Andrew Duncan: Oxytocin

I used to have this experience with someone incredibly well-informed who would lecture me, late at night, about a hormone oxytocin, linked to trustfulness, suckling, orgasm, and internal pressure control and the release of fluids. I think she may have been making a point about how untrustworthy I was; but how much I might have learnt if I’d been able to stay awake. I always got confused and called it “oxytoxin.” Oxytocin is the messenger which makes fish release roe, or spawn, vascular pressure displacing the ocean. So we’re talking about a blissful regression in which we immerse and become weightless, the inner and outer waters flow together, and the ocean itself becomes a sexual medium, in which spates of precious fluids form spirals and constellations, sight is replaced by ripples flowing along the skin, personal identity and the time sense disappear. I can never remember this clearly. Sandor Ferenczi wrote a book Thalassa which says that we turn into fish during coupling. I thought it was nonsense. Fish?

Chard deNiord: Yeats

Yeats’ poetry spans several decades, beginning in the first half of his career during the last decade of the 19th century with an idyllic Irish muse that morphed after meeting Pound just prior to WWI, his breakup with Maude, and then his marriage to George into his great second career in which his obsession with magic transformed into not just A Vision but his great poems of loss, apocalypse, and political elegy, despite his fascist sympathies. He transcended Edwardian manners and propriety with a vatic sensibility that combined Irish mythology with Modernist imagery and themes. This is very cursory. But there you have enough to see how Procrustean it would be to call Yeats merely Edwardian. And how dare you question whether I have anything intelligent to say about Yeats? Just kidding. Say it all you want. So: a few final words about Yeats. He doesn't have to be Edwardian, just as he doesn't have to be Victorian per se in the first half of his career, although he certainly has traits of both. But in his case the parts simply don't add up to make wholes in either case. He's too anomalous, sometimes in an egregious way, to be Victorian. Edwardian, or Modernist. Pretty sui generis. So why are literary aegis tags necessary, especially with regard to poets like Yeats and Frost? And I guess I'd add Hardy too. Such tags are tails wagging the dogs. Let ‘em go.

Steve Halle: Indeterminacy

“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 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 to inhere, 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 inadequate 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.

Robert Archambeau 2: Commodification

About commodification: some people have gone to extremes to keep their work from being chewed up by the culture industry, but in the end real purity (which I’m not so sure is even desirable — words like “purity” make me nervous) doesn’t seem very possible. I mean, think of the people who’ve gone to extremes in trying to avoid being chewed up by the culture industry. There’s a real irony to the fate of the Dada crowd, for example. They started out trying to short-circuit the whole gallery and museum system, doing things like presenting mass-produced objects as art and displaying their work next to axes that could be used by viewers to destroy works they didn’t like. Fast-forward several decades, and the National Gallery of Art is reverently presenting their work. Anyone coming at the exhibit with an axe would be hustled out the door and into a squad car in no time. Or think of Jeremy Prynne, for many years England’s most deliberately obscure poet: for a long time he chose to publish in the most weird little, non-commercial venues, and stayed off the reading and lecture circuits, too. Now you can order up his poems on Amazon.com, he’s being talked about for some of the big prizes, and he’s a star in China, where one of his recent books sold 50,000 copies. In the end, the big cultural institutions devour whatever they want. I suppose we might ask whether the institutions are changed in the process. I think there’s something to this. Certainly the boundaries between “mainstream” and “otherstream” seem more fluid than they used to.

Philly Free School: Thug-ism

For the Philly Free School, as a collective, to cut through the blarney, all the blarneying levels of post-modernity as a construct, we chose a tack of extremity, extreme disobedience— enlightened elitism/classicism, expressed with edges left in of doubt, foreboding, ghostly/apparitional presences, which accrued to all of us as we ploughed through the Aughts in Philadelphia. It's not just that, as has previously been stated, we skipped intermediate steps from post-modern comic auto-destruct modes to our own version of centuries-encompassed-from-America apotheosis— the lot of us, individually and together, were little thugs, and, in an ironic fashion, the "thug" image of Philadelphia in the American press (derived, mainly, from the press's derisive desire to cover the whole city and environs with or in South Philly) does work for P.F.S. Elitist/classicist/thug-ism— that's a new one for the American art scene to deal with, and one which (to my knowledge) has never been seen in America before, wide safety nets be damned.

Dovetailing with this, it needs to be said, for those who care— despite the non-encumbrance of socio-sexual and socio-aesthetic freedoms in Aughts Philly, the landscape we inhabited was not without violence. That's one constituent level of the P.F.S. aesthetic which should make New York cringe, whether they then opt to turn away or not— the edge expressed around carnality, where sex and death manifest simultaneously, and the urgency around carnality and its contexts carries with it darkling undercurrents of physical violence, murder, mayhem, and the dissolution of boundaries which renders these things cognitively discrete. The razor's edge approach to drugs was one not unfamiliar to all of us, including Mary, Abby, and Jenny too, from PAFA to the Highwire and back.

If I stand like a thug behind our collective thug-ism, it's because the elitism/classicism built into our creations' formality and formal renderings in general lends the entire P.F.S. enterprise enough elegance and starkly imaginative gorgeousness that whoever in the United States elects to butt their heads against our brick walls will probably lose a substantial amount of blood. The whole broke-down contextualization of P.F.S. might be a joke if we weren't also funnier than the semi-serious po-mo joke anti-art/junk-art crew, who (their master narrative runs) make us laugh to ourselves in our despair, or make us laugh now to despair later, but may have to face a long-term socio-historical prognosis of cat-calls and thrown tomatoes, from a Campbell's soup can or not. We were, and remain, classicists with pistols.

Another important level of awareness, for those interested in P.F.S., and the unique congeries of contexts around us, socially and sexually— P.F.S., and, in fact, all the major Philadelphia Renaissance sectors, were as completely and totally street as we could possibly be. We weren't watching Philly street-life from the sidelines and taking notes— most of us spent most of the Aughts on the front-lines. By the time I wrote Apparition Poems, the vitality of Aughts Philly street-life was receding into entropy and atrophy— but the book, nonetheless, is a reaction to a decade spent living in the street, as it were— and doing so by maintaining at least some thug-level street-smart survival skills, against the dealers, impostors, and clowns who perpetually threatened me, and us.

In fact, given how tight certain restraints can be on Philly street-life, it is amazing to me that we were granted a solid decade to play around in. I did feel, especially in the early Aughts, a sense of being personally charmed— that when I walked and rode the Philly streets, a beneficent cosmic force was covering me, encasing me in a kind of shield— nothing could hurt me or touch me unless I wanted it to. I was young, of course, and (possibly) wrong— but standing at the corner of 13th and Ellsworth in South Philly at 2 am, or walking home at dawn from Nemon Buckery's Halloween party on 49th Street to 21st and Race, that sense of being guarded was acute. Abs, Mary, Jeremy, Jenny (not to mention Mike Land) all seemed to feel the same way— and we would hit the streets, go anywhere and do anything. Had we not been thugs, or at least partly carried ourselves as such, I'm sure someone would've killed us, before we began; and there's nothing soft about our body of work, either.

Philly Free School: Class, more

About P.F.S. and class— most of us were raised middle-class. The European classicism we espoused, as one component part of our collective aesthetic, does leave us open to accusations of bourgeois interest and prejudice. A hard-line Marxist would have to say that any form of aesthetic classicism is inherently bourgeois. But our demonstrable downward class mobility, inverts this— none of us inherited a serious amount of money, and we all lived hand to mouth in Philly in the Aughts. We were authentically Bohemian— not ashamed, and materially compelled to work retail jobs and occasionally starve. The whole catalogue of our carousing exploits had to happen in this context— and the magic of Philly in the Aughts was that we pulled off these exploits somewhat gracefully and unselfconsciously.

For example, during the years we spent bar-hopping, money for drinks made for an empty fridge at home. If I wanted a midnight snack, it would have to be bread and water. Not to mention that I met Abby and Mary, Mike Land and Nick Gruberg from working retail at the Rittenhouse Square Barnes and Noble in Center City.

Material perks came in and out of our lives— when Abby, Mary, and Jenny were attending PAFA in the early Aughts, each was allotted a personal studio. They could both work and crash there. I spent many nights with Mary in her studio, with its checkered linoleum floor and huge bay windows, on Cherry Street. She had a pull-out couch. After PAFA, the trio maintained co-op studio spaces, but never a completely self-run personal studio again.

All of us had good luck with people throwing drinks and drugs at us. The communal vibe in Aughts Philadelphia was very intense; if you were on the inside, and had something worthwhile to offer sexually, socially, or artistically, everyone was encouraged to share their goods and services. This was especially important for Mary, who was not just a pot-head but a fully fledged pot addict. One truly surprising thing about Aughts Philly is that all the different sectors maintained their own classicist ethos— The Philadelphia Independent offered their classicist form of quirky urban hipster journalism; the Making Time DJs were as classicist as they could possibly be about what they played; and then us. Sharing your intoxicants expressed complicity with both this gestalt sensibility and the will to get trashed beyond it.

Most of us, in Philadelphia in the Aughts, felt an acute sense of being "in" something. I did, but was circumspect about it, and about expressing this "in" from the inside, because I was only intermittently confident that anyone would ever notice us. Owing to a stable, secure body of artistic work having issued from these nexuses, I have more confidence now. This confidence is a compensation for the intense socio-cultural aridity and lethargy of the recessional Teens, as the Twenties take wing.

Abs and I were two of the less political Free School artists. For myself, I felt that the variegated life I was leading made its own kind of statement in Aughts America, and I'm sure Abs would say the same, possibly with more emphatic force, owing to gender and "queer" issues, which have as much permanent relevance as anything else.