More from Dusie

THE KNIFE GAME

In a dream, I'm waiting for someone to pick me up, for a red Ford with a broken steering wheel. I've killed the bride. I didn't mean to. She was smaller than me. Had several tiny blue sleeping pills and a lisp. Silver, she'd say, silver. Something dark swimming toward me in the house, like the game, every third girl moving to the next chair. We're all haunted by machines, strange metallic aches settling in my wrists. A woman in the liquor store asks: are you okay, is something wrong? I have several bottles of tequila beneath my dress. A tiny door beneath my sternum, a peep show girl. She looks kind of like your wife, before the accident. Before the hatpins and black gloves. I get used to your thumb in my mouth.
© Kristy Bowen 2007

P.F.S. : Visionary Deadness

As much as I was, and am, a participant in the Philadelphia Renaissance, there is something to me very inscrutable about it— probably because, as an organic conglomeration of socio-aesthetic energies (rather than a calculated, bought out bid to occupy cultural and commercial space), its movements (backwards, forwards, and sideways) are unpredictable, even loopy. Thus it was that by 2009, my attitude towards Philadelphia and Neo-Romanticism had undergone many modifications. Because I was moving up in the ranks as a heavily published and publishing avant-garde poet (my first print full-length text had come out through Otoliths in 2007), and was doing so with no particular support from the university whose fellowship was largely funding me (Temple), I was in a very ambiguous social position. The cohesive, Highwire mid-Aughts form of PFS had collapsed; Mary and I united again for '07 and then separated by '08; I had largely lost touch with Abs; my confrontations with Jenny Kanzler were inconclusive. The Philly avant-profs seemed undecided as to whether I should be recognized by them or not; by this time, I was not only publishing alongside them, but when a lengthy review of my second print book appeared in Jacket Magazine 37 that summer, it seemed to me that I had brokered a high enough position for myself that I would be fine, thank you, with or without their sanctimonious blessings. The popular series I had going on my blog Stoning the Devil at the time, regarding "post-avant" as a possible movement in poetry, confirmed this— I figured prominently in dozens of high-level theoretical online arguments, and my name was being used in conjunction with many older, established poets.
Then, by August, my final hook-up happened with Abs. Worth noting that as of summer 2009, Abs was still lithe and gorgeous. Not to mention, a brief YouTube celebrity. In 2010, Abs looks deteriorated rapidly, though she remained lithe. Her lifestyle got the better of her. All this coincided with the beginning of my second fellowship year. I did not have to teach, and had already passed the dread comp exams, which did its sometimes wonted task of upping my IQ and (more importantly) steeling my nerves. As I prepared to move my writing into interstellar overdrive, it was difficult not to notice that the rich personal life I had enjoyed all through the Aughts had dissipated into a fragmentary state. Mary, against everyone's advice and wishes, had left Philadelphia to do an MFA in Manhattan; she had already earned a PAFA certificate; but we corresponded, and she left comments on my blog with some frequency. The absence of Mary, Abs, and the other P.F.S. characters left a vacuum in my life, now filled by a rigorous dedication to forging ahead on all fronts as a writer and theorist. What I wanted to do was to expand the Apparition Poems section of my Blazevox e-book Beams into a full-length manuscript; and to do this by broadening the parameters of what could be called an Apparition Poem. I already had some material written which fit this bill. I noticed the new poems getting richer, more assured, both formally and thematically, towards an attempt at the timelessness I loved in Keats' Odes and sonnets.
All through September and October, an eerie feeling hung in the air around me, and around Center City in general— a sense of something misplaced, and of energies moving, as Abby was, in strange subterranean directions. For two weeks in November, Philly enjoyed unusually warm weather— I could not write, and suffered a minor nervous breakdown, distinguished by strange, shamanistic visions of grisly murders and violence in general, alternating with a sense that Center City was suffering a major internal meltdown. The Aughts party was over. If blood had been spilled around me, I had not seen it— but, by late '09, I felt it, and her (Abby), intuitively. The recession had become a formidable claw. 
I also made an interesting decision in the middle of my shamanistic voyage— rather than assume that my visions qualified me as crazy, I would take what was visionary about my experience and embrace it. This played itself out in tactile terms— at one point on the voyage, I called, in a state of panic, to be taken into custody, so to speak. I went out of my apartment, and when I came back, they, the mental health goons, were waiting outside the building in an ambulance. Following a decisive instinct, I snubbed them, and resolved to take care of the rest of my voyage myself, rather than be tamed by others for my immersion in the visionary. As it turns out, all I needed to do was sleep for a few days. When I had regained my strength, I was ready to write on a level I never had before. The shamanistic voyage, macabre, and solitary, as it was, had been worth it.
........................................................................................................

First things first: the unavoidable, primordial question must arise: what is Neo-Romanticism? What Romanticism is tends to emphasize the personal, and the idea of the autonomous artist who does things, creates, for him or herself. Or, say creation ensues to fulfill a personal wish, or power drive. It is implicit in the personal nature of Romanticism that the personal is buttressed by a sense of passion or conviction, which is also personal: the individual finds themselves seized by a passionate conviction as to the validity of personal expression. This is usually pursuant to the revelation of a personal, individualized gift, a unique talent. To make a long, cumbersome story short: the Romantic artist is supposed to, as the saying goes, mean it. The backbone of personal conviction and personal sincerity equips the Romantic artist to “mean it” with as much passionate intensity as can seize an individual human being. So, again to compress a long, cumbersome story, “Neo” along with “Romanticism” simply means a new group of artists who express themselves out of passionate, individualized sincerity, and with personal, individually gifted equipment. This, against the backdrop of a post-modern aesthetic landscape that demeans the individual, and, to be quizzical, “doesn’t mean it.” Post-modernity frowns on the gifted individual, and on individual conviction. Neo-Ro takes for granted that post-modern irony, impersonality, effete half-assed-ness, and auto-destruction of the history of art has grown stale, over-circumscribed, and parochial. Perhaps a bunch of gifted individuals could put some sparkle back on America’s cultural surface. That’s the presupposition.

More from moria poetry

SUNKEN / LOST

for white almighty
the drop

around you opium
sunken lost

around bright
last push

your the mine
in dreams belt

probing what eyes
pleasant in nails

the eyes the ground
don’t vein arm your

popped yellow out-back
on embarrassment

needle once took
break moving

year hero
said too slowly

closing i read you far
your you and

releasing the me
head squeezes fast catch

might vein fingers
want gone

the poking cigarette
strike old fascination

© Andrew Lundwall 2004

From moria poetry

THE NEWLYWEDS CLIMB A FENCE

After the light and the chandelier scraping,
the double-star making, it's hard to face
the red carpet, the casuistry show,

the vacuuming and dusting, the unquiet eye.
Do I wish I could give you "a bath of gold apples"
or "all the songs that sleep in history?" Maybe

this slant alternative is better-plucking lashes
from a winter magazine, little Domestic
winks, if we want, like Italian frames.

Night boats might ferry us further, my friend.
Between our ribs, negatives of future architectures,
textures mind-nestled in flesh splinter-tender.

Let the bog-dwellers dream of American cars,
however grateful for "the Woman and the Dog."
We praise them all and drink our grape juices.

© Kristy Odelius 2007

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.
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As feminists have duly noted, the archetypal figure Psyche in Keats’ Odal Cycle is not exactly empowered. She provides fodder for Keats to create a convincing imaginative vista from; her overt sexuality, her beauty and vulnerability create a space for her to unite the Heaven and Earth. She is a goddess who can descend to earthly tactility and palpability. As she unites all realms, Keats’ reaction in text is intellectually, emotionally, and physically satisfying for him; but we are never shown whether that sense of satisfaction is shared by Psyche. We may choose to believe that Psyche, being a goddess, is loftily sublime over the kind of impulses which create the congeries of Keats’ reaction to her; or it may be that Keats wishes us to believe that Psyche mirrors him precisely, as a tangent (also) to Echo as a mythological figure. If feminists disrespect Keats’ version of Romanticism, it is because, by not granting Psyche a voice, he exudes a sense of supercilious condescension to her/ in her direction. Perhaps. But this is not an issue in Trish: A Romance. Trish is introduced to us, in the poem’s opening sequence, as having painted a masterpiece called The Vessel, which we see hanging in a prominent public position. The Vessel is an imaginative vista opened by Trish herself; we perceive her, instantly, as both having a voice and carrying the clout to make it publicly heard. More than that: she is a creative artist of some stature; we might call her, in the adumbrating of Trish mythology, a Creatrix. If the Creatrix, or any Creatrix figure, is to take her place as a Romantic archetype next to Psyche, and other passive Muses, the first recognition of how this may happen is the recognition that the Creatrix has a unique will-to-power. She is able to unite the intellectual, emotional, and physical compartments of her consciousness, by imposing her imaginative will on the world. Trish’s Philadelphia is specifically a stage on which she can act out the complex dynamics of her will’s complications, intricacies, and idiosyncrasies. Mary Evelyn Harju herself was, indeed, a formidably dramatic personality. 
So, if Trish becomes a Creatrix, we may see her as an empowered version of Psyche. She is post-Odal; sexualized, a figure of myth, vulnerable, down in the dirt, but an active, passionate player in the world nonetheless. There is no room for a Creatrix in the Odal Cycle; Keats needs to keep Psyche in place, and his starry-eyed Romanticism and spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling center on a version of the feminine which poses no threats to Keats’ masculinity. Keats, with Psyche, can afford to be androgynous; sex with her can be “sweet,” “tender,” and “quiet”; because she, as an archetype, cannot speak back to him. Trish is a back-talker, who assumes parity (or superiority) to the males of the species, always. Trish, being self-made, will not brook interference, either with her art or what happens in her boudoir; and the protagonist of Trish accepts this, even as it lands him in deep water when he falls head over heels in love with her. The Creatrix is thus involved in complex intimacies.
The complexity of Trish’s character, and the intimacies attendant on it, is involved with trying to balance a creative and personal life; how to be impersonal and personal simultaneously. Such is the way of the Creatrix; an archetypal figure who achieves states of balances by imposing her creative will on the cosmos. That feature of Aughts Philadelphia: a shared supposition among creative participants that women have as loud a voice as men, and the chutzpah to make these voices heard on high public levels: is one that Trish goes out of its way to reinforce as more than mere myth. So it was. That’s why, at the end of the day, feminists should have reason to be satisfied both with Trish and with Aughts Philadelphia. The arrival in the world of several formidable Creatrixes coincided with so little resistance to their status as powerful presences that sexism in Aughts Philly was a no-go. Our Romanticism, which was also a kind of transcendentalism against mundane reality, was a collective embrace of complexity, as well as a sustained attempt to create a shared imaginative vista, all through the Philadelphia and West Philadelphia houses, bars, galleries, coffee shops, and the rest. What we created has many things in common with the imaginative vista opened by Keats’ Odes— a sense of cognitive enchantment, and a recognition of the mind’s capacity both to discern enchantment and then to re-create, in imaginative ways, what we have discerned— even as what a Creatrix is takes the Odal Vision, Odal Cycle, and Odal Stage, and utterly transforms it into a realm in which women, as well as men, can express how their own personal version of enchantment descended upon them.
.........................................................................................................

Ironic, in a piece about luxury, sensuality, and ease, that it’s taken me so long, until 2024, to finish Trish: A Romance. The portion of the Aughts Philly dream which has remained crystalline over twenty to twenty five years— emancipation from limiting belief systems or creeds, freedom to live expressively, and, most importantly, manifestations of extreme, libertine-worthy excess— are not difficult to define or express. The difficulty in the Trish: A Romance textual journey, which began in 2009, is to render luxury, sensuality, and ease, while remaining faithful to complexities built into myself, Trish (Mary) and Tobi (Abby) as characters. Not all libertine models are complicated people; we were. Also worth noting about 2009; the last real chunk of time I spent with Abby Heller-Burnham, in the 23rd and Arch apartment (Westminster Arch), involved Trish: A Romance. I wanted to tape Abby talking about Mary, narrating their friendship, to see if I could use it. Thus, one section of the book (I thought) could be Abby-on-Mary. Didn’t work. When the tape began to roll, Abby wanted to talk about herself and her travails, which were gruesome in late-summer ’09. Abby was not a happy camper then, and all the ease, the bliss of the six, seven, eight years before were gone. I was never to interact with her significantly again.
Yet, Trish: A Romance remains, a testament to a period of time with many miracles built into it. Like the travelogue writings of Christopher Isherwood, the text dwells on a surfeit of characters who don’t just dream but live wild adventures and romances. The bizarre formality of the piece— seven sets of six sonnet-length stanzas— was invented so that the action could be conveyed in a vessel (as Mary would say) lean and mean enough to make the ride a brisk one. The miracle isn’t just in fornication and carousing— it’s the fact that said fornication and carousing was done in a spirit not just of affection but of love. At the end of the day, these are characters who love each other. This, notwithstanding the concluding revelation of the protagonist— that Trish has remained at lease partially unknowable to him. The point is, the characters in Trish: A Romance are not scallywags. They have, and notice, their own emotions. Even as accusations of self-indulgence are not necessarily misplaced. People will take Trish: A Romance not just to Christopher Isherwood but to Brett Easton-Ellis; that much sex, drugs, youthfulness, and rambunctious indulgence does form a sense of symmetry with Less Than Zero. I would only choose to say that in Trish, a sense of emotional/spiritual engagement, rather than dispossession, takes all the Philly-L.A. energy and harnesses it into a form more human, more likeable than the Easton-Ellis book. Remember: the three protagonists are all artists, creative types. La Boheme? No. Something unique, that’s just what it is. See for yourself.

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