Aquileo | P.F.S. Post

Jeremy Tenenbaum (Manayunk, Philadelphia): "Portrait of Abby Heller-Burnham"

Post-Feminist Poetics

An inquiry into post-feminist poetics on Jeffrey Side's blog.

An inquiry into an elite post-feminist on Ink Pantry. And on mp3.

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Live in Brooklyn on PennSound (March 30, 2007):

Pigs and Planes
Disappear
Solipsist
Hell In
Becky Grace (for Becky Hilliker)
Clean
Red Life

Creep
Live in Brooklyn (extended reading)

Also from PennSound: Personal Mythologies II (September 20, 2003)

Coca-Cola Dream
Proust and Love
Hamlet and the Last Drop
Alexandra Grilikhes and Pound

Personal Mythologies II (selected reading)

Also from PennSound: This Charming Lab (March 27, 2004)

Stoning the Devil
Dominique
Ode On Jazz (2)

To March
This Charming Lab (selected reading)

Live at the Writers House (WXPN) (April 5, 2004)

Ode On Jazz (1)
To Bruce Nauman
Icarus In New York
Episode 46: Fieled

Acid Dropping EP

A keepsake of a time and a place, and of possibilities.

Acid Dropping EP is:

I. A Clangorous Din— Speck

II. Stone the Devil— Speck

III. Viaje entre las luces— Vince El Mejor

IV. Driving Home— MalreDeszik

V. Hipsters— Falki Hoz

VI. Feel (I saw) remix— Zenboy1955

Various Positions:

On the Soundclick Jazz Overall chart, A Clangorous Din reached #15, Stone the Devil #12, Viaje entre las luces #18, and Driving Home #29.

On the Soundclick Electronic Overall chart, Hipsters, a.k.a. Ode On Jazz (3, with Falki Hoz), reached #20. Feel (I saw) remix reached #8, making it a national hit.

Featured on Things You Heard When You Were Dead (shane p).

All tracks feature spoken word by Adam Fieled, from (respectively) Opera Bufa, This Charming Lab, When You Bit..., Ode On Jazz, and Curiosities (Feel).

From Funtime Records, and Jamendo.

Produced/engineered by CC Mixter, respective artists, Eris Temple, and the Kelly Writers House.

Wordsworth @ McDonald's (2005)

With the advent of the Information Superhighway, cell-phones, and other Digital Now-signifiers, we have an entered an era in which all reality is virtual. Poets who give serious thought to the why of their craft are faced with a dilemma: how to create poems in the Wordsworthian manner (i.e. real language of people) when technology has outmoded the Romantic model that still dictates so much serious poetry. Language poetry schematized a new model—oblique, skewered, post-modern. This model was a useful innovation that has, in roughly thirty years time, grown stale and somewhat irrelevant. Poets, and what’s left of their audience, still want the Wordsworthian model to hold. They want feeling to be relevant, and language to enact a mimesis of interior (real) processes. The problem is, that if we acknowledge a central virtual quality to modern life, real language may be an impossibility.

So, we can’t depend completely on Wordsworth anymore. For the creation of virtual poetry, it will be necessary for the poet to internalize things ordinarily seen as epitomizing crassness and “low” reality—like McDonald’s. As one sits in McDonald’s circa 2005, it becomes clear that agile minds are working to keep the corporate axles greased—minds from which it is possible to learn. Hanging in the window, a large picture advertising chicken strips; a young African-American male dangling one in front of parted lips, beaming; inscribed on the blank space above his head, a motto: “I’m lovin’ it”. This is obviously rhetorical, in that the “I” here is general and universalized. “I” is all of us, in the contented bliss of a chicken-strip meal. So, McDonald’s is subtle enough to posit an “I” that really means “you.” How many poets left in America can say the same? How many poets are so subtle, so engaged, so virtual that their “I’s” resonate as “yous”? Poets want a perpetual striking of Wordsworth’s bell; they still believe in “real language” (even Language poets inherently must believe before they deconstruct); their “I’s” stay isolate, separate, derelict. Let’s set up a small chart and enumerate exactly the binary being portrayed here:

Wordsworth (real language/ rmen): gender-specific, un-PC (language/men) static/abstract definitely serious-intentioned

McDonald’s (I’m lovin’ it): gender-neutral, PC (I) “I” In medias res moderately serious

Immediately it becomes apparent that the McDonald’s ad execs are, on some level, more linguistically sharp than us, the poets. Their motto is PC, active, and moderately serious, where Wordsworth is sexist, static, and excessively serious. What I’m calling for is a poetics equal parts Wordsworth and McDonald’s. Post-modernists would resolve this binary tension by making a mockery of it (especially the Wordsworth half), in an attempt to reinforce an ethos of “virtuality” or “nothing real.” Though reality has grown to be (arguably) virtual, I am looking for an earnest attempt to implement both sides of this binary, the Wordsworth and the McDonald’s, the “I” that’s “I” and the “I” that’s “you,” the static and the active, definite and moderate seriousness. This does not preclude irony and slant; rather, they become a tool to express underlying profundities. What’s needed to achieve balance is Negative Rhetopoeiac Capability. That is, a poem must attempt to straddle the Wordsworth/McDonald’s binary without irritably grasping after rhetorical reason, or making a mockery of either side. This ensures a poetics both actively virtual and substantially real.

Some of these Frank O’Hara bits are illustrative of successful work in this vein:

I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with
her face on it.
Leroi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12
times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop
a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible
disease but we don’t give her one we
don’t like terrible diseases.

O’Hara’s conversational diction fulfills Wordsworth binary-end, even as his affirmative, ebullient voice veers into “I’m lovin’ it” territory (in medias res, active, performative). This is “serious ephemeral” poetry, using Pop Culture references as quotidian signifiers that nevertheless have substantial internal (“felt”) relevance. O’Hara, though he skirts post-modern (or “Pop”) territory, does not make a mockery of anything—he is kidding, but he isn’t, he is at McDonald’s reading Wordsworth, he is where we want to be, on the edge of a new Mannerism.

O’Hara’s oeuvre as a whole is useful, because O’Hara has a key “Wordsworth McDonald’s” quality that most serious poets lack—charm. His poems, in their moderately serious/actively engaging tenor, are charming. Why wouldn’t Wordsworth at McDonald’s be charming? Can you imagine the Bard of Tintern Abbey reckoning a “Solitary Milkshake,” finding himself overwhelmed by a spontaneously felt Big Mac? O’Hara’s charm comes from unexpected juxtapositions, charged with feeling. He is, in this sense, a good Wordsworthian—but he lives in the present moment, always. Dualism is manifested as whim. Modern signifiers are internalized, processed, felt. So, McDonald’s has led us from Wordsworth to Frank O’Hara, who was virtual before virtual became real. He instinctively navigated a Mannerist-space that has yet to be pursued by a substantial number of serious poets (who perhaps mistrust his merely moderate seriousness). Yet, poets who lean and cling to Wordsworthian “reality” can often be heard complaining about lack of interest. Poets who want to achieve something real in this day and age really have no choice but to get Mannerist. Mannerism is differentiated from Pop (and the post-modern ethos that followed in its’ wake) in this way—Pop is a Campbell’s Soup can, Mannerism is a Campbell’s Soup can held by Michelangelo’s David. Mannerism includes Formal Rigor, depth, gravitas (Wordsworth virtues) along with spontaneous, active, Pop-based signifiers and imagery (McDonald’s). A willful jumble of high and low.

Claiming an essential virtuality to modern life needs some justification. What I mean to say is that image/ technology-saturation has become so rampant in Western society that even those of us who’d like to lead pure, uncluttered, Wordsworth-style existences have cell-phones, use the Internet, watch TV and movies, etc. Cell-phone communication seems particularly distressing, substituting expedience for intimacy (transpiring as it does while we are “multi-tasking”), breaking down boundaries (anyone with our number can reach us anytime, so long as we keep our phones on), often poisoning our relationship to the Now by taking us out of the present moment. So, imagine—one is at a dinner party, adjourned to the living room to watch (if we are lucky) something by Cocteau or Godard. Our cell-phone rings; we are expecting an important (perhaps career-related) call; we answer. We are living in three realms—dinner party, Cocteau, cell-phone—at once. These situations have become familiar and common to most of us. They happen all the time, and they (for me at least) have added up to a feeling of alienation from the essential presence of the Now. This is especially pertinent for city-dwellers. The unreality/virtual component goes way up, it’s difficult to feel solid with a flux not only in the outside world but in one’s hand-bag and one’s computer. When I speak of an encroachingly preponderant virtual world, that is what I mean. Disengagement from singularly focused consciousness.

Poets must address this situation precisely. When Wordsworth, in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, spoke of “gross stimulants” contaminating mass aesthetic judgment, could he even have fathomed our current level of emotional dispossession and image-centered “savage torpor”? I’m all for a poetry that confronts this head-on by using some of it! The architect Robert Venturi says, “Viva Mannerism that richly acknowledges ambiguity and inconsistency in a complex and contradictory time.” Maybe we could go so far as to call O’Hara a “Mannerist”—his exaggerated reactions and humor, his implicit ethos of “mess is more.” McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it” also has the essential Mannerist hyperbolizing spirit. Wordsworth, the sober, steady philosophe, was obviously no Mannerist—but why not keep some of his level-headed piety regarding art’s pleasure-giving, insight-shedding mission, his emotion-cherishing mind?

To me, it is a question of letting in. Don’t write off McDonald’s for its’ Mannerist modernity or Wordsworth for his Romantic self-absorption—rather, let them both in equally, so that what we produce is contemporary and durable, Mannerist and tradition-preserving, face-to-face intimate and cell-phone expedient. O’Hara was, as far as I can tell, adequately a master at absorbing modernity-signifiers in such a way that he represented them without condescension, and with a loving eye. This has obvious ties to Warhol, Pop-art in general, Rauschenberg’s Combine-paintings, etc. Mannerism, however, has grounding in tradition that Pop lacks. Pop did away with the past in embracing glossy surfaces; Mannerism wants the glossy surface and the earthy depth. It is an impossibly ambitious stratagem for a new urban poetics—but why not?

Wordsworth @ McDonald's originally appeared in Jacket 28

Post-Feminist Poetics II: Becky Hilliker and Yeats (Ephemera: Beginning the Work)

Connecting Ephemera with anything after Modernism (but before what I call Neo-Romanticism) is a strain. The chiasmus between Ephemera and the cinema moves the piece hesitantly, delicately towards post-modernity. But the deep-seated pathos, elegiac tone, and straightforward, linear narrativity of Ephemera (linear narrativity not precluding innovation on other formal and thematic levels) all chafe against the sardonic, ironic, corrosive, and yet ultimately heartless heart of post-modernity. Indeed, putting Ephemera on the hot-seat next to ordained post-modern products is a pointless exercise. With The Prelude and The Waste Land there is a point; by The Emperor of Ice Cream (as illustrative), there is none. Not to mention other American junk-heaps like Black Mountain and San Francisco Renaissance. Let’s skip, if we shall, to the Aughts in America, and the beginning of more action (live action) more germane. I have, in a manner of speaking, affixed to the many female artists of the Aughts (American stripe) to develop a new post-feministic mold or prototype they all happen to fit. There she stands before us, if you will: the Creatrix. As I have adumbrated the Creatrix-as-construct, and the entire formulation as a subset of Neo-Romanticism, the Creatrix feeds, as post-modernity did not (neither do multi-culturalism and academic feminism), on narratives of form and passion, delivered from stances of settled self-sufficiency. Grandstanding, proselytizing, or playing to a perceived crowd is thus eschewed. Narratives connotate stories represented in a discernible way. Form and passion remain self-explanatory. An interesting narrative, as in Ephemera, is then accredited with a sense of innovation. Forms rendered interestingly, also innovation. Entropy into incomprehensibility, nothing. Formless forays into the obviously anti-aesthetic, also nothing.

So, about this live action I have been promising. The locale happens, interestingly, to be New England, and the name of the writer is Rebecca Hilliker. Let’s take a look at Catch, and discern if we might how conventional textual tactics can be made to serve innovative ends:

The wind turns the water into an animal
and the boat rides the back of swells,
bucking wetly.
My legs absorb the push and pull,
thinking only of the fish,
sleek and dripping on the line,
neon green parachute ballooning
from its mouth.

I arch my back
and the rod dives.
The fish lifts, slimy as an egg,
spinning like a ballerina
on a silver thread,
its marble eye mute,
fixed on white.

How many times
did you find this world,
blinded, terrified?
There are hands on you
and pliers in your mouth,
metallic, blood-washed.
How many times have you waited
for the water
while everything lurches around you,
brilliant white, like the inside
of a hospital, like the underbelly
of a dream, gasping
to break the surface
toward that cold & sudden light?

Like Ephemera, physiological tension or tautness makes the poem serve a visceral end of magnetism, fascination. It might also be said that magnetism and fascination in text are impossible without narrative to hook potentially engaged consciousness. This can be done with fulsome narrative, or what Roland Barthes refers to as bits of narrative; but the narrative sector must be filled in somehow. Why Catch creates an interesting chiasmus with Ephemera, is that in Ephemera, the sense of a tense, tautened physiology plays against a formal conceit: free-verse used to create aesthetic effects usually created by end-rhymes. In Catch, the tense, tautened physiology plays against an origin-seeking phenomenological fantasy, wherein the protagonist transubstantiates herself into animal form. A visual, rather than an aural, change. In Ephemera, an elegiac effect is created by two lovers parting ways, who stay discrete, do not meld. In Catch, a sense of disorientation or dementia is created (cinematic also, as in The Fly) by a lack of cognitive discretion. The protagonist has a sense of identification that brings the poem to an intense, incandescent, partially horrific crescendo. Ephemera remain genteel; Catch does not. The sense of live action that they share, shot by shot, succession by succession, connects both pieces to a textual continuum what brings texts to the brink of the sublime, when the sublime (as in Schopenhauer) is imposing, overwhelming, either gently so (Yeats) or luridly (Hilliker).

P.F.S. : The Disfiguring Gaze

Not to be a wag, but stands to reason it's an appropriate time to point out that Mary Evelyn Harju's 2006 portrait of me, done in her co-op studio space in Spring Garden, North Philadelphia, does the nifty trick of fusing my face, as painted by her, with Abby Heller-Burnham's. Is the personal situation behind this contretemps a soap-operatic one? It is. Without being unduly personal, it is enough to say that Mary did not appreciate what happened between Abby and I while she was stuck, outside the Center City scene, in East Falls, with a reprobate far shadier, and nastier, than John and I. The East Falls, mid-Aughts period was not a culturally rich one for Mary. When she rejoined the scene, it was with an eye towards looking at who had done what while she was gone and taking the piss. Rather than Davidean (Michelangelo, Renaissance, not Jacques-Louis David) elegance, I'm comically warped and gauche looking here. No pin-up at all. Instead, from her, what might be called a disfiguring gaze. The disfiguring gaze amounts, from the painter's perspective, to a radical power trip, a revenge fantasy fulfilled. The Other's energy is tamed and muted, if not decimated. The resentment at having missed all the mid-Aughts fun nonetheless plagued Mary H for the rest of her life. But made, disfiguration-wise (not decimation-wise), for one of the more intriguing fuck you-s in American art history.

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Having ascertained what the pertinent cultural evidence is, the conclusion is inescapable— I was Mary Evelyn Harju’s muse. Or: she used me, my physical apparatus, as a site to start from in exploring the issues she found the most interesting. A muse-site. The sense of intimacy with me thusly implies a preference Mary had for warmth or nearness. A purgation of the objective in favor of a warped, sexually charged, polyglot subjectivity. The exploration of the subjective as a labyrinth would’ve been valued by Miss H as a way of building depth (self-contained, self-perpetuated depth) into her visions. Humanism, the Renaissance manifested again, against the arid frigidity of the post-modern art which dominated East Coast gallery spaces during the Aughts.

How I react to being a muse, or, to not belabor the intimacy involved in this instance, a Muse— no sense of drollery, but a sense of bemusement nonetheless, that I relate to my own physique, rather than my brain, as having accomplished something culturally meaningful in the world. Mary and I, indeed, were physical people together, physically involved. The recognition, which includes bemusement, is that Mary Evelyn Harju regarded me as a body first, a brain (a perhaps distant) second. As a nascent writer in the Aughts, with my own set of socio-aesthetic concerns (starting from Symbolism and English Romanticism, but encompassing philosophy, literary theory, including Deconstructionism, as foundational materials in a self-made matrix), it is amusing that Mary needed naught but my body to be delivered into an expressive realm where she had leave to say what she wanted to, to the world and the times she lived in, from 915 Spring Garden on out.

The radical sense of physicality was vertical for Mary here. The Muse Mary Evelyn Harju was looking for, to exalt, mystify, or disfigure, was centered, as the Italians had been, on physical dimensionality. On another level, my emotions cannot not be engaged by the realization of my servitude as Mary’s Muse. It is with a combination of pleasure and pain that I begin to understand the sojourn in her towards flesh-spirit, soul-body unity, through art and sexual intercourse, back and forth. Pain, because staying grounded in physical reality cost Mary the better ride she could’ve had, had she been more attuned to intellect, dissevered from physical presence, and presiding over physical presence as well.

To be the enfranchised Muse as raw meat does put me in a false position— I myself am dissevered, as aesthetic Object, from the kinds of cognitions that see and manifest bright vistas on all sides beyond just Bodies, or my own body, and sexual intercourse. Becoming a major Muse based on raw physical presence is thus only semi-empowerment. Nonetheless, for what Mary Evelyn Harju’s particular sensibility was, which could only take the Bible and the Renaissance together and channel them into revelations of carnality (which could also be seen to ricochet back and reveal the feminine or Woman), I served, at a younger age, as fulsomely as anyone could. Even as the recognition of what was in my brain, my own cognitive capacities, had to be consigned to the shadows, or to the chiaroscuro of half-existence.

P.F.S. : On being painted as David

The solvency of Mary Evelyn Harju's The Fall, from 2008, is about form and formal rigor. It would be easy, just from this piece, to call her a formalist. In Philly, this is a dread categorization— Manhattan has always accused Philadelphia of bland, tepid formalism— but if the Harju piece is charged into being more, placement within proximity to other Aughts Philadelphia products, writing and photographs (a benevolent matrix structure here), transcendentalizes the piece into being something more. The similarity of how I am painted here to Michelangelo's David, the ideal male nude in art, highlights both Mary's twin obsessions, the body and the Renaissance, and the sense of a relationship narrative laid down, also similar to what I do in Equations. The phenomenology, for me, of being painted as David, is about an era in which raw physicality, the primordial physical, was both valued and fetishized. I participated, as has been established— threw myself into the Aughts matrix, with all the freshness and naivete of a young adult, not yet seasoned by continual intercourse with the material or cultural world. My version of David is thus one of original innocence. Adam, if you will, before the Fall. The narrative of the painting is specifically about innocence transformed into experience. Eden, or the Edenic. The piece freezes before I make my choice— to bite from the apple or not— and thus destabilizes that the outcome must be a predictable one. On another level, this is my ascendent moment as a pin-up— full frontal nudity establishes that— and, as a classicized version of a pin-up, the painting is meant to be as seductive and provocative as representations of raw flesh can be. The image here is not chaste.

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A few more things to say about The Fall. Axiomatic things. Like, for instance, that Mary Evelyn Harju’s representation of me as David is just that, and precisely that. The similarity is there, and unmistakable. Mary’s fascination with the Renaissance is already well-documented. As is her sense of erotic fascination with ideal male nudes. Also notable that who I am in The Fall, as someone being represented, is someone true to life. I really am 5’9, slightly over 5’9, actually, with a pronounced tendency to lankiness. I’m not secretly 5’6, and chunky. Or 5’8 and a half. Those who might see me will not be surprised. These tokens of complete aesthetic legitimacy have to be established, in a country where carnival-rules have made show biz standards the norm. The Fall has a number of ways of being for real that are striking ones. No show biz.

The other thing I wanted to discuss is more interesting. The Fall was modeled for and painted in a co-op studio in the Spring Garden section of North Philadelphia (915 Spring Garden) in 2007-2008. On a narrative level, the painting suggests Mary and I in the garden of Eden, and locates a portion of its narrative in the Bible. Mary coming out of a Christian Right family is significant, as is the outre Aughts-Philly peccadillo of her Renaissance obsession and eroticism. The sense of Philadelphia as an Eden, or as Edenic, is an intriguing one. If there is one facet of Philadelphia as a city which establishes that it can manifest as an Eden, or as Edenic, it is the sublime nature of Philadelphia’s architecture. What a city is, primordially, is a collection of buildings. Because Philadelphia, from City Hall on out, was constructed, at its best, of buildings meant to endure over decades and centuries, and to fulfill rigorous aesthetic criteria, it creates a physiology, in Philadelphia, of levitation, transcendentalism over the mundane, and of an atmosphere in which history moves forward, lives and breathes. Because Philadelphia is built, at its best, of living, breathing history, it offers a sense of shelter and amnesty to those who wish to pursue living, breathing history itself. Thus, it could be an Eden, or Edenic, for those of us in the Aughts, who wished to create to do something other than degrade, or reenact show biz. Philadelphia, in short, is built past swinishness. It’s a real city, by world standards. The Fall could not have been painted, I would tend to say, anywhere else, nor could David manifest as David, or Mary and I as Mary and I. Even the inbuilt sense of doubleness in The Fall falls into place with the idea of history which subsists as history, but also lives and breathes. Is, thus, double. And tolerates the phenomenology of doubleness.

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Acutely worked into both the surface and the depths of The Fall is a semi-obvious contradiction— to the eye of the painter, I can be both Adam Fieled and Michelangelo’s David. The work of art is a conduit to a color-form reality in which a frozen moment allows this apotheosis into doubleness. Yet hewn into The Fall is the troubled and troubling narrative of a relationship gone wrong. This narrative itself is skewered and doubled by Biblical intimations. Mary Evelyn Harju was, in fact, raised on the Bible. So I, as a figure in the painting, split into a triumvirate: Biblical Adam, Adam Fieled, and David. If you look closely into the depths of The Fall as a work of art, the emotional heart and soul of the painting is not the Biblical or Renaissance resonances. The felt core of what is being expressed is about the vicissitudes of my relationship with Mary. The creation of levels in the painting is important— as high art is supposed to do, it classicizes and historicizes what in itself is unimaginative, overly familiar material. Yet beyond the sense of levels to be engaged, the most central and centralized level is a genuine human relationship— a marriage—gone asunder. Mary and I were never legally married. We didn’t need to be. We were married in blood and in art. The terrible conflict in Mary— what is forcing her to stumble in the painting— is a complex congeries of material and psychological realities which made it that, in the Aughts, Mary could paint only intermittently. Ferocity and delicacy were oddly mixed in her.

Remember: Mary and Abby were plugged into the mid-range at PAFA. As usual, an academic context was not prepared to handle to emergence of something profoundly new. But the criss-cross of influences built into The Fall— Bible-Renaissance-Aughts Philadelphia— are a soul’s potential journey into a world never felt or experienced before. Inappropriate, I feel, to speak too much of what I went through with Mary then. I’ve done that abundantly elsewhere. Back to the main, where David fits in is its own criss-cross, for Mary, into the issue of perpetual temptation, and potential damnation. David tangibly manifests for her, as a male ideal, her own potential sense of physical, consummated deliverance. David, for her, is about lust. Mary was not a delicate woman about fulfilling her lust. She was libido-empowered by a Manifest Destiny attitude attendant on the realization of Renaissance ideals, and notions of the body. The Humanistic, at its extreme of expressiveness. Courageous, also, given her background. The Fall, is, in fact, a courageous work of art. Classicizing and historicizing the personal, and indeed, as boldly personal as any feminist could wish or hope for. The David level, about lust, melds back into being Adam Fieled, and us being co-joined as partners. Returns, in a loop, to the beginning, and to the singular. Other eyes will see how it moves in other ways. But the points of origin, I prophesy, will remain roughly the same, where The Fall is concerned. They are, or will be seen to have been, sturdy ones.