this alternative existence in which one’s subconscious yields to consciousness, whereas the dreamer forgoes all control involuntarily. Fieled references the prevalent drug culture of the psychedelic rock scene in San Francisco during the 1960’s and 70’s to infuse his poetry with this theme: “stay where shadows press themselves in upon you. Stay with the purple riders and their sage buttons.” (16) This is the first drug allusion of Opera Bufa, and boldly opens the doors for others to follow. His mention of “purple riders” adorned with “sage buttons” points directly to the band New Riders of the Purple Sage, a country rock band that emerged from this drug and music culture of California in 1969. The term “purple riders” describes users of a mildly hallucinogenic aromatic herb found in Southern California commonly used in Native American ceremonies. Though Fieled makes this insinuation early on in his work, he picks up the thread again towards the end when Maria Callas says to him, “We are all purple riders” as she slowly exhales a ribbon of smoke. Though the author also mentions the use of cocaine, this theme of hallucinogenic drugs is more tightly weaved into his story as he openly associates it with Maria Callas, one of the narrator’s inspirations, his former lover, and the woman who performs his Opera Bufa.

In addition, the poet dissolves boundaries signifying binary opposition to destroy conventional associations and meaning. Many images created by Fieled seem cryptic, and the reader must often wrestle the sentence into some sort of submission from which he or she can draw any digestible meaning. For example, he says things such as, “The history of popcorn is a minor third that can be squelched by intense bed-thuds,” (31) or “keep your pug-face for the aesthete tax collecting slobber-heads.” (28) He also tests one’s logic by using such hypothetical reasoning as, “If you were a cup of finished ice cream, I’d be a brown-eyed moon-goddess.” (11) These lines disorient the reader and also reflect on Fieled’s own state of mind during the creation process. In describing his own style, Fieled says, “As for fluorescence, those crayons were always my favorites anyway. If the color is off, it’s because my set collapsed, if not into nullity, then into plurality.” (54) He tears down the blatant contrasts separating nullity from plurality and life from death to create a space in between, seemingly void of sense and control, from which poetry and song spring forth in abundance. He says that “song cannot be spared when life and death adhere,” (56) and it is within this grey space that Fieled writes. Inside this space, in which everything seems arbitrary and undeterminable, people create new connections between words and images, create new meaning, and better understand themselves.

In losing control and sacrificing reason, Fieled actually gains control over his own creative style and the structure of his work. The opening sentence in which he mentions Chopin establishes the poet’s theme and perspective that he will tease out during the fifty-nine poems to follow. He relies heavily on the concept of absence and its multiple contributions to the creative process in the first quarter of his opera before he enters into other themes. In his first poem, Fieled says,

What’s lost might be a sea shell or a tea cup or the bloody scalp of an Indian; it hardly matters. When you are lost, the heart recedes from exterior currents, too much in sync with itself, its groove vicissitudes. Each encounter, rather than revealing new rhythms, is experienced as a clangorous din, a pounding…to push the heart deeper and deeper into pitiless darkness…We squirm within ourselves to the sound of the Devil’s opera bufa. (5)

He disregards what sends him into this “pitiless darkness” to focus on the experience he lives once there. Fieled plants the seed of an idea that should slowly blossom in the reader’s mind through their experience with his work and returns to the original concept in his final poems. Eight poems from the end, he begins an “inventory” of what is lost, of what remains, and of what has been gained. A few poems before that, he says, “What has been lost thus far? It’s just tar on a highway, bound for ocean,” (50) lines that provide deeper reflection upon an idea that was similarly stated in the first lines of his work. In using this structure, Fieled has created a strong thematic foundation that circles back on itself, and he fills the middle with layers of relevant ideas, juxtaposed colors and images, and a stylized imagery presented in a simple, yet very rich and highly poetic style.

Stacy Blair, Loyola University Chicago, 2008

Karen Volkman's Spar

Karen Volkman's Spar came out in 2002; and can, possibly, serve as a "gateway text" into a world in which the High-Mod ethos becomes contemporaneous and relevant (Neo) again. Broadly speaking, it is a book of lyrical love poems, that straddles several genres and sub-genres: prose poems, sonnets, projective verse, poems in couplets are all assayed. What feels important to me about Volkman's book is that there is a heightened quality to the language, a fineness, that is exquisitely wrought and that is sustained for the duration of the book. It creates tension and dynamism in an arena (love poetry) where laziness and calculated redundancy are the rules. Here we see Volkman emerge with a bit of Gertrude Stein-like poesy:

What, I said, noise, I said, is you, are you, all? Yes scream yes shriek yes creel yes bawl. Yes hum, clink, boom, chink, slap, scrape, wail. But is, I said, noise, I said, something to nothing, is noise flight to fall? Is blue noise to black, or scorch to sow? Atom to vacuum, or Please to No? Riotous wave to staid shoreline? Cardinal to crow?

Or horizon to axis. Or exile to in. Barbarous tongue to true language. Me to him.

Melopoeia here is used instrumentally to serve an affective aim: to create a sense of the possible distance, possibly unbridgeable, between two people. In post-modern poetry, this language would be rendered in such a way as to suggest a sort of self-sufficient quality; it would be presented as a linguistic thing-in-itself. I like the multi-dimensionality that Volkman creates with language that can be taken on two levels: as a thing-in-itself (a la, also, Tender Buttons), or as something metaphoric, illustrative of a broken-down affective bond. It is this multi-dimensionality that could, possibly, be a hallmark of Neo-Mod, just as it is a hallmark of the original Mods: Stein, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stevens and the rest of the High-Mod crew (though it has been presented to me that Williams is not "really" a High-Mod, an anti-designation I am still wary about).

Part of the charm of Volkman's construct involves a formalist impulse. I would think that Neo-Mod would involve a certain degree of formalism, as all movements do; a "movement" in art, after all, is nothing more and nothing less than the projected and actual creation of new forms. Volkman uses an older form, the sonnet, but bends its contours to her own specifications. This is called Winter Abstract:

Call me no one, candle abandoned.
From black lots, black columns, dimensions,
scattering wind. It's been a long time here,
the reflected essences of backyards,
photos freezing in your past. And less. And less.
Wouldn't promise but I swore,
love, adventure,
kept the best of our fractured animus,
when you close the door on your nurture--
cure on ice-- the most protected picture
once radical, now quest. Dear heathen,
your magnet is nomad, do not ask
for more malignant fires, benigner poles.

A case could be made that the lapidary quality of this prosody is regressive, but I disagree. The metric irregularities and both implicit and explicit fractured quality on offer here remind me of H.D., Zukofsky, Niedecker, and other second-wave Mods, who all doted on metric irregularities as a way of adding "edge" and attractive "splinter" to their constructs. "Heathen" is indicative of something highly unusual (in our milieu) about Spar as a whole: the conflation of secular love with religious (albeit sometimes pagan-religious) impulses. This is the kind of territory that H.D. doted on, but that post-modern poetry will not touch. Yet, Volkman's slant is contemporary, while also aiming for, and often achieving, the exquisite.

Wordsworth and Pleasure

After reading William Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads innumerable times, I believe I have spotted an angle which has been scarcely touched before. Wordsworth uses the word pleasure 25-30 times in the preface. The fact that the preface is only twelve(ish) pages long makes this significant. There is also some irony in it; few people think of Wordsworth as a poet of pleasure. That honor usually goes to Mr. John Keats, who emphasizes the body, the non-cognitive (post-cognitive), sensual richness, heavenly prosody, O for a draught of vintage, etc. It turns out that Wordsworth was as intent on "imparting pleasure" as Keats was, but the major difference seems to be this: Wordsworth associated pleasure with thought (specifically, thoughts occurring in a certain associative relation to each other); thinking, in Wordsworth's self-created aesthetic milieu, leads to satisfaction, which inverts Keats' "tease us out of thought" dynamic. He is tracing the primary laws of our nature, and we may gain pleasure through thoughtfully deciphering them. Here he is, cogitating at Tintern Abbey:

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years.

Tracing primary laws is tied here to the figure of Wordsworth himself; and the law has to do, evidently, with using the mind instrumentally as a kind of digital camera, to let images impress themselves on it, so that they might be memorized, stored, and hauled out in due course when the appropriate occasion arises. "The picture of the mind" is more than a cognitive construct, but cognition itself is given pride of place; it is the enabler for pleasure to enter consciousness. How different is Wordsworth's conception of sensation than Keats, whose wonted gestalt sensibility is more present-minded, prosody-sensitive (to Keats, Apollonian), less conservative, and less bound to processes abstracted away from physical reality. Here, Keats visits the cottage of Robert Burns:

My pulse is warm with thine own Barley-bree,
My head is light with pledging a great soul,
My eyes are wandering, and I cannot see,
Fancy is dead and drunken at its goal;
Yet can I stamp my foot upon thy floor,
Yet can I ope thy window-sash to find
The meadow has tramped o'er and o'er-
Yet can I think of thee till thought it blind-
Yet can I gulp a bumper to thy name-
O smile among the shades, for this is fame!

Pleasure comes from unmediated physicality; thought, in Keats' conception of pleasure (and melopoeia), is something in the way, something often futile. Yet, I am unaware that Keats made any special mention of pleasure (beyond its chiasmus, in art, with intensity) in his famous letters. Wordsworth is the Romantic with the overt pleasure principle, and it is quite curious, considering how convoluted his conception of pleasure seems to have been. Somebody could (and probably will) take this in a New Historical direction, and demonstrate why these two established representatives of two generations of British Romanticism had such widely divergent conceptions of pleasure. Notice the essence of the difference; Wordsworth wants to craft pleasure for the reader; Keats actually experiences pleasure first-hand in the poem;  which is then transferred, hopefully, to us, to be absorbed by osmosis, via richly detailed prosody, and (as) a direct experience of Keats' visionary frisson.

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An encounter poem from Chris McCabe's The True History of the Working Class on P.F.S. Post. 

Scantily Clad Press: Revolver, etc.

The e-chap Revolver, by Adam Fieled, from Scantily Clad Press.

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Alain Robbe-Grillet died last year. He was the first and among the most famous of the "New Novelists" produced by France in the second half of the twentieth century. Jealousy is a short novel that some take to be his masterpiece. It was roundly panned when it first came out, but eventually came to be seen more kindly. What's pictured above is a map of the plantation house where the novel takes place. "Taking place," where Robbe-Grillet is concerned, is sort of a misleading phrase; Jealousy winds, folds in upon itself, repeats parts like a piece of music, deliberately doesn't cohere, and leaves us pretty much in the dark, so that non-linearity becomes not only a feature of the text but a distinguishing characteristic. That is what, for me, makes it exciting; Robbe-Grillet uses non-linearity the way Jimi Hendrix used the electric guitar; as a kind of mechanical mistress, a way to create a sense of stasis that is not static, sight that is not vision, affect that has no concrete correlative. A... is the muse of the text (if we can posit that there is a muse for the text), a beautiful woman, the implicit protagonist's wife. He suspects that she is having an affair with Franck, a neighbor who also owns a plantation. All the incredible sexual tension happens in a perpetual ellipse:

The hand with tapering fingers has clenched into a fist on the white cloth. The five widespaced fingers have closed over the palm with such force that they have pulled the cloth with them. The cloth shows five convergent creases, much longer than the fingers which have produced them.

Only the first joint is still visible. On the ring finger gleams a thin ribbon of gold that barely rises above the flesh. Around the hand radiate the creases, looser and looser as they move out from the center, but also wider and wider, finally becoming a uniform white surface on which Franck's brown, muscular hand wearing a large flat ring of the same type comes to rest.

Robbe-Grillet was apparently interested in creating objective prose; interiority, conventional psychology and character development were deemed passe. When Roland Barthes writes about Robbe-Grillet, he emphasizes "sight," the visual dimension of his work, that what we see (visualize) is what we get. However, it is part and parcel of Robbe-Grillet's peculiar magic that by being entirely objective and ocular, he manages to imply (and create by implying) everything else: character, interior detail, psychology, affect. It is in the dynamic tension between a streamlined surface and a convoluted, whirlpool-like depth that Robbe-Grillet achieves solidity. "Reading the surface" allows adequate pleasure, in and of itself; Robbe-Grillet is the most detailed novelist this side of Marcel Proust (though the details are invariably outward and objective); but a reading that does not acknowledge a subterranean level of activity would, I think, be missing part of the point.

Jeffrey Side on Beams, etc.

There is an interesting review of Beams up in Galatea Resurrects #9, turned in by Argotist Online editor Jeffrey Side.

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Lately, I've been feeling pretty fortunate. I had two books come out last year, both in the fall, and, little more than six months later, both of them are being taught. Beams has been used by several students in an undergraduate English course at a conservative college (Wofford, Prof. Jennie Neighbors) in South Carolina. They have taken the thing apart, in a search for what motivates, animates, and designates avant-garde (post-avant) poetry. The students were given a choice of a plethora of texts, and they chose mine. I have befriended one of them on Facebook, and corresponded with the professor, a delightful person with an adventurous spirit as regards literature. Opera Bufa is going to be presented to a class at Loyola in Chicago this summer. One of the things I'll be doing in Chicago in June is speaking to, and reading for, this class. I can only hope that this luck, this sense of my books actually doing something in the world, continues, and give thanks I've been in the right place at the right time.

Also, these things go to show that not all academia is mired in provincialism. This was my second semester teaching, and, though the syllabus was not of my choosing, I tried to be as heterogeneous in the way I presented the material as possible. I taught John Donne alongside my friend Chris Goodrich (specifically, his poems in Ocho #11), Twelfth Night alongside Tom Stoppard, and hit the students with a John Keats chaser after a long day of George Herbert. It is my hope that me and all my friends will continue to transform academia to the point that it is, or can be, genuinely edifying, a realm in which legitimate literary discoveries can be made. Next semester I teach Comp— not much I can do with that— but I am going to try nonetheless.

Ungovernable Press: Rubber Soul, etc

The new Adam Fieled e-chap from Ungovernable Press is Rubber Soul. 

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At a certain, early stage in my poetic development, especially my State College, Nineties years, Arthur Rimbaud was a pivotal influence. Answered Prayers is a testament to that. I had, at one point, entire chunks of A Season in Hell memorized, and would spout them off at readings. Yet, not at Penn, or New England College, or Temple, has Rimbaud been presented to me in an academic setting. Come to think of it, Baudelaire and Verlaine haven't put in an appearance either. What gives? Aren't the Symbolists an interesting crew? Don't they have something substantial to offer? Upon re-reading Season in Hell, after many years, the simple answer is yes. Rimbaud's little manifesto is a fascinating melange of dynamic oppositions, animated by his distinctly adolescent (but compellingly incisive) sensibility: saved/damned, historicized/ahistorical, mad/sane, individual/socially involved. Rimbaud uses oppositions to crack open his own tender psyche like a nutshell. He both exposes the essential frailty of self-schemas and gives us an opportunity to watch him construct an identity-in-text right before our eyes. Construction of identity is really what Rimbaud is on about here:

I inherit from my Gaulish ancestors my whitish-blue eye, my narrow skull, and my lack of skill in fighting. My attire seems to me as barbarous as theirs. But I don't butter my hair.

I loathe all trades. Masters and servants--all--peasants, base.

I am the slave of my baptism.

I am not a prisoner of my reason.

Why is Rimbaud not being taught? My guess is that he is being taught: in France! There is a sort of provincialism endemic to academia which I am only now noticing. Schools tend to stick to the literature of their country, which is a rip-off, but there you are. Nonetheless, it is delightful to me that a text which I haven't read in years still has the power to transport me, especially since most of what I read back then I can't stand now. Our era puts great emphasis on identity construction as an aesthetic issue. The dialectics of the Deconstructionists, especially, would seem to be quite germane to Rimbaud's investigations. He deconstructs himself, and the thrill is in watching him put himself back together again.

P.S. I found a way, in the mid-Twenties, both to reprise and to pay homage to Rimbaud, in the double sonnet Season in Hell: White Candle. Here it is in P.F.S. Post and on PennSound.  

Roland Barthes, from Death of the Author

Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as hitherto was said, the author. The reader is the space on which all quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. Which is why it is derisory to condemn the new writing in the name of a humanism hypocritically turned champion of the reader's rights. Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favor of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give language its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

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Mary Walker Graham and Rosanna Lee on P.F.S. Post. 

P.F.S. Presents Pictures 2 (Timothy Yu)

                                 

                       Steve Halle

                   Andrew Lundwall

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This is Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Gustav Klimt. Art critics have accused Klimt of being merely decorative, but what I like about this image is that it subverts the patriarchal, voyeuristic gaze we often see in pre-Modern representational art, in presenting a Biblical woman, as direct and uncompromisingly bold as Manet's Olympia, challenging and seducing us coterminously. There is, in her gaze, a primordial power, and it's difficult to miss the fact that she's holding the head of Holofernes in both hands. Olympia is brash but unsophisticated; Judith is more multi-layered, and the one small breast revealed through her gossamer gown can come to seem like a radically sexualized equivalent of Mona Lisa's half-smile. You could also make a connection to Shakespeare's Dark Lady; though the position of the painter in relation to Judith is not clear. Judith refutes standard notions of female beauty; she is not voluptuous; yet the coolness of her expression exudes sensuality, knowledge, and power. In short, it would seem that in creating Judith, Klimt turned the tables on himself and his dominant and dominating masculinity; here, it is an empowered woman who rivets his gaze, and his objectification is tinged with awe rather than condescension or aggression. Among other things, an invitation to ekphrasis.

Jeffrey Side: Carrier of the Seed

Carrier of the Seed is a Blazevox e-book by UK poet Jeffrey Side. Those skeptical about the e-book format would do well to peruse it; it is proof positive that e-books are, in fact, both real and legitimate. This is a single long poem; 63 pages long, and its formal characteristics are unique: it features a single column composed of spare, terse lines, going straight down the page. This gives the poem a sleek, lean look, as is customary with Side. Reading the poem is like riding on a high-velocity train; it doesn't get sluggish, and there are no breaks in the continuity of the sustained, brisk rhythm. There is an obvious connection with some aspects of Language Poetry; the primary difference between, say, Barrett Watten's Progress and Carrier is that Carrier does actually tell a story, albeit elliptically. This is a story of love lost: memory associations, forms of consciousness which accrue to it.

What happens is that Side will often break through the fast-moving, but often opaque surface of language-as-language into something like this:

my love I
need you so
much but more
than else I'm
waiting for you

There is a relationship being posited, and the poem's velocity can be taken as a metaphor for the poet's escape, or attempted escape. It is also important to note that specific scenes do get interspersed in the "deluge" format:

as to how
many erections she
caused in a
crowded room who
can say with
signs and signals
from her hips

The title of the poem implies a kind of address to manhood itself, what constitutes being a man-in-the-world. This address to/of manhood is complicated by the relationship scenario that is enacted in the poem:

all day and
night I fight
for light while
you were with
my mistress it
just makes a
fuck of me
as I go
up to the
south of hills

The relationship is ambiguous, manhood (as presented here) is ambiguous, and it all goes by so fast that the poem demands multiple readings. There is also a song-lyric quality to many of the most memorable bits in the poem:

I can't get
you under I
can't be leaving
you not until
I've done everything
I have to

This visceral, heightened formality is one I look for in poetry right now. It's Language poetry, with greater velocity, more affective drama and intensity, a kind of balls-out sangfroid. Yet, the implied presence of music does not preclude an engagement with poetry-as-history:

calling all cars
calling all cars
Keats let me
down too much
you left before
we could be
strangers this is
a trying time

Burns and Milton also put in memorable appearances. Bits of rhyme jazz the thing up as well:

life with fetters
cut from water
pearl you never

The following bit, for me, is the heart of the poem:

night and you
had a pocket
to keep you
out of sight
as you tried
to be so
helpful but maybe
we never existed
separately so nothing
can be sacred
and I cannot
love or hate
and I have
no care for
fate and it
will be chaos
in the end

This is a poem that extends the thematic range of avant-gardism in the English language. It demonstrates the kind of humanistic gravitas which Barrett Watten does not, yet it maintains crispness, pungent sharpness for its duration. I immediately thought, also, of Chris McCabe and Mary Walker Graham, younger poets who are taking Language Poetry and expanding its parameters. If this is, in fact, a kind of movement (what is now being called "post-avant"), Side fits squarely into it.

Mini Q & A: Karen Volkman

Adam Fieled: I’m struck by the manner in which you manage the sonnet form. You manage to balance the formalist’s impulse to craft and the post-modernist’s impulse to abstract. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how this balance was achieved.

Karen Volkman: I'm afraid it's a bit difficult to say how I came to the "balance" —the sonnet project was a very unexpected development in my work, and took me by surprise — continues to, in fact. I can say my touchstones through the writing have been the trinity of Hopkins, Mallarme, and Rilke. (Valery has also been a reference for some of the most recent poems.) I of course deeply revere the great sequences of the Renaissance, but it was reading Mallarme in French and Rilke's sonnets in German that really pushed me to try the form — something about the intense materiality of sound impacting through the foreign words and syntax.

I hope to continue this conversation at some point in the future...

Blazevox: Beams, and more

The new Adam Fieled Blazevox e-book is called Beams.

Beams is divided into four sections: Beams, Apparition Poems, Madame Psychosis, and Virtual Pinball. 

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In Opera Bufa news, Chris McCabe is placing two copies of the book in London's Saison Poetry Library.

Simone Muench has placed several pieces from the book in her Chicago-based web-zine Sharkforum.

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Six new sonnets in Lars Palm's e-journal skicka. 

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An Opera Bufa postscript. It became obvious, in the Teens, that the book had spawned legions of imitations. And imitations. And imitations. And again. Yeats had a thing about dogs, and fleas. I agree with him.

Otoliths: Opera Bufa, etc.

Adam Fieled's first full-length book, now out from Otoliths, is Opera Bufa. 

Opera Bufa is available to be purchased here. 

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This picture of me was taken in Brooklyn in March, where I read at Stain Bar under the aegis of Amy King/Mipoesias.

Mary came with me, and we met Mary Walker Graham and Briana Winter, also pictured, there. And toasted Rothko, Becky Hilliker, and the Nineties.

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Mary took this too, at the Sidewalk Cafe on Avenue A, where I read at P.F.S. Presents in June with Mark Lamoureux and Amy King.

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Rosanna Lee rocks the lobsters on P.F.S. Post. 

Kristy Bowen compresses, likewise. 

P.F.S. Presents pictures (Timothy Yu)

                                  

                          Simone Muench

                                        Adam Fieled

Andrew Lundwall, Adam Fieled, Simone Muench, Steve Halle

                        Kate the Great's

                 Adam Fieled and Kristy Odelius

                                                       

Thanks again to Tim for taking pictures at the Philly Free School Presents reading and sharing them.

Dusie Kollektiv: Posit, etc.

The new Dusie chapbook, electronic and print, by Adam Fieled, is Posit.

Posit is being released as part of the Dusie Kollektiv. 

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I got a nice Dusie chap in the mail yesterday from Jordan Stempleman. His new chap is called Horse Sense. It strikes me as an odd title- horse sense usually implies practicality, an ability to see through blarney and unnecessary complexities to the heart of the matter. The Stempleman poems included here, however, are ornate, complex, and intellectually ambitious. They don't demonstrate horse sense per se, but create a kind of gilded labyrinth for the brain to play around with. I kept thinking of Self-Portrait era John Ashbery. Stempleman may turn out to be a kind of heir apparent to Ashbery; his formal elegance, rich vocabulary, and intricate layering suggest this. The chap is sprinkled with memorable lines- The night to remember is impatiently waiting/ to be left alone (which recalls Ashbery's famous the night, as usual, knew what it was doing), What a difference it is/ to be between the unwritten and the unsaid (this one strikes me as more Eliotic), There is a looseness in tending/ to look back (this could go either way). This particular chap is a pleasure, a reminder that a good chap can be as important as a good book.

Eyeballs

They sent a maid
to clean Jocasta's

chamber, a stout
ex-maenad, still

full of wine. She
happened upon

the two eyeballs
of Oedipus, doused

with blood, beneath
Jocasta's dangling

feet. They were
smooth, tender

as grapes. She
pocketed them.

They became play-
things for her cats.

Perhaps there is
use for everything,

she thought, raising
a glass to her lips;

and if I am a thief,
who will accuse me?

This poem is featured in the Dusie chapbook Posit, as included in the 2007 Kollektiv; and, as of 2017, in the Argotist E-Book The Posit Trilogy. More from Posit in Lars Palm's skicka.  

Theodor Adorno: Lyric Poetry and Society

Theodor Adorno asserted that lyric poetry, which tends to focus on individuals and subjective impressions, can in fact be used as a kind of societal barometer. It isn't what is in the lyric poems, necessarily; it's what is left out. Lyric poetry implicitly implicates an uncaring, mechanized, homogeneous society. Because lyric poetry is traditionally the province of the "epiphanic/Romantic I", and because Language Poetry has the dual aim of robbing this "I" of its perceived hegemony and also enacting an (often Marxist) critique of conspicuously consumptive (American) society, it made me wonder what, in fact, is a more effective method of effecting change: lyric poetry that implicates indirectly, or post-avant poetry that takes, not exactly a direct approach, but a more direct (even when "deconstructive") approach then the conventional lyric takes, in its assault on materiality and societal conventions.

Adorno uses the example of Baudelaire, and the note of despair which runs through his poems. The formal aspects of Baudelaire's poetry were, for Adorno, a way of classicizing his work, separating it from the heavy vulgarian influence of the bourgeoisie. Formality in high art is punkish enough to do that trick. By Adorno's standards, Baudelaire gets tangled, though, because by the time he wrote Paris Spleen he was criticizing bourgeois France pretty directly. His allegories all exposed the cold, hard reality beneath the veneer of charm and lightness which dominated nineteenth-century upper-class France. How about the lyricists of today? This is hard for me to address— if there are any genuine ones, I don't really read them. I do write lyrically, and read poets that do lyrical stuff, like Corso, Larkin, and others, sometimes, but these poets don't seem to be pure lyricists. Many lyric textual personas do, in fact, implicate an uncaring "consumerist" society, sometimes directly, and with darkling hints of levels built into society more sinister than the merely consumerist. These seem to move in a dark, miasmic wilderness, from Wordsworth and the English Romantics on out. It seems that they manifest the sort of syndrome Adorno is referencing.

Goodbye, kari

Apparition Poems in Jacket 31, etc.

I have some new Apparition Poems, from Beams, up in Jacket #31.  

Also in Dusie and Otoliths. Many thanks to the editors.

More new work from Beams in Nth Position, Eratio 7.

Apparitional portrait by Mary Evelyn Harju, 2002. 

Pigs and Planes

I don't believe in poetry.
It's a slant that wavers
around different patches
of sky, or mud chucked
on slats of a sty, or it
could be the pig, or the
plane, farmer or pilot,
pork-chop industrialist, air-
traffic controller. The one
thing it isn't is itself.
To say poetry is poetry
is a rank offence, post-
misdemeanor, sub-felony,
the sort of sin credulous
people pray against. Pigs
you can believe in, & sties.
Planes you can believe in, & skies.
I don't believe in poetry.

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Interview with me, done, via Anny Ballardini, in Lavender Ink. 

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Tammy Armstrong chimes in  from New Brunswick on P.F.S. Post. 

why america is a sham democracy

It's simple: NO FREEDOM WITHOUT HEALTH. If you're not healthy, you can't be free. The fact that millions of Americans get sick, stay sick and die because they have no health insurance makes America a sham democracy. We're the only civilized nation in the world that doesn't offer some kind of coverage for everyone. I'm ashamed of this. If I can find something to do about this, I will. It's a joke and it ain't funny.

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Waxing Hot with Steve Halle on P.F.S. Post.

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For this Philly Free School-affiliated show, Mike Land takes the helm.