from Argotist Online Poetry (2023)

When I converse with N on the phone, in about my thirteenth year, our heads open up together, and we create an imaginative landscape out of nothing at all. Events around us, our classmates, notorious or boring or uproarious events of the days get used as fodder, parties, dances, and we hoist the whole rig up and sail it into the sky. We dance ourselves around our desire for each other: are we friends, or could we be more? When we broadcast together, other will sit and listen, spellbound. But to the left and to the right, even at thirteen, is the impulse to share our bodies as well as our souls and brains. N is conservative this way. She maintains a deep need to keep physicality light in and around her— she doesn’t play sports, can’t swim, is an excellent dancer but not a dab hand as a walker of city blocks, either. All her thoughts are of transcendentalizing past her own body, which is arrayed around her like marsh to wade through. The problem is a hold she wants to maintain over my emotions. We act, often, like newlyweds, but because she will not submit to me physically in any way, my emotions, unconsciously set at a skeptical angle, cannot cleave to her finally, like a ship docking in at a port. Sexual devotion often starts, I learn later, with the body, the physical mechanism. Our bodies are the primordial fact of who, and what we are. So, we talk on the phone for hours, imaginative leap follows imaginative leap, but imaginative leaps are not a basis for a man’s devotion. Not that I’m aware of this at thirteen. All I know is that our brains are doing something intense together, and I like the feeling, but my soul craves a reality somewhere between us that cuts deeper, from sharper, starker angles, into a sense of achievement, conquest, victory, a permanent sense of marking and being marked. Later, it is Trish who brings all these algorithms together. She knows only too well what I am, and what I want. We imaginatively leap all over the cosmos together, hand in hand or separately, but the climax, the final imposition of the most profound shared imagination into the most profound imaginative leap, is back into our bodies and, when we are good together, out again, out into a re-entry of the cosmos, as a finality.

Vlad Pogorelov: November 2023

No. 28

The dirty whore
Taking a bath
Sounds of water
Smells like
Something is burning
I guess its crack
“What the heck”
Its only crack
The time is passing
Drinking tea
Smoking third cigarette
Waiting,
Turning,
Slowly transforming
Into somebody new
Completely unrecognized
During the passage of time
While the dirty whore
Taking a bath
Smoking crack
Singing songs from
Time to time
Shaving legs

The sounds of water
As an addition
To the picture
To this little kitchen
Where this situation
Of self-mutilation
Is taking place
Cutting oneself open
With a calligraphy pen
Letting the contents free
And suturing up with spaghetti
While the dirty whore
Taking a bath
Smoking crack
Singing songs from
Time to time
Shaving legs

Lifting the new man up
From the chair
Getting a hairdryer ready
So she can dry her hair
Making more tea
Having another cigarette
Laying down on the bed
While the dirty whore
Taking a bath
Smoking crack
Singing songs from
Time to time
Shaving legs

Picking up the book
Photo-poems
All about New York
From a long time ago
Looking at a picture of a child
Trying to imagine him to be a grown-up
While the dirty whore
Taking a bath
Smoking crack
Singing songs from
Time to time
Shaving legs

Making the new man stand up
Walking towards the bathrooom
Slowly opening the door
Silently looking
At the dirty whore
While she is taking a bath
Smoking crack
Singing songs from
Time to time
Shaving legs
And smiling

Poems from the 1997 Repossessed Head chapbook Derelict were written while Vlad Pogorelov was living in Philadelphia, and the poetry editor of Siren’s Silence.

Vlad Pogorelov: January 2024

So I quit my job,
Came back home,
Had two shots of vodka,
A glass of wine,
And the classical music
On the radio
Was just right
For the time being

A cat sat by me
She looked quite happy too
And, though she never quit
Her job of chasing cockroaches
Around the house,
Somehow both of us
Felt very good.

© Vlad Pogorelov 1997

Susan Wallack: November 2023

It's the name of a lipstick I wear
most days, proving
poetry's indomitable, ingrained, like the Namer

herself, wrestling thousands of new
untitled tubes- scarlets,
magentas, blue-reds, browns- but none

a gash, none a wound, no blood,
nothing wilted.
Stumbling cylinder to cylinder,

knowing full well what these balms
mean to a woman
dogging beauty.

Then at night, alone, aged skin
phosphorescent & furrowed
as a moon, she tends garden.

Pruning, shaping, watering
roots she planted in sand,
watering the sand.

originally published in New Zoo Poetry Review Volume 5

Susan Wallack: January 2024

1.
You disappear so beautifully.
Eyes wide, perfectly aligned,

as if you could see, as if
Matisse's joy

might be happiness...the azure/
pumpkin/scarlet fields set

lightly inside his penciled outline.

The main star shines, no glare.
And it's possible that

somewhere less frantic
charged particles

rest before they exit.

2.
But blonde light, like a starlet's
hair, sweeps all things

equally: calamity rests,
fallow in the field.

And the north-bred yearling hawk

looms motionless, like a stuffed
& mounted version of himself.

Watching. Shadowless. Red eyes wide
& perfectly aligned. And then,

when it's time, he just disappears.

originally published in the Minnetonka Review

Andrew Lundwall: November 2023

hey. i'm going all metal dark fingers. since the colour of want speaking. everything hurts. be treated like have affairs laughing hysterically. signs of it's time like chronic between heels. these mysteries. things aren't perfect are inflatable. it doesn't matter i missed you mouth confesses. images creak with strange eyes with strange energy. chronic proportions who love use me. have someplace going midnight like crusades. messed in take a breather. a strange girlfriend is eager. & you have a song is addictive. equals yes. to be crystal with three-fourths it's told. everything worry when the way it means avoid the vertigos. chances are still need the spiritual heartaches. palace of mouth to hers. to hers makes phantoms. finds skin she's in. harbored & how. technicolor fingers. a strange position yes with gin. stained. laughing. she's all like slow down time together. you opened herself. images all insane with want. with a power. give thanks. parted sweet. lips are hurts. are her lips everything wants sin.

tongue-sprawling shadows. funky as sin. is addictive. makes like scattered yes. toxins. disorganized sweet words. planet things non-stop. get eyes. know. we crazy bitter submitted. magic triad. tourism of fantasized edges. raptures. mysteries accumulate. fetishistic refreshments. more vertigo. voice transformation through inflatable static. want me. despair have someplace. moves so noise towards breath. being shards sighs. to occur exposed the spiritual proportion. trances prosthetic. desensitized whatever. loved three-fourths abstraction. are understand instincts. sky creaks with it loaded apprehensive. paralytic leap-frog. chronic between heels. being strange ministry. being unfathomable. beautiful energy bulges. the metal dark is wolves. descending like repercussions.

tone of vertiginous surprise. gave X away. phantom eyes cloudy with gin. stained. fingers. be better guilty palace of presence. static between medusas. U remember anything is blind with moonbeams. where should equals yes. heartaches toy together. direction of finds skin. nakedness of tragic minds played out. X hurled enchantments etc. transmitters of. because. another shadow. like so many X'd wondered. fingers. intimate doses. thoughtoil. people in arms is. instant communion. it's not like that. sitting beside X's opinion. can't sleep knows. not there. fantasized. who love U situation. halfway between what's doing & whims. serves sly look. it's speaking. everything hurts. satellites hover. holy circumstances. klepto circus. latex U's eating. blond teeth made strangers. wobbly severe backdrop. costumes of. of guess what. pyramid green. X pours out look here. vertigo is. open windows of midnight like crusades. in sleepwalker circles. navels of doubt splashing into someplace. call it country. betrothals of U are decadent messed in.

© Andrew Lundwall 2009-2023

Andrew Lundwall: January 2024

ALLURE

transparent mattresses gray clouds
stars of sad reunions
sad centers of nectar
frigid with ground below
the spinal cord of
is rotating hum
is splintering
wooden halo
beneath the weight
taken in installments
anything is moon
wear it
whether pills or
metallic sacrament
saharan depressions
the days' dials pursue
robes flowing behind
profound obsessions
stringed instruments
purpose is problem
she'd kicked her habit
i'll admit
that i was hesitant
infested persistent
a leg up her skirt
is motivation
lurking around
the telephone booth
with its sincerest face on
my legs would not and still
last night
the rosary between her knees
her face from east to west
like an echo between poles
it was emotionally close captioned
it read like telepathy as it
struggled from shoulder to shoulder

GOODNESS

she looked so real
i couldn't bring myself
to hold her muster up
the sky is funeral blue
as anxious earth unrolls
before and behind you
a glued face to a window
is where godess
refuses intervention
a glued face to a window
is a face instead of you
unsteady on glossy feet
the city's recycled son
packing an unheard-of heat
in his tight jeans levi's
two neon virgin marys
flashing in his scrambled eyes
or remember when norfordville we'd went
to do when you'd thrown away important
that day way back in her ageless beauty
the clouds pissed all of this passionate intensity

© Andrew Lundwall 2009

From Argotist Online Poetry (2023)

Audrey, as a tangent to N, took the idea, not of broadcasting gossip but of sharing and disseminating literature, as a fait accompli move to establish romance, drama, suspense, and rich entanglement in her life. Prisoner of a rich background, and with a preacher for a father, she latched onto me as a purveyor of sweets for her, from my books to my looks to a sense of deference she wanted me to sometimes have as a way of demonstrating respect for her roots. The one determinative moment— we stood, with a crowd of poets, outside a bar in Andersonville, Chicago, as a night of festivities ended, and I was either going to pick her up somehow or not— ended in, for me, a practical response of denial. Her apartment was in an obscure neighborhood in Chicago, I was staying in the distant ‘burb Palatine, and was due in Rockford the next afternoon. For Audrey, as she was later candid about, I was resisting something compelling in the universe which required that we spend the night together. She was heartbroken, with her Indiana-bred sense of being cornfed (blonde, voluptuous, clear complexion), and with the conviction she had that anything she wanted could always be hers. Rich equations suffer greatly from senses of entitlement, emanating from the rich, and dousing all that they touch with a glaze of non-recognition, of obliviousness. This was Audrey’s contradiction— give her a text, available to be read at her leisure, incapable of vocalizing need or difference of any kind, and she could rise to the occasion brilliantly. Texts had a way of ejaculating into her brain and heart tissue, in a lovemaking routine (with the right text at the right time) extremely pleasurable for her. As I stood with her outside Moody’s Pub, a flesh and blood entity— needy, morose, possibly surprising or disobedient the wrong way— turned her interest tempered with diffidence. This decided the night for us. Had we been ensconced together for several days, as I had been with Wendy, things might have been different. But when two possible lovers are too transient to each other, the magic spells don’t work, incantations fall flat, and it is learned again that for equations to take on flesh in the world, there is no substitute for real, raw time.

Miscellaneous e-mails: 2005

 From the belly of the beast.

From PICC (A Poet in Center City)

Lena, the Temple student who had read with us more than once, was on the scene quite a bit then. She and John were very tender with each other, and Ricky liked to play up the “double date” angle and bring Heather in on the action. I wasn’t seeing anyone steadily, and detested feeling like a fifth wheel. When this formation emerged, I would leave. It’s just that Heather was a sugar-cube underneath, and we had a little secret pact going, and knew it. By Bloomsday ’05 (June 16), we had entered into a full-on, passionate affair, and Ricky was out. Ouch. All the while, John and I had picked up the cudgel to put together a huge poetry reading at the Khyber, patterned after the Poetry Incarnation reading in ’65 Swinging London. It wasn’t an entirely joyless enterprise, but without Christopher and Ricky there was little group espirit de corps. Now we just felt like ordinary hustlers; even if, for the first time, the Philly press were showing some interest in us. We hammed the event up verbosely for them. As it were, and when it was all said and done, spending two perfect nights with Heather Mullen wound up being the apogee of the mid-Aughts ride for me. We managed to encapsulate, in a tiny time-frame, a real marriage; we found a way to give each other everything we had. By the time she took the stage at the Khyber Pass, swaying slightly from a hot ninety minutes spent at the Khyber bar, she had also managed to demarcate what had happened in June, and what was going to happen now. I’d been to Boston and back, and found a way, without meaning to, to cheat. Heather knew by then who Wendy Smith was. Heather clung that night to Sal Benzon, a Philly politico who liked to hang around cultural people. Yet this was the night that, for the Philly Free School, for pure public razmatazz, established a real standard, and won a real game. A paying crowd poured in, and filled the place up. We had received real hype in the press. Heather’s plea was similar to my opening remarks. She compelled to assembled throng to understand, “We live in a new Philadelphia. All the boundary-lines are gone. Who you are now is who you can be in this living painting, this new assemblage.” Heather looked down briefly, futzed with the mike, and piped up, from a higher vocal register, “It’s time for everyone to come together in a way that what you get back is always more than what you give up. You think you’ve seen what Philadelphia can be, but you haven’t. I want every single one of you to understand something about Philadelphia: we started this country, and we’re all gonna start it over again right now, in a spirit of compromise, in a spirit of no resistance. I know how hard everyone here is working, alright? Respect. But who The Philly Free School are and who you are, are the same thing. We’re all here tonight because America needs Philadelphia to take the lead again. Amen!” I won’t exaggerate: not everyone cheered. But there was enough fire in the response to inspire John Rind, for one, to give Heather a big bearhug (for once) when her screed ended a few minutes later. Once again, Heather Mullen became the hub and the apogee of our enterprise, even for John, even for her newly established ex-husband. Heather was better than John and I with the public, in a way: she had political instincts. Even if, despite Heather’s rabble-rousing, the Khyber proved less levitational than the Highwire, stuck as it was on street-level, and in one low-ceilinged room. No one was happy, for example, to see the Plunkett goons sulk dejectedly at the bar. They later insisted that I had stolen their money. In a way, John, Heather, and I, and the rest, were thieves in the night, laying down a cultural gauntlet hewn of unusually genuine materials, and living on a real edge in an unforced way. Our moment there, that night, was a mid-level one, strength-wise: not too fragile, not too sturdy either. But I’ll always love Ms. Mullen in retrospect for daring us to imagine more strength in us than we actually had then. What she imagined then, I am attempting to make a tactile reality now. Amen! The darkest cloud on the horizon for me, personally, was D.P. Plunkett and his crew. The Free School had found ways to upstage them, but we were weakening. The Plunkett poets read at Poetry Incarnation ’05 with many others; but they were morose at the event because we didn’t treat them like stars. They reacted by concocting the aforementioned, spurious tale that I had withheld money from them and began to circulate it after the event. If I wanted to survive, I knew I’d have to stop dissipating my energies and focus on poetry in a singular way. There was no other way to conquer the Plunkett goons; and I’d learned that art events are all too ephemeral. There was little in them left to keep. I had one major piece out in Jacket Magazine; it was time to build on it. And ponder Heather.

From the original Philly Free School blog

 Posts (2005) from the original P.F.S. blog, before it became P.F.S. Post. 

Highwire Gallery Calendar: 2004-2005

 Taken from the Highwire Gallery's website, as it existed in the mid-Aughts.

Stacy Blair: July 2016

6:30 a.m. is when my heater keels over;
dried up somehow from the ice storm
which punctuated the night's prose on my

attic windows. This is where I live: the attic.
By 9 a.m. it's all slush, and my furnace is
hot and wet again. Cold shower: I need

one— present tense, of course. I will stop
not moving and wriggle a bit under covers,
twisting my body up in the blankets like

a fork in spaghetti. Three of them: not forks,
blankets. Three second-hand covers collected,
collect hair and skin samples from their human

domains: past, present, future. Who knows
how many have come before me, but I'll burn
this when I'm done. Maybe then, I'll light

a match to my own epidermis.


c. Stacy Blair 2009

Stacy Blair: July 2016

A PERFECT CIRCLE IS...

A circle is what we talk in
and the hole in which our
words bury us; the bulging
blueberries I add with soymilk
to my matinale Grapenuts;
or the gears in my grandfather
clock, circling through time only
to double back. It is the hug
around my waist made by Elea
before she left for France; the sphere
of space made by lovers touching parted lips.

Multiple circles of time form from repetition;
circles circling into generations make
five-dimensional slinkies,
our faults repeat like History while
new mornings wonder at our perseverance,
curious hearts.

A circle is the top of my water bottle
cap removed on the night-stand,
shapes my dreams take as I
circle back from sleep to
the same hour I rose yesterday (it was yesterday).
A perfect circle is a blueberry and the shape of us going nowhere.


MAPS

We peaked together atop
this snow-covered mountain,
rolled down its spine,
whereupon a creamy
blue fog covered my glasses.

Now we repose in the field,
backs up against cherry-bulbs;
the suspended poplar,
eyes drifting to the coast.
From across that field of

cherry-bulbs, suspended
poplars, the cemetery jogs along the coast.
Honesty, weeping, chills my lashes.
Oak-rich-ebony, your eyes match
your hair, block my view.

c. Stacy Blair 2008


Stacy Blair: July 2016

MORNING WINDOWS

Sky blue hangover over-hung
above my tea-top-table
this morning while you slept.
Long days set into short
nights, your sunny sheets
never want for company.

Yourself dispassionate,
disappearing come September
beyond distant barren fields.
Melting mountains mighty since
time spared their angled edges.
Alliterative, I am consuming;

pretty poetess all the while
presumes ignorance.


LISTS RHETORIC

This gender-bender of a city
has me dealing in androgyny.
How am I expected to see
bliss beyond these words
of war poured out of your
mouth? I lie livid at the feet
of news, magazines,
not finding reasons why,
forgetting every second
that God did exist before Nietzsche.


c. Stacy Blair 2008




Stacy Blair: June 2017

Blonde locks jut out over the tops of pigtails,
bleached beach/sand-color by the sun.
Time's short between this photograph and my regard.
Picture: no flower lays or shoes, just
young grass hips. She is, I am, we were,
very young. The entire page of this album
flanks history; under my mind, another
helpless time explosion. I was, we were, are,
naked newborns, as our little limbs on film.

c. Stacy Blair 2008

Mary Walker Graham: March 2008

[THE STORY’S IN THE BROKEN SHELLS]

The story's in the broken shells, the fissures 
of the rocks. The water left those cracks. 
And it was the sea that rocked; that sang
its story of self or selves. I said,
You see me? And it did:
the sea saw.
I'm lying. It was a river
that ran nearest us, and all that night
I dreamt of alkali, dissolve.
That's why I say the sea, I like the salt.


THEN & NOW

I couldn't be more or less than I was then,
could I? But like a person, thought I could.

Standing beside the picnic table—
beside myself— mimicked hands, hello, and mouth.

Said yessir, pleasesir, thankyou— I watched
the boats go south. I waved goodbye, dutifully. I bore

the empty wine bottle to the basket, shoo-ing flies.
But all day he'd been leaning—mast and pole—

he had us cleaning the underside of the belly,
all along the bulwark and the bow. I had tools then,

didn't I? Steel wool, toothbrush, tar. Once
I tarred a roof, rewired a house. I was small;

I could fit into crevices. But only like a person.
I was a child: rest and enervation. I could as easily

lie down now in rows of soybeans, as against
the plaid flannel of your shirt, smelling of gasoline.

ON THE BANKS OF THE RIVER IN WINTER

So many Marys grieving by the river
that I have to cover my ears
to shut out the sobbing and hear,

as if for the first time, 
the long low sound of the water
and the train just beginning

to round the bend and blow
its way through the dark tunnel.
How many times I've sat

in summer: considered the chicory,
drawn the blue bridge flung
from bank to bank, or wondered

the names of the red flowers,
their throats like trumpets.
How many times I've not

given in to the weeping:
I can almost see her— the one
who lifts the Potomac mud

to her face and smears,
as if it were a balm and not
the original problem,

or the one with the bucket of fish:
she should return them but that would mean
letting them slip, silver and whole,

finally cast out. I'd rather
let them wander in the maples,
cold and insistent and crying.

I should swim somehow— wait
for spring; I've been waving
to that other a long time,

the one who wears the red
and not the blue scarf.


© Mary Walker Graham 2008

Susan Wallack: January 2007

EVOLUTION

Once before, when I was a woman,
(a diagram distorting the actual
dream),

I hiked a leg,
barking like a seal, &
urinated a long-
lemon stream.

Running south,
syrup over ice
cream, pleasure
over suffering:
the first idea.


© Susan Wallack 2007

Susan Wallack: February 2021

At times God seems
Like a scientist to me,
Patient & persistent,
Experiments still pending
Stashed in a shoe box
On Heaven's marble floor.
And from time to time,
Say once in an aeon,
He lifts the corner
Gingerly, as if not
To disturb us,
Checking on progress,
Then lowers the lid
And inscribes
The statistics.

© Susan Wallack 2021

Susan Wallack: June 2021

Consider life's billion anxious
gulps of oxygen, smog porridge
sucked ad nauseam. If a wily

Camus invites us to agree
that Sisyphus is happy, I'm
satisfied to dream Camus'

Algeria: super-heated sands
hemming the Mediterranean,
and a raucous newborn

gleaming with slime, a just-plucked
shell held high into the sun. Her
nomad-father's rutted palms

obliterate all light, his desert-
dimmed eyes squinting to find
stripes, moles, stigma, signs—

imperfections to justify
a drowning. No surprise. Just too few
dried figs, no gods or fires

driving them forward, into the sea,
ancient terrors, shallow waters
heaving salt, fish, history.

originally published in The Brownstone Review No. 5

© Susan Wallack

Susan Wallack: October 2023

Death's young, lush, smooth skinned, canny,
posed au naturel, cocoa belly
down on an improvised divan, eyes

rolled back to study Gauguin (who
flatters himself she's scared of him). Slapping
liverish paint to a faux

background, fantasy blooms
where the native truth would be: an endless
queue of stunted men,

shuffling forward, shifting dumbly
outside thatched huts infested with fleas.
Inside Death squirms, ever horny, flexing

moist pink lips as if he were a child,
slow to see where to fix his bristling
prick, bury Art, take his pleasure now.

originally published in the G.W. Review, spring 1999

The Khyber Pass: July 5, 2005

It’s my humble opinion that Philadelphia is ready to take its place among the great cities of the world. Many define us by our proximity to Manhattan; an easy mistake to make. After all, Manhattan is widely acknowledged as perhaps the world’s greatest city. Over years of shuttling back and forth, I’ve learned to love Philly and Manhattan equally, for different reasons. The exuberant excess of Manhattan is intoxicating but exhausting. Philly is a “Middle Path” town, and if it doesn’t stagger us with raw velocity, we’re able to function here without exhaustion. Manhattan is glamorous but expensive. Philly is short on glamour, long on substance, and we can live here without going bankrupt. Ultimately, Philly and New York are sister cities, with much more in common than not. East Coast, liberal, each with its own Ivy League school, cynical, earthy, brutal summers, brutal winters, gorgeous springs and falls, great art museums, architecture, wonderful pungent neighborhoods.
So, the tale of The Philly Free School is becoming a tale of two cities. The specter of a third hangs over the whole endeavor— London. From ’64 to ’70, London swung harder than any other city in recent memory. How could it not, with Lennon, Hendrix, Jagger, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Genet, Hockney, Bacon, and Godard hanging from the rafters. The Philly Free School inherited its name from The London Free School, who were perhaps the first multi-media artists’ co-op ever. The London Free School made stars out of Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, promoted poets like Alex Trocchi, turned churches into psychedelic cathedrals. They introduced the “light show” in 1966, when The Beatles were still singing “Yellow Submarine.” Thus, The Philly Free School has a lot to live up to, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.
We don’t merely want to recreate Swinging London. We want to create an analogous environment with Philly and New York artists right now. We want Philly and New York to join together in song, poem, and story, to break new ground and start a new chapter of reciprocity and encouragement between these two great cities. We’re gathered here tonight to help inaugurate this endeavor. “Poetry Incarnation” at the Royal Albert Hall in London, 1965, introduced Ginsberg and Corso into an already fertile, volatile mix. Who knows who among you might be a Ginsberg or a Corso? Even if you don’t happen to be Allen Ginsberg, you still deserve a time and place to “Howl.” The Philly Free School exists so that anyone who wants a forum by which to express anything can do so. That was the belief that inspired the original “Poetry Incarnation,” and that’s the belief that spurred us into creating “Poetry Incarnation ’05.”
What’s in the future for The Philly Free School? The possibilities seem limitless. How many fledgling artists are there in Philly and New York? Tons! Many of them are talented, too. It’s our purpose and our mission to cross genre-zones and find the poets, musicians, painters, filmmakers, novelists, and performance artists who are taking the right risks, shaking up the right conventions, assaulting the right boundaries, cracking the right codes. We have the grandiose ambition to rock NYC and Philly so hard that a baby is born between them. A love-child that knows how to swing; a freedom-child that knows how to Howl. We’re going out into the world with that passion in our soul, and we want you to join us! Welcome to “Poetry Incarnation ’05.”
Adam Fieled

From Otoliths: April 2010

In 2004 and 2005, a group of young artists who called themselves the Philly Free School staged a series of performances at the Highwire Gallery, in the now-demolished Gilbert Building on Cherry Street, Philadelphia. The stated goal of these performances was “multi-media”: as such, they involved poetry, music, fiction, films, and different hybrid/mutant versions of these. What I want to address, specifically, is the poetry aspect of these performances. These seem relevant to me now because multi-media presentations of poetry are, to many, significantly more interesting than standard poetry readings, which are (I would argue) an impoverished form of public expression. What constitutes the impoverishment of poetry readings as public art events? Let’s put the question in different terms: what does a poetry reading offer an average audience?
An audience at a standard poetry reading is offered an anti-spectacle— a single man or woman, reading from sheets or a book, often looking down at this book while intermittently gazing up at his or her audience. Why look at something or someone static, and (for the most part) inexpressive? This is the first level of impoverishment. Then, as to the contents of poems read in a public context: are most poems compelling enough, as works of literature, to merit public airing? The truth is that most serious poems do not read that well out loud— poems (good ones) contain enormous amounts of compressed data, which necessitates slow, ocular engagement. Lines that need to be read three or four times to be properly processed pass with such rapidity, in a reading context, that they might as well be Greek as English. Moreover, attendees have two options— to make an earnest attempt to understand things instantly, or to drift off into reverie. The latter has consistently been my choice (and I have, fortunately or unfortunately, sat through dozens of readings).
But the Philly Free School artists (of which I was one) started from the presupposition that poetry could be mixed with Artaud; that public poetry is, in fact, better as a side-dish than as a main course; and that the possibilities of “spectacles” were (and remain) more exciting than more conventional poetry contexts. As such, the Philly Free School shows (which were well-attended but received little media coverage) presented, in general, little in the way of conventional poetry performances; poetry was mixed with video and music to create novel effects. I was proud to contribute to these performances, because they had not only young energies but principles behind them. While I would not deny that results were mixed (some ideas came off, some did not), I have yet to see another concentrated attempt to make poetry multi-media in a public forum. We were using artful language as texture, the way a painter might use brushstrokes, and an inquiry into this usage (language-as-texture) revealed untapped possibilities as regards making poetry interesting to audiences, who may or may not find poetry interesting to begin with.
When language is used as texture, as a constituent part of a spectacle that also includes sound and images, the audience (ideally) feels itself immersed or engulfed in a dynamic collage; as such, this kind of performance is an extension of the Modernist ethos. Fractured things can be more compelling than wholes; this was one tenet that motivated Pound, Eliot, and the rest. For an audience, sitting in a darkened room (and the Highwire offered two main spaces, a conventional gallery space and a warehouse space), this sense of brokenness could be interpreted many ways, but the essential thing for us was to present something that was dynamic, rather than static. The most elaborate of these presentations involved music, images, and poetry at once; while it would be reasonable to question whether the total effect was bombastic or not, the responses we received encouraged us to believe that what we were doing was significantly more exciting than an average poetry performance. Live poetry, I would argue, only works as texture to begin with; it is in the mix of things that live poetry comes alive. In the specific performances that I was personally involved with, I did, in fact, read entire poems; if I had it to do over again, I would not. It would have been substantially more appropriate to read fragments or even to improvise. The video collages were put together from foreign movies, Internet, music video, and photography bits. The musical elements alone were entirely improvised. Although I am proud of what the Philly Free School accomplished, it was merely a beginning. Thinking about it now, we could have been much more rigorous. Our ideas of spectacle were naïve, and needed development.
What would a completely successful poetry spectacle, in the Artaudian sense, look like? Artaud, of course, became famous for his idea/ideal of the Theater of Cruelty; a spectacle that confronts an audience with its own mortality, in an unflinching, persistent way. What kind of poetry fragments could add, textually, to such a spectacle? It seems to me that the poetry would have to be written specifically in conjunction with, specifically for, the music and the images. They would have to function, in other words, dramatically, as carriers of a certain kind of drama, just as dialogue in a theater production does. What can poetry contribute that mere dialogue cannot? Poetry has in its arsenal a capacity for incantatory power that dialogue does not; an ability to build, to create rhythms, melodies, and cadences that dialogue cannot. Anaphora is one method by which this kind of fragment could work; rhyme is another. This is texture that creates stimulation; with other elements, the potentiality for genuine spectacle, cohesive spectacle (rather than naïve, haphazard spectacle) arises. As to what the spectacle addresses, there is no real limitation, other than the impulse to compel attention, hold it, and overwhelm at once. Certainly the apocalyptic conflicts in the Middle East, our flagging domestic economy, and the status of the environment are all fertile (pardon my irony) ground.
Then, there are things standing in the way of this kind of spectacle: time and budgets are big ones. Many poets just skirt insolvency; serious spectacle (unfortunately) often involves serious funds. The Philly Free School were lucky with this, more so than we realized; the Highwire let us use the space for free (though they took a cut of the door). But to come up with ample space, time, and funds is a real challenge, which cannot be solved overnight. It may come down to a collective, like the Philly Free School, to make this happen, if it does ever happen. To my mind, it would be a tragedy if it does not. There are, in general, too few poetry readings that have any capacity to stimulate, and too many that wind up being “snooze-fests.” The irony, for one working in an experimental context, is that avant-garde poetry readings tend to be even more boring than mainstream ones— abstruse poetry out loud, which shuns narrative, is more difficult to follow, and often registers as little better than gibberish. But I will simply say, for myself, that the desire to create a genuine spectacle with poetry has not perished, and I hope other kindred spirits are “waiting in the wings.”
Adam Fieled

From Philadelphia City Paper: June-July 2005

“I want Poetry Incarnation ’05 to mirror the original London event in its scope and in its egalitarian structure. That is, I designed this event so that almost anyone that wanted to read could read,” says Adam Fieled. He and Mike Land, co-director of the Philly Free School— a multi-media arts co-op— are bringing a slew of poets together in one space to not only give each a chance to showcase his or her work, but to solidify poetry as an important element of the arts. “It would be nice if people would have the realization that poetry is still a vital, viable force in American culture. It would also be nice to prove once again that Philly is, in fact, a great poetry town, a place rich with literacy, poetic history and culture,” explains Fieled. But with over 40 participants slated to read, the organizers have also pulled prose writers and editors into the mix. There are recognizable names, such as published noteworthies CaConrad and Jenn McCreary, while others are fresh voices aching to be heard. Known for indie rock and hip-hop shows, The Khyber hopes to get a crowd that wouldn’t normally spend a Tuesday evening listening to haikus, free verse, and limericks. “I want people who come to this event to walk away thrilled and exhilarated by its diversity.”
Deesha Dyer

Vlad Pogorelov: April 2020

Being low on inspiration in the middle of the train station
Trying to find a decent rhyme or the place to go
Feeling very cheap like an amateur with a third class ticket

Isn't it a crime, a very major crime of nature
When you're subjected to not being able to find a
Rhyme or a decent woman?

But fuck the nature! Let's break this glass wall!
Go outside, be artificial but independent
And vice versa...Do you still like the verse?
In the meantime returning to the original style:
- Shut up and smile.

Nothing helps better than looking at polyester shirts,
Clear plastic skirts, synthetics and vinyl
Aluminum in the form of foil paper
Or listening to your last words:
- See ya later
When you don't mean it.

Paper, another artificial object. Nailing words to it,
Letting them dry and being absorbed
Feeling like a medieval knight holding his medieval sword,
Killing enemies,
Splashing blood just like ink, when the ink is just like blood

God! God! God! And the Virgin Mary. Here is the letter:
Dear Mary! Would you love me, would you fuck me?
I'll be very gentle, very caring.
I'll treat you nice, Mary. I am not exactly from Palestine,
But please, do not hesitate
To accept some very valuable foreign aid in the form of a 
Smile.

And Mary's telegram says:
Wait! You're not a carpenter, you're a poet.
So go fuck your Muse or your mom.
The end of the telegram.

My reply: Dear Mary! Thank you for the advice.
Still want to fuck you. Love you very, very.

And back to the train station.
Where would I go without an inspiration,
Without a rhyme or a decent woman?
New York? Moscow? Near past? Distant future?
After all, the crime is becoming a punishment
When you try to cut your soul open.


c. Vlad Pogorelov

At the Train Station was originally included in the 1997 print chapbook Derelict, from Repossessed Head Press.

Vlad Pogorelov: September 2020

I wanted to kill myself for years
But I always lived on the first floor
And the gun shops won't sell a gun
To a foreigner with a criminal background
It's not that there are no other ways to do it
I dreamt of drinking myself to death
But after hours of puking
I discovered that life is O.K.
As long as you don't have to punch
Somebody's time-clock
Or when you're drunk but are still
Able to drive
And the classical music
Or a beautiful woman,
Or a decent typewriter,
Or a good friend,
Who is not asking you for some
Cash until Friday, every other day

At the moment,
I am still alive
We made love 3 times last night
It's 2:20 p.m.
I had two cups of tea,
Three cigarettes,
Plus some beer for breakfast
My woman is in the shower
She lives on the third floor
(Too low to jump
and I don't want to be crippled)

P.S.: She came out of the shower.
Looked at the first line. Put her hands
On my shoulders and said firmly:
"If you're gonna kill yourself, I'm gonna
Kill you, son of a bitch. Besides,
I don't need blood in my apartment."


© 1997

Vlad Pogorelov: March 2021

"You're an enigma," she said
You're an enigma
I know all about you
At least more than the other girls
Her kiss was sweet and warm
Alcohol and perfume
I couldn't look in her eyes
              "Yea....Yea," I said
              "I don't want to be exposed
                             It's not good for you"
               "For me?" she asked
               "It's O.K. for me," she repeated
               "You talk gibberish," I said
We kissed some more
Then she went to the bathroom
To snort
Ha! She liked cocaine
"God damn enigma," I thought
While drinking some lager
And when I lighted a cigarette
A black man came up to me
And asked me if I was queer. 



Vlad Pogorelov: September 2023

Mosquitoes,
Cockroaches, and
Spiders
My lovely roommates
and my only true friends
I love you
I love you
I love you
In a sick kind of love
Which will make an executioner happy
And the victim will suffer no more
Only pleasure from the torture
And the pain has no right to exist

And some time my eyes are
Staring at you: big, lonely spider
You are sitting in the darkest corner
Of your dusty net
Waiting for me to get in

And I know for sure
That a giant mosquito
Made his home
Inside my swollen heart
There is plenty of blood
Inside those chambers

And when I can't hear you clearly,
When you are talking to me on the phone
I feel that a cockroach is moving
Inside of my ear

And sometimes I feel
That there is nothing to feel anymore
Ever since my soul was amputated
And smuggled to India
By a gynecologist
Who was seeing my mother
Long time ago, before I was born

So,
Mosquitoes,
Cockroaches,
and Spiders,
You are my only friends,
Who are sharing my soulless fate,
Abandoned by lovers,
Forgotten by long-time friends,
Forsaken by my motherland and the ancient gods
I am living a sheltered life
As a derelict

And it seems like it's time
To jump into the water of a substance,
Which looks like a residential street
Or a boiling sea
Depends on the point of view
Or the angle of the mind
Or just walk out the door
And swim to the store...
Buy some cheap liquor...
Go back home...
To this slow SINKING ship
And to share my fate
With my only true friends
With my only true love
With mosquitoes,
     cockroaches,
     and spiders
'Cause I am a derelict
And I am living a sheltered life

c. Vladlen Pogorelov 1997-2023

Vlad Pogorelov: October 2023

Experiencing her body 
Next to mine 
It felt warm and very close 
It had the smell of alcohol 
She was laughing like crazy 
And talking 
And swinging 
Looking at me 
From time to time 
Drinking 
I was drinking too 
And smoking 
An easy way to deal with life 
Easy 
Old easy way 
And I was so happy 
Happy just because of her presence 
Beside me 
With her soft hair 
Flying around my neck 
I didn’t wanna bother to 
Ask her name 
Instead, I asked for a cigarette 
And she gave me her last one 
I bet she would have given me 
All of her 
If I’d asked her 
But I was happy with things 
As they were 
So I just kept drinking, 
Smoking and writing on 
The napkin of very poor quality 
Finally, she asked me, 
“What are you writing?” 
“I’m writing shit… 
I’m writing nothing… 
I’m writing a letter to my wife… 
Any more questions?” 
“What?” 
She didn’t hear me 
It was too noisy in the bar. 


All published poems on P.F.S. Post by Vlad Pogorelov taken from the 1997 print chapbook Derelict, published in Philadelphia by Repossessed Head Press.

Andrew Lundwall: August 2006

* (UNTITLED)

the el diablo outhouses
of the village
blast reggae tonight
as the silent man strangles
the sidewalk intoxicated

SOPHIE

sophie’s hands
reload my shadow
rewind my window
stoned in the afterglow
of a blue leopard’s eyes
soggy like so many moons
as bourbon babies emerge
from dated floral curtains
of next door bakery
bubbling doughy
unknowing
and across the street
groaning metallic
gruntworkers
wasted apostolic
black out beneath
the yellow flowing
midnight robe of
a meth-addicted monk

LAWN FLAMINGOS

my sister’s prophesies
usher in the gray rains
of coming circumcised autumn
in pornographic prayer
as the blood flower
of her boyfriend’s shadowy polaroid
sets fire to abandoned mattresses
of wilderness crashes a golf cart
into oblivion

lawn flamingos cringe

WHISTLER

the blind hands
of august weary
of strangling stars
fall into the graffiti
of her moist lap

Andrew Lundwall: December 2007

#1
i found the empty life lasting beyond waiting being filled (going over) - you hear my voice in your queue of heading - you operated yourselves with the fear hidden on the floor of space like being slept - a robber down my stolen book where page divides early childhood with a sulky song - crimes beyond colours go disgust-exciting to educate me who is sadly not long - fire-place-stained life span you is older the evening maintained - here-smiling the miracle notion around fires of gutter dancing and alive you hear my voice - do you hear my voice with glacial friendliness because it does not believe everyone nowadays - i have felt the sea's sad fact that there is room for improvement - pinocchio's cliff of the silver screen coming to contact you screaming to you - there are works for you surplus on the black pavement of space - notion fires on in the angle of a closed book - i have felt friendship pools invested in plowing appreciation - transience laughing to dance my voice in the tail of the sun it sees the red and black color of possible screw longitudinally

#2
gepetto sunset master lied about his childhood - cave eyes stood imploringly - secret hands plot false voluptuousness make something right risking violation - masks bonily fray the shadow of voice - scratching minutes - say pattern the night when goodbyes wither - o her mouth silently names broken eyes misaligned - tongue ends gathered green stains of forget utensils do the signs

#3
the sunflowers all bloomed silverly - discover angel eyes lamenting trees inside voice - deep broke song trees - trembling hands' clairvoyant blues - breathless sharp red fare of information - dreamless little eclipse of bleak oak face confined to carpentry named thanks for fuel approached extreme of recreated childhood - his moonlike bleeding tongue works that last time following the say seed through speechless grief - sighs no refuge for wooden sickness

© Andrew Lundwall 2007

Andrew Lundwall: April 2008

RUMPUS ROOM

the moon slices like ivory
through our window we see it
deceptive breaths
shredding yesterday's bills

injured that look
down the stairs
descending slowly
it hurts to watch

it's not even funny
we're incarcerated
in eternity's rumpus room
no one's speaking


THREE SLICES OF MOON

nothing personal but i'd rather distance you - cursive all up there in my face like a blizzard of bees each letter pimped out - geography this

*

three nuns at the bar last night raised mug this bud's for you - the jukebox jester played a wicked accordion for the occasion

*

a dark cloud - was it a rorshach test or blood spatter you tell me - my game is 3D - infatuated passengers grin


SENSES

if it rains for real
decorate it this time
laurel it and let it
drop like a stone
so safe on the other side
so convenient to be


EUCHARISTIC

congregate like the washington monument
bright hydrants shapes of being awake
recurring still supplied memory we’ll hook
up thoughts dispensing fleshes steadily
like yellow lips decompressing a map
hard twists of night radically lilt
to know long returns clad in black robes
by an absence like a lifer'd found the egg


10:15 SATURDAY NIGHT

struggled up from sleep
from the glow that fires her fingers
sweet consequential sweat aloof
like lonesome in snow globe

thought that if i'd told
or if you'd stayed still
long enough if being anyone
is being everywhere else but

you've shrouded yrself in silence
excused myself from room to smoke
distracted bored long drags tilted
to find her something in my stacks


BC

lost in the raging sound
a face is splintered
through the club
and its web of smoke
all eyes die here
at their feet the ladies
shiny north pole they swirl
to stun the masses stupid
at the edge of the world
renee especially
i walk through you
your legs suit me
where i wish to move
through your eyes
offer a bouquet
to shadows
to love


© Andrew Lundwall 2008

Andrew Lundwall: October 2008

RESURRECTION

those lips that smoke together
giggle at 4 am like porcelain
of it felt like years'd passed

chopping block was it the moon's
a woman entertains life this way
hear there are milky cloud noises

hear there is recur prolong each missing
with oval slip of kisses stirring up feel
which surged into my eyes for you again


RIVERSIDE

shallow faces paint this way go by
eavesdropping the largest erection yet
under penalty of checkered tablecloth
imprisoned by rainbows soft chewy nougat
milling about smoking dopest dope
being called fucked each hour inches by
flesh glaciers peach fuzzy incredible
strips like puzzles skinnydips off riverside
with buxom pupils whiskified abysmal


EYELASHES

moans on phone snuffed rationality her torso unspooling
beneath magenta sheets of doubtencrusted lust
rolling winedribbled r's of distant camerafugues
a fugitive cyclone of shattered spastic sunflowers

because lay awake is law of those indebted
because noise of kisses over shoulder past
because memory juice leaks what could might be
because floorboards creak a melancholy possible


BUG

stars after
rain feet
on street
television creeps
cramped cargo
stapled to chest
like an insect
like an ever



© Andrew Lundwall 2008

Andrew Lundwall: March 2009

BAUBLES

footsteps the color of spur in dawn arcades
a technology of hush a nothing to look for
drinkable crests of twilight manes of dagger
stuttering turrets sloshing a mile-high snow
the dots each crane would hoist and ripple
or thrusts resilient bouquet of yellow smoke
threatened eyelids videotape stripping lots
or thinking drink and her transparent brooch
a mutable connection derailed by sideways sighs
lets so much in a little an oblivion of trinkets


IMPULSIVE POEM

a net out ahead two-a-piece wheezing
adderall funspokes belabored & bedraggled
a mystical head given a mystery occasion
of cardboard wingtips paint by numbers
plant anything that each breath should
hinge on kleptomania but it's given
murmurs of missing a tremulous kleenex
leopard print multi-faceted eyelids
drag dregs of cigarette up & away
it's an all-time rumour a gospel
duped bellydeep & good as thick


SHEER CHERRY

look no hands a buzz a silo what's collapsing
tunnels of fun ferns are set are swell & pines
throb elusive traipsing pillows of cloud elongated
melodious if she had a pin yet everywhere there's
a password stoned honey being called alive under
hunched shoulders of blue is sheer cherry conjuring


© Andrew Lundwall 2009

Andrew Lundwall: July 2016

chicago wind hair
spontaneously making noise
out there it's out there
plucked me from crazy wilderness
the sticks sniffling stoogey
o wild flower inebriated as a loon
what is it that spiritual graffiti
that follows you big lettered "poet"
through halls asteroid
upon halls asteroid hellishly
what in what gentle way
will i fuck her tonight?
in her prime my twilit dancer
this place these prancing people
among these demonically cupie
my pulpit is shabby like dolls' shaved balls
i'm ultimate lush reverend drunk
the killer the pubic hair
caught in your coffee
so irish feel my name kiss me
swim around you in august heat
and the one who asked of me
where's your girlfriend at
what's her answer
where's her tropic where are you
this alliance these vague conversations
about studliness and self-reliance
kerouac i wish i were free too
my lowell my crop my lover so pre-
occupied me i'm so so pre-cummy
and there's this everything hooking up
and you should be too harbinger
warped by your binge wrapped around
spooked in your haunted closet

c. Andrew Lundwall 2007

Andrew Lundwall: September 2023

 I SWEAR

I am writing down numbers
There's a look in your eyes
That screams Moscow, bitches!

You've pinned God to the ottoman
Like a crushed mosquito elsewhere
Munching, the kids play dominoes quietly

Pretend to give a fuck, I dare you
I swear once I published in this literary quarterly...
& start to hold my breath & think virgin again

Dear brethren and sistren infatuated with irony
I swear the depth of this bread goes on forever
While a good portion of the world is starving

The balls of this poem are sagging south
I've stopped making plans expecting her call
I can't sit through movies at all anymore


MANGINA

My mangina is the screw
By which you thread
Your not so secret nights

Don't bother my beer
I'm drinking


© Andrew Lundwall 2008-2023


Steve Halle: January 2006

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Steve Halle: April 2006

SH: Useful concepts. I want to respond on Keats' Negative Capability, which I think introduced several useful concepts into modern poetics, and also served as a birthplace for the non-lyric/non-Romantic (I guess what you’d call “post-avant”) lineage alive in contemporary poetics. First, I view Keats as the odd Romantic, along with Shelley. Whereas Shelley validated the entry of politics into poetry, Keats rebelled against the first wave of Romantics by heightening the power of the imagination and downplaying Wordsworth's "egotistical sublime."
The imaginative poetry Keats penned allowed for oddly juxtaposed words; in his Odes, Nightingale & Grecian Urn, for example; in order to create a reflection of his state of mind. Even though these two poems work in a highly stylized and rhetorical way, they reflect on Keats' consciousness— the power of imagination and the untranslatable power of the mind to hold disparate concepts without struggle. The idea of negative capability is also (ironically) an example of negative capability because neither Keats, nor anyone since, has presented, as far as I know, a good reason why some people embrace mystery and some people need closure.
“Indeterminacy” in poetry, it seems to me, is another big point of contention among experimentalists today, and I would assert that Keats' negative capability is the concept which paved the way for indeterminate poetics. I believe a relationship exists between the misinterpretation of "first thought, best thought" and the misuse of negative capability. People like to assume that Ginsberg, Kerouac and the Beats meant "first word, best word" or "first draft, best draft" and use their teachings, which are highly formulated methods for improvisational poetry, to justify writing whatever comes to mind. As we see with Bukowski, a poet who edited little (if at all), this work sometimes succeeds, often falls flat. The same is true for indeterminate poets whose work lacks closure. I think some poets misuse negative capability or “rejection of closure” as a means to avoid striving or thinking about their work. Poets who misuse negative capability think they can avoid essence, substance and arrival, but I think this is a big mistake because it fools poets into thinking they don't need intention or investigation and can operate solely on intuition.
Keats is also perhaps the first poet to address the idea that language is unsatisfactory for expressing ideas completely (though Shelley suggested this too). As skilled as any poet may be as word-smith, the poem will still be lacking to the thing-in-itself: be it the real triggering element of the poem or some abstract or intense thought or sensation the poet tries to grasp. Through negative capability and his understanding of the powers of and limitations of art, Keats may have been the earliest antecedent to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets of this century. Language poets, of course, understood the fallibility of linguistic expression, so they began to work with language the way a painter might work with paints, allowing for pure linguistic abstraction and/or frustration, depending on whose side you're on. Critics sometimes call Keats a "mood" poet, meaning that every single word did not have to make total logical sense in the poem. Instead, Keats' linguistic consistency depended upon creating the desired mood, a different way of hitting "the just note": le mot juste.
Previous to Lang-po, I look at Keats as having laid the groundwork for the High Modernists, especially Wallace Stevens, who tried and perhaps failed as much as Keats did to create “poetry of imagination” or “supreme fiction.” Like Keats, Stevens valued the imagination of the maker over the rational mind, even though I feel that Stevens, again like Keats, often wrote rational and calculated poems. Keats' influence and the influence of negative capability cannot be overstated in an existence wherein making rational sense of everyday life, let alone the “big questions,” is nearly impossible.
AF: I take most of your points. The one problem I have with the schema that would put Keats behind Language Poetry and post-avant is that one could make a valid argument that Keats, bent as he was on Romantic (maybe post-Romantic) ideas of personal feeling and personal expression, pursued aims antithetical to these movements. It helps to remember that Keats mentioned negative capability in a letter, and he was referring to Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s dramatic technique, rather than his own poetry, which is rooted very much in Romantic explorations of self and self-hood (whether this is done obliquely, as in Grecian Urn, or directly, as in Nightingale and his great sonnets.) In theory, Negative Capability (and its implicit ancillary devices, non-linearity, allusiveness, abstruse tangent writing, deferral of personal expression, etc.) fits in snugly to the post-modern ethos that dictates what many of us do. But negative capability doesn’t factor as much into Keats’ own poetry as most people tend to assume. Even when he steps beyond the personal, it is often to challenge a historical figure— Hyperion is a direct response to Milton—or to tell a richly detailed but essentially linear story, as in Isabella and The Eve of St. Agnes. So, I like the connection of Keats to Stevens and post-avant, and I’m willing to give it some cred, but for me, Lord Byron takes the “proto-post-modern” cake. Remember that extreme self-obsession (like extreme impersonality, or anything extreme, in fact) is also a common post-modern trope—think of the self-mythologizing of Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Tracy Emin, Robert Mapplethorpe, not to mention poets like Bukowski and Ginsberg, and before them Williams and Pound. Byron’s complete and often facetious self-absorption (pushed knowingly to the point of self-parody) paved the way for the “art of celebrity culture” or “art-in-kitsch” which dictates so much of what we’ve seen in the past fifty years (in the multi-media continuum of the aesthetic.)
SH: About the Net: the pros of the Internet poetry boom far outweigh the cons, i.m.h.o. It suits modern (United States) societal impulses to be able to get what you want, when you want it. In your case and mine, we publish virtually what we want, when we want to. In that sense, it's gratifying. We don't have to sift through mountainous submissions piles. As far as publishing our own work, ‘zines and blogs can offer instant gratification to us like no print outlet can.
The “con” of instant gratification would seem to be instant disposability. A plethora of information means we face a choosier readership. When you purchase a print journal or collection, the tendency is to read it: it was a “monied” choice. As for my blog, people have to want to read what's there. If they aren't interested, they’re a mouse click away from something different. You and I have both discussed new poetry and the prospect of the old theme of immortality through verse. I think it's pointless to think about, because we can easily lose focus on what's important: the real work we do. The value of the lifestyle we lead (internet or not) is in doing the work, the process. I think your outlook on this might differ from mine, but I respect even the untrained poet because, essentially, he/she is getting the same benefits from doing the work as I am, regardless of poetic knowledge, lineage, theory or literary history. That's not to say I find untrained poets' work interesting. More than likely, the opposite is true, but I think I can quickly discern whether or not anyone will challenge my intellect, which is a big draw for me.
In addition to the instant gratification/instant disposability dichotomy the Internet establishes, the possibility of e-books excites me. I like materials and mobility. The combination of those two things is exciting. For the poems I write now, especially “investigative” poems, I like to have synthetic linguistic fragments or ideas handy. The Internet, and its ever-growing portability, enhances these desires for me. It's the old “writerly” advice I've heard from a number of sources: always have a book, a pen and paper on hand. With notebook computers and wi-fi technology, I can have all three in one. And given the trend of technology to shrink, portability will only increase. Bill Allegrezza's “moria” e-books are quite exciting because I can access them from virtually anywhere. The authors he publishes sacrifice money for hit counts. I think I'm resigned to the idea I'll never get rich off the po-biz game, so I'd rather publish an e-book that gets 3000 hits a month than make $3000 from a print book no one reads. The attention span and eye-training it takes to read an e-book will develop, as well.
The fact of the matter is, the Internet is the hub of the counterculture. This is where you MUST be if you write differently, think differently or live differently; our circle of avant-minded poets populates the Internet. The only way around its importance is with “eminence,” which few younger poets can claim. The Internet is the only way around the taste-making large-scale corporations like Borders and Barnes and Noble. They don't carry counterculture material per se; they carry what sells because it's the essence of capitalism to do so.
AF: All good points and taken. One thing I would add about the Net is its international aspect. How else could we be in daily contact with poets in Mexico, Canada, England and Australia? This, I think, is the key to the success of JACKET and Silliman’s blog. All artists have a need for commonality, to be part of a community larger than the small milieus that they generally, inevitably inhabit. JACKET has been instrumental in turning post-avant from a plethora of small, insular groups into a unified, international whole. This also applies to Silliman’s blog. Between them, we have two publications that everyone, or almost everyone, in the post-avant community reads. The consolidation/unification of post-avant is almost entirely due to the influence of the Net. Centrist poetry can lay claim to no such unity. Do English, Australian, and Canadian Centrist poets read American Centrist journals, and vice versa? I would wager that they don’t. What I think post-avant really needs is a print equivalent of JACKET. If we could get in print what’s already in motion on the Web, we’d really be poised for world domination.
SH: Where does post-avant poetry need to go and why does it need to go there?
This is a difficult question. I'm going to approach it from two angles, and then go on my own tangent. First, Ray Bianchi has said in conversation that post-avant poetry (I think he called it “experimental”) needs an audience aside from poets. He compared post-avant poetics to contemporary visual art and avant-garde jazz, both of which he feels have an audience, albeit small ones, outside of the artists themselves. Regarding avant-garde jazz or improvised music or whatever they're calling it right now, I agree with Ray. Many of the local improvised music concert series in Chicago draw good-sized crowds. Sure, many of the non-musicians who go to these shows are artists, and experimental artists, in other fields, but it is an audience separate from the makers themselves; this is of utmost importance. People often compare modern poetics to a self-perpetuating system or “closed circle.” Post-avant seems to be a scaled down version of that, based on its "marginalized" status. Even though mainstream poetry is not widely read, I believe occasional readers of poetry tend to buy what Barnes & Noble carries on its brick and mortar store shelves. It's a scary thought if you're an experimental or “post-avant” writer. B&N tends to carry only the APR/Poetry crowd and their predecessors.
Additionally, Ted Kooser's big push as poet laureate has been to encourage poets to make "more accessible poems." You and I have talked about creating a middle path between extremely experimental and Centrist work, but I'm not sure we've settled on an answer. Poetry, in its loftiest manifestations, must work to move human linguistic and artistic expression forward. Kooser seems almost to suggest reversion to more basic creations, to expand the public's interest in verse culture. I think it's a dangerous idea. We first must answer this question: what do we (as poets) and everyone else (potential readers) want from poetry? I myself want poetry to live up to other art forms. What I mean is, poetry seems to be years behind other art modes (visual art, avant jazz specifically), with notable forward-thinking exceptions like Gertrude Stein and her aesthetic progeny. "New Thing" jazz started happening in the mid 1960s; Abstract Expressionism in art in the 1950s. What is the poetic equivalent of these, and when did it come into fashion?
Post-avant poetry might be the answer to that question in a general way (or at least some of its subsections.) I don't feel that post-avant needs to reach toward the mainstream. Eventually the mainstream and post-avant or experimental poetics will merge— that seems to be the trend. When will this happen? Not for a while. I've generally heard it said that any move to anthologize poets is way behind the current trends in poetics, sometimes 50 years behind. Pierre Joris’ and Jerome Rothenberg's Poems for the Millennium is perhaps the closest thing to an “anthology of the now” we have in poetry, and I don't think it's up-to-the-minute. Anthologies bring experimental verse to the classroom and seal its canonization. That's the path to mainstream readership and exposure to non-poet readers. Perhaps moves toward online anthologizing and the instantaneous possibility of the Internet will help post-avant poetry.
Speculation aside, I don't know if I'm as distressed about post-avant's lack of non-poet readership. I see a great amount of high-quality work emerging from the post-avant community, especially through editing Seven Corners. I like the directions post-avant is headed in: investigative poetics, destabilization of the egotistical sublime, improvisational poetics, contingent poetics, synthetic language, multilingual poetry, expanded translation, re-co-opting language through political-poetic experimentation, etc.—important and interesting stuff, for my money. I'm sure you notice the same thing in P.F.S. Post— the poets are there, the work is good, what else can we ask for? The commitment should always be to doing the work, the "real work" as Gary Snyder would say. If the work is good, the readership will follow. For me, being a poet, post-avant or otherwise, is about the process of it all, the practice, the involvement with the art and the critical discussion that it creates.
AF: I think “process orientation” is indeed important, much more than the petty rat-race that poets (myself included) often get sucked into. My own particular preference would be towards a new kind of Formalism. When you say Formalism, people think you mean rhyming poems, odes and Shakespearean sonnets. I don’t mean that at all. For me, Formalism means, quite simply, the willingness and devoted impetus to create new forms, whether they involve conventional melopoeia or not. For me, Picasso was the ultimate formalist, though he’s been tagged “Cubist” and lots of other things. Formalism ties in to seriality, working in series; you create a new form, then bend it and twist it every which way; exploring, seeing what works, milking it. Picasso spent decades proceeding in this fashion; as did Matisse, Monet, Braque, lots of the best visual artists. I suppose you could call Robert Creeley a serial poet—he came up with a signature style, and then most of his poems became (for the most part) variations on a theme. O’Hara’s Lunch Poems are another good example of serial poetry composition. Yet, no one talks about Creeley or O’Hara as Formalists, because, again, Formalism is associated with archaisms, tepid retreads of old forms.

Steve Halle: January 2007

BLACKBIRD #4

styrofoam packaging
w/ meat bloodstain discarded

a five of diamonds,
corners nicked off

the bud light can crushed, throw away

fuck sounds, a metal door
squeaks shut, silence, more moans

a half bag of mild winter’s salt waits unused

keyed up accord, she smokes
to trim her newly unpregnant body

she shows it

flower garden scuttled
a hip repair, metal-metal
an argument

snow falls one day,
melts next, murky
shoe run-off on white linoleum

market meet

in winter, potholes grow

a coffee can full of butts
sits off stoop right

crackpop wood burning,
whoosh of gas,
a scalding whirlpool
ups the buzz
and sleep, curtain.


BLACKBIRD #5

half-splashed in war paint
machete on canvas,

vomit is our Diaspora,
“yes, but”

idyllic in Germantown,
a depressed ex-model
tea for two by four
rots, or nails rust
from lack of proper
installation manual.

sip and taste misgiven weather.
rocks continue in bucket
love among the crushed coral

puzzle make hair, half-sip
or swallow before six.

a grubby denim hairline
inching spineward,
the paint taken off,

and soon.

emulsion in pomegranate juice,

non-proper, a defense of investment,
a denial of technique,
still-life withered grape above climate,
vin de glaciere tethered to tongue

hand swung and hamfisted

vision blurred by blood,

a nest, it ties it. a test
of flight in feathers of fancy.

© 2006 Steve Halle

Steve Halle: February 2007

VARIATIONS ON TWO PHRASES FROM OTHELLO

If I had a cap to tip,
a cup, or a ewe to tup,
to sit on my lap,
I'd toss her a tip
as she strips to trap
my lust, while my eyes
feast, and I'm tempted
again by the two-backed beast.


ELEGY / EULOGIA
For Lee Halle, 1928-2006
it’s a slow
steady, steady…
live, they
say. a slow
steady, steady
wind breathes
life into clay.

it’s too whip-
fast, Pallas, to Spring
whole from a head,
and after, this marathon
of whip-fast footfalls
run year-round your
ragged dead.


© Steve Halle 2007
check out this poet's blog-journal at http://www.sevencornerspoetry.blogspot.com 

Steve Halle: November 2007

#1

dear dangerfeld,

remember this riddle: in an opera box, Genius and Tyranny compete with constant elbows and jostles. the audience enraptured by distracting commotion misses the simple melody of dramas. by interwoven discourse, dinosaurs. the short arms flagellate an imperfection. a mixture of metallic materials contained in a matrix of zinc. perfect creatures and an extinction of teeth. remembrancing in a pac-man world i know the location of all the ghosts. yet still misstep. a failure to position my yellow orb in space and time. nowadays, memory is so first-person shooter. i see what i see but lurkers inhabit a finite beyond. like an infancy. no one remembers the self they create until they remember period. what if i created a beast of myself? o the pains of personhood! in the darkroom, i'm enamored of the moment before the chemicals bring forth image. then later the bubbles of a picture as it burns. in the infrared, i hear voices of the maestro. if the opera fails to satisfy, sleep. yet be forewarned, the fight goes on and despite a sharp rise in merchandise sales for the third quarter, Genius is well behind. when you awake, you will feel between scream and song. suspended like swung semiotics.
fevered and forgotten,
seria

#2

lustthrust as lastgasp of genial weather aflame to falling out bobby pins her hair is not flame-retardent. the heirs to a succession of depression dinkdrift along, caught in eddies the ditties in rivers of convolution. what said differs from what did in painful change and falling hipswell and sore and naming. she of no name not Arabella. if a spring comes after, it will be of declaring and declaratives. leaves and snow are white noise unheard. a leaf hits a lake wave the rushcrush an if makes sense it's not so for softening. underneath depression: lichens a lake a surface blind to flux nevertheless o Saussure declares of depth: deep fulfillment does no more than clarify our deepest longings. an assignation is thrill assigned to guilt in unlit fires the hermitage burns. a woman by my blue or her black knows or conscious of her aspect a leaf flutters away undecided wind a tree leaf aflame thinks "tongue-of-the-mind" awhirl in flutterflux autumn yields to the flavor of falling gone winter gone barren no buds beyond what beauty gone balded.

#3

myspace is aself athwart its own purgatorio. in dormancy transparency a her augmentations. silkspun in black expensive those unshy pithy about bulges. or labial trims. tree analogous to phases: root of imagniation, trunk of reality suspended betwixt, braches and leaves of a false consequenced real. shelter from the inclemency of season or barbarity of others. in a time of flame, all is pendulous. a season screams and Damoclesian. before a fifteen minutes. what does she think of how I think she thinks I view her? perceiving the leaves smells a whisper of burning. a falls is no nosegay not hinting at betrothal. not even in catching. now is the time to play Doctor. male enhancement a victor more than nature allows. what lies beyond or what crazy buds a throbbing star what darkness we follow what into cocooning discovery. on a possible other side a digital shell buzzes. self atop self a god-making god runs amuck. click upon click a pile. a sour smell crumbs on a sweatshirt.

© Steve Halle 2007

Steve Halle: May 2008

elegiac stanzas for m.r.

in fall on a lake a turnover a man with fake plastic watering can a lake a scum comes to turnover unseat the stability of a thermocline and a teeth live in lakes but in summer teeth go sleeping and dorsal fin on a surface unsharked in fall on a lake leaves sink to rot and the wind has teeth the meaning: to lurk a life spawn bloat die and wash ashore a man waters leaves unwithered somewhere fire near a lake an M house a landmark somewhere we can turn over a gascan a gascap something I've forgotten in fall a time of forgetting the aging man my fall if you know a lake certain places sunken ships and cars structure and superstructure a hide a lake grave the smell of fish washed ashore and decay an aging man thinks of turnover and gasoline he waters himself he is thinking of growing larger an aging lucid man uses gasfire to speak his fire himself flesh the message he sends and no lake enough water no lake of fire or human powermad leviathan enough to douse can say chain enough to stop the spread of firewords he speaks with a silenced mouth beside a lake a man in turnover he is fire the message he burns

elegiac stanzas for k.c.

a whistle is bell enough to Donne wheelsteel pestles memories & fleshes a bellwether herds of yellow an island yard to which i'm sailing altho purple of the plum trees lose leaves in red whether watercolor in dinghy wind but don't fight it rain in the face it stings don't fight to stay ahead of whether oars aside for Sisyphean challenge to find the most infinitesimal Russian doll a rock reaches the nadir of all whirlpools or dinghy contained by brained container ship holding the roots of memory hostaged rake ahead of leaves and flame-retardant chem ahead of wildfires conductor smokestack engineer laboratory lightning he sees his burden before premonition scintilla among words raked together in memoriam a name mouthy kid an essesnce upon the axis of his own growth in naming windy eye beasted hurricane sylvan wye a slave to whorls of task a question exclaims its own answer we found it don't fight is Traneing In proving where we cannot believe

elegiac stanzas for r.r.

paraphrasing Eliot: the irony is to be born kicking, drooling & shitting into a barren world. o eyes i hear with, ears i see with. is it not better? measure life in windows fifteen thousand one hundred forty five go by each flecked with drop spots particle particular where water had been but is no longer. two hundred fifty seven per pane average backed by winter fog. wheel & electric rail & Adolf the fury of approach furious even in stopping. metal-metal. weather strip. aboard-abort. it's overheated in here. ads. faces. words. phones ring but none answer, none speak. the route respirates (in-out, back-forth) its own infinity into graffiti, the unmanicured middle of a vacant lawn, weedy lot. time spelled backward is emit. heat, radiation, vapor. your building differs or i enter through a different door. you are the you i thought of you as being but something else simultaneously. head-sprung you i chucklestudy the absurdity of perverse o'er-urinal propositions. o the philistines mad to create! even to create the potential circumstances of creation. to create a game by which the circumstances are enacted in a ledger of probabilities one of which being a simulacrum of the intended creation. even a premonition of a second self. to hold: the center of the pendulum. the Strict Master w/ scythe keeps time in ears i see he claps they grow the train in rushes by as we hit the tunnels' stairs a misser in harvest time. i hear you; you're you & other. against the backlit city we dance arms enlocked, unsmiling. followed by the fool. Route 12 a road to Unicorporated Count(r)y seat of the Lethean imagination. fishbrains: newborn every ten seconds--achtung! the chess pieces too hot to finger. No One removes his cloak. curtain. drape over the mirror. sweated bangs hide the forehead forgets. the sun again the sun. eternity is three-handed: a card game beyond trump a mutation beyond holding a watch you cannot afford. i take my imagery from the Swiss from the dawn in a solemn dance away towards the dark lands while the rain cleanses cheeks

elegiac stanzas for a.r-g.

the pendulous chubby-white knee meat is a swing-year-old five in repetition amidships the blued plastic childflesh makes the upstroke of wind in recollection a rust-year-old time in saddle-gold the shoe while new in dismount learns the pleasure of gravity's grassjolt via the earth mechanism (1.ooomph.!) Exeunt and here insert a Shakespeare "" likely Lear again alas poor Yorick the Cutlass rumble is my skull scene spelled homophonically in the intersection over where plasticine angels chortled i was almost lost never in Denver! the terminal repeats a simple is not a phrase an apple of a simple to be LeBaroned in tow the child's simple too safety if not reverie to be backrevered one light seat to fancy must be forwarded in the paths' past impressions of a rickshaw glider glaze slide concussion a harmonic immolation of steel-steel to shatter traffic patterns my glass perfect crumple to peel in aftermath memoryskin orange of my sinus i've seen the other angel her sinews terrible-charitable lust cheek under halo i beseech & heal sirened away I See You Exeunt i knew him Horatio

elegiac stanzas for j.r.

Dear Lodi,
palomino in terms of bull by the balls and Arabian by means of its snow leopardine tail frozen in a sculpted mid-gallop when the horse's suffering ceases its cathartic valuation out comes the gun tubes out of her arms new tubes NOW to dull pain of coming dullard "Goodbye" i say over the rainbow your suffering no longer panolplied by the coloring of this aging man punished a sculptor whose talents are weak who ceases exploration in his creation but never ceases carving a space in the world in which to die picking out clothes casket plot affairs in order no different from the underporched dog who limped off arthritic to face things as he must alone a composer no longer finding justice among the notes admires Cage for the wrong reasons admonishes silences with noise unpacks bags and sets off for Bozeman in need of O Marie! I'm coming for you! a mountain view in lieu of carbuncles wrinkles corpuscles etched via marcottage, Élan vital, signed then titled "Crepuscles in Bronze"
Goodbye,
Idaho

© Steve Halle 2008

Steve Halle: July 2016

crooks on the inside means suicide
crops on the downside, pesticide
boy on the crib-side, infanticide
favor eyes over eyesight into homicide

she asked me to untie her,
chase away the lice, the worthy
few isn't me, which heaven sees

........................................................

a chain for your locket, the photo
drips from your mouthed wish,
my light oversees my greatest
pension; a shock of impatiens.

the rat beneath a Blue Line train
diseases Chicago underground

.........................................................

broke Bogart, broken bone-saw,
thinned-out source, the sun capsizes
Los Angeles, and if you skip the sun
it will make you sleepy, if you count

measured breaths, you can snore
among bodies; these mink coats
paid off well; now I'm sworn off kills

.......................................................

she gave in to "we," planted a house,
built a tree, still, needy, widgets belie
bees, a windy taboo, a yarn, pleased
by redundancy, Wednesday suits you.

she's the one she likes. all are pretty:
psalms and banshees like to scream
along; she likes to shoot his gun,
blown loose, left behind, if you wouldn't mind

c. Steve Halle 2007

Steve Halle: January 2017

Under the desk-
red plastic box
of Legos, from which
things were built
demolished brick
by plastic brick,
a place of origins
lays in wait

behind blue blinds,
a red light, an imagining,
made real by imagination.
The memory of its glow,
the ghost apparatus,
rising mind at bedside dawn.

Etched in the marble
of a city's empirical consciousness,
a dead man eternally bleeds.
Voices plead with his blood
for certitude, and construct

a reply, feels real enough
to pacify the weary mind,
the dry throat forming words,
yet the body reaches after
its own and another's carnality,
only flesh memories pacify,
not scripted visions of fantasy.

The lampshade grants
the bedroom understated light.
A turn-dial color TV,
one-hundred faux-fur paws,
magnitudes of material,
when love is pulled from warm hands.


c. Steve Halle 2006