Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "PICC: A Poet in Center City #18"

The old guard are reserved about me; they refuse to deal with Christopher at all. Christopher is pompous about being young and fresh; he’ll do anything not to be a bore. The sensibility finger points from Christopher to Morrissey and straight back to Oscar Wilde. As might be expected, Christopher is sexually ambiguous; he frequently makes flirtatious remarks in my direction. But, I notice over the first few years I know him, he only seems to date girls. Bisexuality is one of his adopted poses. Maybe. Joe Miller and Christopher, when they run into each other, have nothing to say. Christopher, at this time, has several poems out in the Columbia Poetry Review. Christopher’s writing is more avant-garde than Joe’s or Elizabeth’s; bits of Pound, Cummings, and “Pop” kitsch. I never lose the sense that Chris is based in Manayunk, which is its own place (at a tangent to Center City) and with its own ethos. Main Street, Manayunk, is posh like Walnut Street, but smaller, more sedate, and cozier. Drinking in Manayunk (as Christopher and I are wont to do) is peaceful and, especially in spring and summer, decidedly a glamorous experience. Some of the glamour Christopher has for me is Manayunk glamour, and he does come off sometimes as a Manayunk transplant in Center City. The first important reading I do with Christopher is at Villanova University (he’s an alumnus) on a cool spring night in ’01, with J.R. Mitchum. We read to about fifteen female undergrads, and they treated us like big-shots. Who could ask for more? Yet, in hindsight, I am destined to realize a number of things about Christopher at this time. Philly around us is swinging quite nicely culturally, thank you very much. Christopher appears to be an actively-engaged, first-tier participant, and in many ways he is. But it would take someone more seasoned than me to decipher what leaked out of him, as we drank on those Manayunk nights. The truth is, that by 2001, Christopher associates his life in art with something that’s already over, already in the past. I know the wide parameters that were set for him at Villanova— that the whole campus was familiar with him and his antics, not just with books but with movie cameras and video art, too. Just as Philly was swinging, the whole campus had swung around him. He was a hipster king, and did not lack for minions, either. I know these things, but Christopher is delicate about revealing what later becomes obvious— this time, on the Villanova campus, was when he was happiest by far. He had everything he needed. Where he lives in Manayunk as of ’01 is a mystery, but a dark-edged one. And Christopher avoiding Logan Square and my apartment is dark-edged, too. Christopher is a creature of myth, and mythology, and the nights he commuted from Villanova to Manayunk and back, in the prime of ‘d’ magazine, were the nights that lived up to his bohemian ideal. What ‘d’ was took Christopher’s myth and concretized it, gave it definite form. Everything for him coalesced around the ’zine and his editorship. Every once in a while one of us would say “I propose a toast…to ‘d’ magazine!” I erred, though, when I thought Christopher was ready to move on to new enterprises. He was stuck on his time as a big fish in a small pond. So we read at Villanova at in ’01 in a reasonable way, but Christopher was looking for something, a moment, he could never find again. While it was always wry to remember the rejection slip I’d received from ‘d’, Christopher was not forthcoming about how he schematized himself and was confined in his own myths. I found out later. 

 © Adam Fieled 2012-2023