Adam Fieled (State College, Pennsylvania, USA): "Room 510, Atherton Hilton"

Lightning illuminates the pale sky; rain
on the leaves sounds like waves. Snakes
rattle across the Earth, hold themselves
erect under the onslaught. Your body,
Jennifer— lax against a pillow, aghast
at the finality of clouds. Lampshades
are tan mushrooms— wallets stuffed
with obscure currencies. Some stray
Ruth may (later) come to wound me.
Swim for your life, junk-in-the-veins
Narcissus— Rimbaud is just a button
to push, guided by voices or not. Our
face of passion is one we had before we were born.

© Adam Fieled 1996

P.F.S.: Symbolists and Hallucinogenics

Nineties heritage, as it could start from State College, works under the aegis of what was being imbibed by the kiddiesnot uppers or downers (that much), but hallucinogenics. Many nights in the mid-to-late Nineties, the Nineties revolution in State College was a revolution-in-consciousness around skewered perspectives and visionary trances. State College was and is serviced, in this respective, by something beneath the surface which illuminates the entirety of Happy Valley, and central Pennsylvaniaa mystique emanating from Mother Nature herself, around a sense of earth magic resonating from the greener areas in and around State College. Nature breathes there. Hallucinogens heighten the sense of ecstasy and fulsomeness bestowed by greenery on the place.

No joke that, on the syllabus for true Nineties State College hipsters, a place was made for the French Symbolist poets of the nineteenth centuryRimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine. Hipsterism, in an era of turmoil, balanced imperatives other than just popular music and partiesreading culture in State College wasn't nothing. Other than the philosophy texts I was studying, up to and including Kant and over to the Deconstructionists (philosophy was my major at PSU, and my philosophy credits did transfer over to Penn), the heaviest lit in my brain were the Symbolists, who took all of our sense of being on trips and navigating mind-scapes and articulated what we couldn't, yet.

So, the lot of us had not just a sense of a soundtrack for our adventureswe had texts which meant something to us, which were also conduits to our personal (and collective) revolutions. The poem from Something Solid, Season in Hell: White Candle takes, and places this set of circumstances on the table for all to see. Rimbaud, in his masterwork, enacts an interior process in text of complete personal revision and revolution of self. My poem takes what was already transformative and makes it do double-time, enumerating not only a personal revolution but a revolution pertaining to the rigors of early marriage. Marriage and Rimbaud are not naturally simpatico; but the Nineties sense of unlikely juxtapositions (including State College's game of class-confounding) take, and make the contingencies which serve the poem resonate to a Symbolistic frequency. Such is one pertinent manifestation of Nineties-ism. Other, similar early work, like Room 510 Atherton Hilton and The dawn broke over our bodies, takes Symbolist impulses and radically eroticizes them, working along a vibe axis of enchantment/damnation, searching for a potent voice still youthful, still casual, in heaven/hell. If something or someone was supposed to be inhibiting our creativity, they failed.  

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On a more practical note: State College in the 90s was very strange. It should've been that, being an artist and coming from a background steeped in the arts, I would feel uncomfortable and disoriented there. After all, people associate State College and Penn State with football, Joe Paterno, and little else. Granted, PSU State College is a high-ranking school with several outstanding departments (including continental philosophy, which was my major), but its image or "face to the world" is all about athletics. It's just that I didn't find State College that limiting. There was an active underground scene in the arts in the 90s which gave the place some real vitality.

I moved to State College in '94 without formalizing any plans to do theater or anything theater related. I had spent the summer of '92 at Carnegie Mellon doing pre-college for acting, but it hadn't led anywhere. What theater at PSU had going that I was intrigued with was a weekly series of plays, written by students and graduate students and produced by them too: Outlaw Playwrights. By the spring of '95, I was actively writing plays, because the outlet to have them produced was there. By the the spring of '99 (I had left a script in late '98 once I'd moved to NYC), I'd had four one-acts produced.

State College had an active indie rock scene, too. Summer in State College in the 90s can't have been that much different than Athens, Georgia in the early 80s. The whole town was slowed down. Everyone involved in State College Indie lived in a room in a house and there were house parties all the time. What State College needed, but never got, was an R.E.M., to be a flagship bearer from State College to the world. There were candidates; the best and most popular candidate was a band of which every member was a local icon. They were musically great and very muscular (and as classicist about musical quality as early R.E.M.) but no one in the band could sing. If this band had had a Michael Stipe, the whole movement in State College would've come to the surface much faster.

People were fucking. To the extent that some arts scenes in America have problems with this, State College didn't. The sexual mores were pretty blase about faithfulness and seriousness, too. This extended even to life on campus; North Halls was considered the "artsy" set of dorms, and I lived there for a long time. The idea of doing pick-up routines, hanging around playing music and smoking pot, and grooving on what you were going to do in the arts when you "grew up" was de rigueur. What was important was that you could live on campus if you were an artist and still not starve to death spiritually. We all absorbed the 90s ethos, which amounted to a more tortured and world-weary version of the 60s. And most of us listened to the same music. Nirvana weren't too big in State College: Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, Guided by Voices, the Flaming Lips were all massive. I got into Nick Drake and Big Star on the side. Brit-Pop, particularly Blur, was around.

How did we relate to the football shenanigans? We didn't. We simply acted as if they weren't happening. In North Halls, on South Atherton Street, on West College, you could get away from that crap, and really do it, and mean it. Although visiting East Halls was always a fun education on what it meant to live on the dark side of things.

I liked my philosophy classes, and did well in them. They were a handful of other courses I liked. If I often flaked out on Gen Ed requirements, it's because I was a flake in many ways in those days. Philosophy engaged me; other than that, my mind was possessed by the arts. Or  intoxicants. By 1997, they were coffeeshops in State College where, if you knew the right people, you could buy gooballs over the counter. Or smoke a joint openly sitting out in the cafe. Bohemia, and the scandals in it.

The last six months I spent in State College in '98 were the happiest. It was a bacchanal to match anything in Philly, Chicago, NYC or DC. And if no one in the wider world knew or cared that it was happening, we were too young to notice or fret that this was the case. We'd get to that later.

From Seven Corners Poetry

A VILLANELLE

I have undone our bent decision laughing sadly.
Between wind and wound, the day pitches down.
We are a replicating setting devoid of greenery,

with hoes, tropes, and our mass machinery
with licensed language but without listening we drone.
I have undone our bent decision laughing sadly

as though to speck electric and forgo our power medley.
We divine to be verbs but end up as proper nouns.
We are a replicating setting devoid of greenery,

trying through the days’ languor to talk avidly
of words settling among sheets slipped facedown,
the stillness undone, our bent decision laughing sadly.

An embryonic engineering; an abracadabra of absently
searching the haphazard circuitry of words. Yes, this brown
field is a replicating setting devoid of greenery,

a discord of clouds at our throats, a soured creamery
left hastily for the rush of law, of light, of renown.
Still moving with our bent decision laughing sadly,
we replicate settings devoid of greenery.

© William Allegrezza and Simone Muench 2009

Adam Fieled (State College, Pennsylvania): from Answered Prayers and Willard Preachers

SONG FOR MARIA
My scarlet letter let you in
     We rallied on our separate beds
         The way to blue was flushed with ice
              Your tongue possesses everything

(lighten my,
watch my,
  blow my)

                        In any case the case is closed
                  We walk the streets, a trackless train
              My verdant prayer is your own skin
         I can't believe I'm free again

Relax—

Ice yr drink—

Think—

Pursue a purpose, lost in flame
     Become the scum you dote on, crab
          The sky, the ground, the square you are
                The realm of flesh is one lone purge...

mercy        mercy      mercy
     mercy                mercy

© Adam Fieled 1998

From Eyewear

AMARYLLIS CANADIAN TIRE

Near the return and exchange desk
the sink drain blare of Cash 11, Manager to Cash 11,
bulb-split amraryllises,
petals halogen rusted, garden bulimic,
stand sturdy in clay cups
while the mats at the automatic door grow streamy
with boot tracked snow, slush.

Ski coats shift sibilation,
each down-plump body
maneuvering the card table,
careful not to catch a leaf
above sparkle-glue bijouteries,
outsized flanges and piano hinges.

Amaryllis—
dismissed amid vulcanized rubber
boxing day sale perfume—
an ostentatious widow
price shopping at the discount tire.

© Tammy Armstrong 2006

From Equations: Antithesis

Here’s the complicated equation: if there isn’t much reality in human relationships, but you have to have them, you must embrace the responsibility of making them as realistic as possible. There can be no I am just this, you are just that: the realistic approach is one that fastens and binds to nothing. Jade will be over in a few hours and, as I prepare myself, I realize that to not-fasten leaves one perpetually unequipped. But somehow it doesn’t matter the clench of dissolution is so sweet that no one ever recovers from it. This clench has its own transcendental reality, and if what dissolution really is remains permanently out of our grasp, authoritative judgments must be suspended. Jade is smallish, about 5’2, with long, straight brown hair that falls down her back, delicate Virgo features, and a mien brought to level pitch by many wounds. When we make love, I am forced to be gentler— gone are the thrashings and poundings, and I find myself in a new position, playing a new role. Jade is an actress, and every gesture she makes is nuanced, deliberate, complex.
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Jade keeps pulling surprises. I’m stunned because she does this with a certain amount of levity, as though anything that startles goes up. The drugs she ingests take her to a realm of crystallized perfection, in which she cuts through open spaces like a human blade. Because I am willing to follow her, she initiates me into the mysteries of this realm. I find that my edge is blunted, because in many ways it is a false edge— artificially produced, unstable, past any form of measurement. Nevertheless, when we meet in the middle our edges coalesce. Alright, so this is artificial, she says; what and who gets to define the natural? Can you even tell me what the natural is? I admit that I can’t, and this admission transpires at a moment of maximum vulnerability for both of us. Are we razors or mirrors? Jade inhabits a world of hollow forms, which she hovers above— my role in her life is to contradict her thesis, that we might create a dialectic. As we move towards synthesis, Jade places one of her hands on my face, puts her forehead to mine. She knows that there is a sting in her hollowness for me, who would prefer to see fullness. But we go on like this for hours without knowing what or who we are. The depth of this place eats into my eyes, but (as Jade is learning) I enjoy being eaten— chewed, swallowed, digested.

Equations in Otoliths

 Pieces of Equations in Otoliths 19, from 2010, when I was still working on the first draft of the book.

From Equations (2011-2023): Thesis: Wendy Smith

Here I am in New England, getting killed. It’s summer, there’s weed around, booze. I’m perched on a ledge, feel I’m being pushed off. Look who’s here to visit: Wendy, two years older than me, who has two pieces coming out in Poetry. My first major piece has been out two months. We immediately become big shots to each other. Wendy has slightly bronzed skin, brownish hair lightened towards dirty blonde, a voluptuous body but a way of holding herself that suggests she finds her own body embarrassing, somehow unworkable. Yet even her diffidence is enticing; it makes guys want to ram through those defenses. Our equation sinks into place: I’m a young Poundian firebrand, she’s got all the spiritualized quirkiness of Emily Dickinson, but with sex appeal. We are standing, having drinks in my room, smoking cigarettes in the balminess (open windows, flies). There’s a party down the hall we abandoned to smoke in peace. Somehow, a wind current comes into the room and does a loop so that the door closes: a minor miracle, or a universe sign concerning what’s meant to happen next. It does: I reach over, begin with gropes, which soon turn into kisses. As we go into this, Wendy lets her hair loose from her ponytail. We are two geniuses, kings and queens, and this is within days of Heather, her positing of me as underling. Such is a life in the arts. When a surfeit of symbolic material lands on two souls, they (sometimes) have no choice but to act them out. As I enter her, Wendy becomes a symbol of my own artistic potency, and I of hers.
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As I pound away at Wendy, I notice this about her: she’s scared of sex. I am on top of her, she clutches my arms with her hands. It’s like she thinks I might go crazy if not held back. Her eyes are opened wide and looking into mine, glazed and petrified. I later find out that fear of sex is one of her great poetic themes. But we bang away on this tiny narrow bed with no sheets in this dorm room that must suffice for this ten-day residency. I try Jean’s tricks (variations) but nothing works; Wendy’s afraid. She’s denied the unction of a stream; I’m wearing a condom. This goes on all night, right through the New England summer 4 am sunrise. There is some gruesomeness to wolf-hour sunlight that only New Englanders know. She leaves me and there is poignancy to her leaving because we both know this cannot happen again; we have taken our roles too far. She can’t handle the moves that accrue to the life of a big genius and I don’t like this diffidence in her parts that hates sex, loathes feelings, wants to curl up underneath a crab shell and close its eyes forever. I’m twenty-nine, and I’m building relationships that are instantly obsolescent. Wendy, for one night, got to be a goddess, and me to be a god, only to find out that we’re just more normal people doing that hallowed, time-honored routine: fake it ‘til you make it.