Featured Poet: Adam Fieled

Adam Fieled is a poet and Ph.D. candidate from Temple University in Philadelphia. Adam edits the blog-journal P.F.S. Post, which publishes contemporary poetry and art. He also maintains Stoning the Devil, a blog on which he publishes thoughts on literature, art, politics and other cultural bits. He recently released a spoken-word auido cd called Virtual Pinball-Madame Psychosis. He visits Chicago this week and reads at Myopic Books (1564 N. Milwaukee Ave.) on Sunday, December 17 at 7 pm.

My History

I had a life in Egypt
as a prince
my father now
was
my servant
then
in Rome
me
and my friend Chris
molested
children,
which is why
we
can’t get laid
now
then
early
in this century
I
emigrated
to New York,
where
I worked
for
the mob
who
eventually
killed me,
and
now
here
I am.

Pigs and Planes

I don’t believe in poetry.
It’s a slant that wavers
around different patches
of sky, or mud chucked
on slats of a sty. Or it
could be the pig, or the
plane, farmer or pilot,
pork-chop industrialist, air-
traffic controller. The one
thing it isn’t is itself.
To say poetry is poetry
is a rank offence, post-
misdemeanor, sub-felony,
the sort of sin credulous
people pray against. Pigs
you can believe in, & sties.
Planes you can believe in, & skies.
I don’t believe in poetry.

Window Sketch

Might trees, fore grounded
against red bricks, in March,
be expectant? Curtains,
tapered & tied. Behind,
a chair’s outlines. I’m as
settled in here as I’ll ever be.

Settled in here, I’ll never see
that chair’s insides. I’m as
tapered & tied as that blind.
Be expectant, curtains,
against red bricks in March;
mighty trees, fore grounded.

On reading Chris McCabe & then Keats

must be something in England,
makes hearts beat….stay beating,
through the daily melee…humorously..
knowing about dragons, sapphires, shit
stains, everything else….double-decker
metaphors we don’t get (as in create/
understand) in the States,
ham-fisted burger-beered belly-flopped

On Jazz

Physical beauty, Formal Rigor of God—
spiritual beauty, Economy of God—
Natural Will, Transcendent Will,
Facile Will in all its’ dismal “there-ness”—

Piano broken chords breaking down space
like watching bits of paper collect,
contained in a 12-bar blues; root
notes you tend to lean on,
or maybe a honking minor third,
a harmonic multi-colored sharp…

Follow your compulsion into flurries,
clusters of connecting phrases,
then a pause to sanctify as the progression
resolves after lingering on the fifth
for the appointed time—
pentatonics mainly w/ some suspensions,
sheets of sound, trademark leaps,
like watching a rainbow erupt
out of the placid bowels of street-lakes,
sparrows in the gutters,
Eliot-esque alienation syncopated
impossibly high & mighty…

Repeat the repetition now into major scale—
Ionian gold, major-third suspensions again,
almost midnight for tremulous trees,
also hipsters, flights of birds, rabbis
in the wilderness as blues ends; here’s a quicker
quirkier jarring bit to cut
your teeth on…

Base bottom notes natural like ferns,
ride the ride cymbal like musical fellatio,
roll w/ rolls & kick-drum ejaculations,
what Hart Crane heard in bridges,
only blues (so bridge seldom comes),
stasis achieved nicely replicates movements,
bowel, kidney, heart-beat, daring snare of lip-ness,
thickness, quickness,
get it all out for all of us into the brick-laden city,
mutter of exhausted midnight buses
as vibrato notes shiver, miniature
solos on the toms creates energy
of emptiness among the weird abundance,
concluding w/ roll on the snare, now bass
also investigates metaphysical space,
not so much implacable as inexhaustible
eruptions; spring of autumn,
autumn of spring…

Seasons of balance, compromise,
away from extremes; Middle Path exteriorized,
oh piano on a minor seventh which bespeaks
longing for a more ethereal world,
elegiac as the last apple of October, eaten
by a Halloween camp-fire, beyond blues
of Earth into cadence, dying fall of pure moon,
ravaged, torn from the throat of persistence,
mute existence destroyed completely
and on fire, a universe of fingers & mouths,
looking down the tide of Death into eternity,
square-shouldered & erect,
freezing into whims of Ultimate “there-ness”,
beyond ordinary notions of quotidian abyss
in one long sitting pow-wow peace-pipe corn-cob
wholesome dinner of Voidness,
but insinuated only to drive away singularity….

Jazz is plural,
they give you a space, show you its’ contours,
allow you to move around & drown
if you want over hilltops of remorse, created
by Love or dolorous longing & especially
Central Parks of the soul & intellectual Bordello
life cut & pasting its’ bleak outline over rooftops
& bluebirds—

©Copyright 2006 Adam Fieled.