20th Anniversary

October 10th marks the precise twentieth anniversary of P.F.S. Post taking to the airwaves. Over twenty precise years, I'd like to offer thanks to everyone who has participated in the site and helped to make it a memorable one. To mark the twentieth anniversary, The Metallic Autumn, by Andrew Duncan, which first appeared on P.F.S. Post a month into its existence, seems appropriate. Thanks again. 

Rain silvers the slate roofs, smoke blows through the rain.
The hawthorn hedges are a red haze.
The hills above the town are blurred by mist.
Beauty is stripped away.
Light is pierced with nostalgia, slow and lax.
Decadent season.
Water forms as a haze between light and rain.
Flowers and leaves decaying in the streams
mix earth and water in slow dispersal.
Blur steals over visible forms,
smoke and moulder stir in the ash of light.
The pools are sorrowful, the sips of flowers split.
I find a single apple whole after all these weeks,
skin whole and pulp firm as sapwood.

In a slush of softness and excrescence,
late berries languish on the tendrils,
lush to dissolution, spoilt with juice,
blacker than nature with a white tinge like regret.
In the shadow of the sunny fronds,
where dew never dries, they drink and rot.
Rain on the leaf, dew on the bine. Mites
finger the abacus of their flesh.
Rain silvers the roof-slates, smoke blows through the rain.

Season of memory and regret.
Barrels coop up the giddy hearts for recollection.
The animals grow lazier and furrier:
search out shelter and apathy!
The heady noon is gone, the soft inner of the blossoms
and their offer. The rarer veins are frozen in their course.
We waited for the glance of the sun.
The osier of bare birch twigs seems like smoke
against the red glow of the Apple going down.

Rain silvers the roof-slates, smoke blows through the rain.
A swirl of leaves like heavy fire
pours through the tamping of a world on the wane.
The darkened sky withholds the weary forms.
Crepuscle, dissolution of concepts;
season of case-hardening ash,
season of ferment and thorough steeping.
Fruits infringe their brinks and stream their brims
overlapping the thick pulp of fallen things.

The principle of ice shall come to judgment
on the lusts of Nature, searching out the flaw.
Bare branches detach pure metre from an obese rhetoric.
Blue glare shall stake out the torpid mist,
pure-axile crystals shall affirm the morass.

© Andrew Duncan 2001

P.F.S.: Trish (preface)

For those of us born in the 70s and 80s, who lived through the Aughts in Center City and West Philadelphia, our perception of Philadelphia will always be colored by the sexualized over and undercurrents which animated, charged, and lit the Philly arts scene on fire with sexual energy during that time. Many of us were annoyed by the misconception the media created of a not-fully-sexed Philadelphia; but we were disarmed on that level. I have said elsewhere, and it bears repeating, that if the city of Philadelphia has a sun sign it is Gemini. It is another way of saying this: Philadelphia from within looks and feels vastly different than Philadelphia seen in a cursory way or from a distance. The sultriness around our scene was warmer and more human than the scenes we had all read about in New York and L.A.: we weren’t motivated by money or fame as such, or the desire to create and maintain images of/for ourselves. The hot blood that ran through McGlinchey’s, Dirty Frank’s, the Good Dog, and all our other hang out venues, had some actual romance in it; we all went so far as to care about other people. We were a get-close crew. The Gemini twist, as ever for Philadelphia, is that if the seeds we plant ripen correctly, Philadelphia may go on record as one of the hottest scenes in the history of the arts, thus overturning a century of bad press, neglect, abuse, and widely spread misinformation, and a corrupt arts-dissemination system with it.

Art and life have a way of co-mingling which can be difficult to finesse for an author. Because I dared to place her image on the cover of this book/pdf, I might as well announce what will be obvious to those who knew me and the Philly scene during the Aughts: the female protagonist of Trish is modeled on Philadelphia painter Mary Harju. The life I built with Mary (and with the Philly Free School) was highly unusual; we were artists without being rich kid dilettantes; lovers without being mutually exclusive; Penn students and graduates who went out of our way not to be academic; and human beings who tossed and turned on our own emotional waves without trying to fake balance or calm. It was a scattered life we had, and a haphazard one; but the love and affection we shared was genuine. In fact, if I have ever had a Laura or a Beatrice, it is Mary. The difference, of course, between myself and Plutarch and Dante, is that Mary and I consummated our relationship very fast. The heat we had for each other never quite let up, either. As per Mary’s house (4325 Baltimore Avenue), as is seen here, in the early Aughts— it was an experience in itself, filled as it was, always, with artists, musicians, and other bohemians. On certain nights, everyone in the house would be intoxicated on something or other. Many nights I spent there, I felt as if the entire house had ascended into deep space, into some other, enchanted, sensuous realm. I have memories of floating down hallways and stairs. Mary was a wonderful playmate and an excellent mate in general. She was never boring. And, to the extent that I hope this piece conveys the intense electric excitement I felt in her presence, it is a reminder that these elevated feelings are always possible, even during a Great Recession. It is the Gemini stare of Philadelphia down the barrel of a shotgun.

For autumn '25

EPHEMERA

“Your eyes, that once were never weary of mine,
are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids,
because our love is waning.”

                                            And then she:
“Although our love is waning, let us stand
by the lone border of the lake once more,
together in that hour of gentleness
when the poor, tired child, Passion, falls asleep:
how far away the stars seem, and how far
is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!”

Pensive they paced along the faded leaves,
while, slowly, he whose hand held hers replied:
“Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.”

The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves
fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once
a rabbit, old and lame, limped down the path;
Autumn was over him: and now they stood
on the lone border of the lake once more:
turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves,
gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,
in bosom and hair.

                      “Ah, do not mourn,” he said,
“that we are tired, for other loves await us;
hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
are love, and a continual farewell."

© William Butler Yeats 1889

P.F.S.: Baudrillard's Conspiracy (2006)

Got around to reading Baudrillard's Conspiracy of Art. Baudrillard's main thrust is that after Duchamp, the banal got tangled up into art, creating what he calls a "transaesthetic" society; a society where everything could possibly be art. Warhol then took this to the extreme by turning "art" into a mechanized routine, taking out everything transcendent in art and replacing it with plain quotidian artifacts, or the simulacra of these. Baudrillard claims, staying on the surface of things, and accepting surface-level narratives of art history without inquiry or objection, that this influx of banality has destroyed art as we know it, and that art has reached an advanced stage of "nullity," with the art community frantically trying to pretend that this hasn't happened. It will be seen, over a durational expanse, whether Heller-Burnham will prove to be the antidote to this melange of circumstances, contexts, established aesthetic mores and neglected ones, or not. The melange, of course, being traditional, parochial America. 

Significantly, Baudrillard never mentions poetry. so it's clear his critique is aimed at visual art and visual artists. Nevertheless, I took his rather vulgarized critique somewhat personally. In Language/post-avant circles, there is a somewhat prevailing ethos that "anything can be poetry/make a poem." Certain experimental poets have used this as an excuse to substitute banality for transcendence, nullity for depth, simulation for authenticity. Authenticity, of course, is a dicey issue here; objections to the lyric "I" and long-standing quandaries inhering in it, and in poet-extolled authenticity, are commonplace in avant-garde circles. I mean authenticity on a level which is meant to imply seriousness, a commitment to aesthetically and not merely conceptually or politically valid or relevant poetics; an approach not wholly ironic. And irony not used, as it often is by Conceptualists, as an excuse to abase, belittle, and sanitize an art-form into advanced rigor mortis obsolescence.

Pursuant to this reading of Baudrillard, and as I've discussed elsewhere, I've come to the conclusion that the bravest thing a poet can do now, paradoxical as it seems, is to "warp" backwards, towards form and narrative. Warping back per se is the bete noir of post-avantists in general; but, as Baudrillard noted, going forward into even more vapid banality is not much of an option either. A brave retreat towards formalism and narrativity is a valid move because, as you cannot step in the same river twice, a narrative-thematic movement backwards/forwards would have to create new forms to reflect new circumstances and contexts. We wouldn't be going back in a merely imitative or Centrist sense; we'd be warped forwards/backwards by our emphasis, our preoccupation with content, specifically as regards crafting poetics out of an engagement with the most serious issues poetry and philosophy can address, the primordial ones. Philosophy in poetry, dialectic or not, nullifies whatever the transaesthetic impulse might be. It also nullifies irony, when irony is employed, as it often is by the Conceptualists, to emasculate the aesthetic.

From Dusie

ROPE DANCE

Morning is a burned thing, Louise.
Spoiled like a shuttered house.

Paper everywhere— under the beds,
in the dresser, floating
the pale skin of soup.

You make a cage of your fingers
to keep out light. Chicken bones
to keep out the dead. Grey
where it’s all wearing at the ends.

Your braids still tied in a V
when the dark comes to you like a cat.
A long hallway. A girl in pink
sateen against a backdrop of stars.

When you shut all the latches,
shut your eyes. A little gin, Louise.
Make one turn, then another.

© Kristy Bowen 2006

From Pirene's Fountain

EMILY BRONTE

these windy slopes are shorn
of the things which make life comfortable:
broad trees, broken bread, the swell

and supple curve of a lover’s back.
I sit here by my window, catch
the rough, sweet scent of heather in my nostrils

and write of death and love entwined
like adders together. The poetry
lies wild in my veins, the poetry

of granite skies stabbed by rocky outcrops,
the giving spring of turf, the taste
of solitude like aloes on my tongue,

the bare, unchanging moors, which take
my sisters and myself with mute indifference
and conquer under soil all our passion.

© Alison Croggon 1991

From Sawbuck Poetry

MARCH

Moth-bodies of greenhouses at mid-
morning stretch out—
a syllable— cross the previous
trickster swamp. That little mister
where nozzles ought to burn,
crying injun at every undisclosed
box with wheels,
box with no way of returning.
Just hit me with it— Felicia says—
if I can get me and my boyfriend a pack—
intruding on this poem. Which one,
Felicia: did she mean
it, kindly? Can the passive be
as aggressive as you feel?
In my army and about my predicament
there are meteoroids covered
in the grass, there are prairie
skirts hovering, hairless as present.
I will be with you presently.
This unmade river not
done in this instant
is, shows.

© Jen Tynes 2007