P.F.S. : Sex and Shadows

The poems I would like to explore today belong to Boston's Mary Walker Graham. Many of Graham's poems adopt the tonal posture that the protagonist is either a violated victim, or caught in the throes of self-castigation; veer towards the straight Confessional, but always with an added dimension and depth (imaginative capacity) which places her (to my eyes) squarely within the confines of post-avant. The following is a prose poem, entitled A Pit, A Broken Jaw, A Fever:

When I say pit, I'm thinking of a peach's. As in James and the Giant, as in: the night has many things for a girl to imagine. The way the flesh of the peach can never be extricated, but clings— the fingers follow the juice. The tongue proceeds along the groove. Dark peach: become a night cavern— an ocean's inside us— a balloon for traveling over. When I said galleons of strong arms without heads, I meant natives, ancient. I meant it takes me a long time to get past the hands of men; I can barely get to their elbows. How a twin bed can become an anchor. How a balloon floating up the stairwell can become a person. Across the sea of the hallway then, I floated. I hung to the fluorescent fixtures in the bathroom, I saw a decapitated head on the toilet. I'll do anything to keep from going in there. I only find the magazines under the mattress, the Vaseline in the headboard cabinet. A thought so hot you can't touch it. A pit. A broken jaw. A fever.

This poem oozes creepiness. Among the aspects I find most notable: the way that Graham's protagonist self-infantilizes (regarding herself not as a woman but as a "girl"), the imagery that conflates the sexual with the horrific (Vaseline butting against a decapitated head, broken jaws, fevers), and the intimation that what is at the heart of this confrontation is some sort of compulsive relationship. Yet the poem is intriguing because, despite its intimations, it never abandons the first person singular. Whomever the "you" happens to be, we never see them, they are never addressed, and the poem posits no "Other." There is solipsism at work, which cuts the implied "you" down to size; the narrator may be involved in an unhealthy relationship, but the primary feeling we get is one of self-loathing and self-disgust, expressed with compelling (and disturbing) intensity. The generalized phrases, addressed to men, serve to illustrate, as is Graham's wont, the narrator's alienation from whatever specific man is sewn into the situation, interior and exterior. 

Everything about the subject's relationship, both to coitus and to responses to coitus, is posited along axis structures of attraction and repulsion, a push-pull edge that narrativizes how the subject experiences passion. That the affect emanation is dark and dour also creates an axis of attraction and repulsion for the reader, who may choose to engage or disengage, based on temperament, and the principle of fascination being stimulated or not. Form vacillates between poetry and prose, strictures and freedom, uneasily. 

There is also an unlikely quality to Graham's metaphors: what exactly could "balloon" imply, in this context? How can it be connected to the "peach" that Graham puts it up against? At one point, Graham creates a metaphoric chain, all meant to represent the same thing: dark peach, night cavern, ocean, balloon. The most obvious interpretation is that the metaphor is meant to signify the female sexual organ. However, the metaphoric chain is distorted, phantasmagoric, and macabre. A stretch is required to allow the metaphoric chain to work, just as Graham stretches to convey what she wants to convey, which is equally brutal and surreal, and supports a consistent persona. The following poem, Double, first appeared in Ocho #11, and works an analogous angle:

Here is a box of fish marked tragedy.
Is it different from the dream

in which your alter ego kills the girl?
You are the same, and everyone knows it,

whether tracing the delicate lip of the oyster shell,
or sharpening your blade in the train car.

The marvelous glint is the same.
Though you think you sleep, you wake

and walk into the hospital, fingering
each instrument, opening each case with care.

The scales fall away with a scraping motion.
You are the surgeon and you are the girl.

Whether you lie like feathers on the pavement,
or coolly pocket your equipment, and walk away...

You are the same; and you are the same.
You only sleep to enter the luminous cave.

I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that this poem places itself in an introspective realm of infantile sexuality. Yet that it is written from an adult perspective gives it a kind of double edge. If there is terror here, it is terror of the protagonist's own sexual power. The interest and pleasure for the reader is in trying to understand the different levels of self-evaluation that are going on, and how they affix to the narrator's sense of herself— how her persona is constructed. As in A Pit, there is a level of sexual solipsism inhering in the protagonist which becomes a maze, in and of itself. There is also a level on which the poem exteriorizes its own discomfort through the use of "gross" imagery: box(es) of fish, blades, surgeons. What is the nature of the operation? What necessitates it?

Reversing A Pit, the poem is given added depth because it is presented in the second person: not "I" but "you." It takes on the quality of a narrator talking to herself about herself, and makes the poem an exercise in imaginative self-consciousness, more so than A Pit. I find this admirable because it recuperates the tone of Confessional poetry, but puts it through a new kind of synesthetic light filter. What Graham sees as "Double" could be a split between her body and her mind, or between her sexuality and her intellect, or even between herself and another. Whatever it is, it has left her in pieces, and the poem seems to be an attempt to reassemble herself. Both of these poems, and other Graham work, present a consistent persona, a tangent to Stacy Blair's: a polymorphously perverse girl-woman lost in the never-land of her own body (and polymorphously perverse can imply a body of thoughts and ideas in addition to the mere physical mechanism.) Though possibly mainstream-consonant, as has been duly noted, through usage of conventional narrative techniques, and exploration of familiar emotions, it would be difficult to get more edgy, in the parlance of this discourse around post-avant, than that. Like painter Jenny Kanzler, Graham torques the Creatrix archetype in on itself, so that narratives of passion become narratives of purgation, yogic exercises to make metaphors. For a post-avant (or Neo-Romantic) analogue, see fellow Bostonian Becky Hilliker.

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The second portion of the Sex and Terror post is being scribed at a later date: January 2017. With the addition of new material to P.F.S. Post from Stacy Blair, a Midwestern poetess, there is more to see and say about the pertinent issues hewn into these texts— the creation of a new kind of female persona in American poetry; a new approach to female sexuality and the female body; and a continuing, obsessive interest in the dark or shaded portion of both sexual and human reality. As of January 21, the poem by Stacy Blair which crowns PFS Post is called Photo Experiments:

Blonde locks jut out over the tops of pigtails,
bleached beach/sand-color by the sun.
Time's short between this photograph and my regard.
Picture: no flower lays or shoes, just
young grass hips. She is, I am, we were,
very young. The entire page of this album
flanks history; under my mind, another
helpless time explosion. I was, we were, are,
naked newborn, as our little limbs on film.

What might strike the reader as most urgent thematically— the artful insinuation of pregnancy— is buttressed by the same strain of self-castigation, self-reproach, and self-mistrust we find in Graham. Like Graham, "young grass hips," "flanks," and "flower lays" are all heavy innuendo about carnality. What makes the poem so fascinating are the divisions and precisions Blair incises into her perceptions of identity— who she was, who she is now as two distinct selves; who she is and who her assumed lover is, also as two distinct selves; and the third entity they create together (possibly the unborn child) being distinct from them as another gestalt entity. It is difficult not to read "helpless time explosion" specifically as a reference to pregnancy— and equally gripping, because addressed, text-wise, with taut, terse authority. The phrase narrativizes, also, the attraction/repulsion dynamic at the heart of issues being explored, and/or processed through purgation. The body’s helplessness redeems itself in the yogic tension-release incised into fulfilled textuality. Caesuras here create a sense of hypnosis for the reader, brief incantation become a formal edge. The poem ends in irresolution, purposefully— and the chiaroscuro edge (or edges) of what I called post-avant many years ago is very much in effect, on display. Why the Aughts created this sense of dread, of foreboding, along with the shadowy seductiveness of stark eroticism, is anyone's guess; a reaction to the stunted quality of the female body (and the female brain in response) in century XX art?

From X-Peri

IF, AS HEIDEGGER SAYS,

Language is the house of being, where
do we put the mimes and their
dime store plastic flowers? What do we do
with the single-syllable words that are too small
to move into? Remember last week when
the mouse fell asleep in the backyard clover,
and the poet-composer warped the same thought
into seven kinds of flight? We climbed the ladder
of an ancient syntax and discovered
that the cathedral we were birthing had no
windows. Who will open the cages we’ve built
around ourselves? How will we capture
the slippery accents of home on someone
else’s tongue? If language is the house of being,
then being is the house of a little talking dove,
and the little talking dove is the house of a secret,
and the secret is the house of silence, and silence
is the house of dime store plastic flowers
and the two-story mouths that carry them.

© Melissa Studdard 2020

From No Tell Motel

CONSTELLATIONS OF GIRLS IN RED

Eight o’clock and we open
our skirts, our rumpled lace.
Black gloved in the wings,

passing cigarettes and flirting
with the pianist. Night
folds me like a doll into a dress,

lusting for copper, chocolate,
whatever I can bite down
on. I am especially attuned

to wrists, the rehearsal
within the rehearsal.
Floorboard creak and fire hazard.

The soloist offers me
a jug of wine, a catbird.
Can do a trick with flying

that puts the aerialist to
shame. Mechanics, she says,
all pulleys and wires.

There’s a crumpled dollar
in my pocket, three gallons
of salt water in the larder.

Her music box plays something
that sounds like Wagner.
My hair tangles in her paper fan.

© Kristy Bowen 2007

From Poetry

NO WHERE, NO ONE

When I found my voice, it was so quiet
no one listened. No one. That was my best love.

And when I came up from the river muck
I found my face; that was like smiling.

The snake does not care, nor the white egret—
and whole flocks of geese, white and Canadian,

settle on the boat landing. Rubbish.
Rubbish and weeds. It was not so quiet

when I screamed; with my face in the water,
not a whisper. Drowned or owned,

I’m now here. My face breaks with a bit of blue—
a bit of bruise and some rawness in the rushes.

© Mary Walker Graham 2005

P.F.S. : Three Definitions

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.

The Creatrix, as a definable character in art, has now developed out of Neo-Romanticism. The Creatrix is a female artist who embodies the self-determination, autonomy, and complex sense of individuality which tends to manifest in Neo-Ro, and Neo-Ro creations. I am taking for granted that the Creatrix, as a definable art-character, does begin with Abby Heller-Burnham, Mary Evelyn Harju, and Jenny Kanzler. What distinguishes the Creatrix from post-modern female, and feminist, archetypes, is a sense of Eros, or the erotic, developed itself to an extreme pitch of intensity. This, even in Kanzler, where this development is stunted or warped into mutant form. The sense of the erotic is grasped, felt, and registered with emotions consonant with an integration not found in post-modernity: straightforward passion, straightforward longing, straightforward physical need, conveyed in a fashion which does not need to abuse the viewer with the dull, dispossessed ironies which have now become a post-modern tradition. Why Eros in American art can be made new now, especially with Heller-Burnham’s immersion in queer life, is that Eros in American art has never had formal parameters imposed on it, by painters who are not merely servants, but masters, of formality, on a level with classicist Europe. This is not to say that the Creatrix has to be a painter. But, if we are to start with Heller-Burnham, Harju, and Kanzler as initial archetypes, these are some reference points which might be of service to us, in an effort not to be strained by an atmosphere in which narratives of form, and narratives of passion, are disavowed.

At the beginning of the Aughts in Philadelphia, I attempted to found an artist’s co-op, to stage multi-media art events around Philadelphia. I called the first co-op This Charming Lab. It met with limited success. By the middle of the Aughts, the situation had ripened. I now had the man power and venues to stage the events I wanted to stage, which would involve multi-media, around ideas and interpretations of Artaud, the Theater of Cruelty, and what could be made of Artaudian spectacle with the resources at hand. My essential partnership in the initial-model Philly Free School was with three fellow artists: Mike Land, Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum, and Nick Gruberg. Matthew Stevenson and Hannah Miller also proved to be invaluable. Abby Heller-Burnham, Mary Evelyn Harju, and Jenny Kanzler all contributed as tangent artists. As of the early Teens, I began to use Philly Free School as a moniker employed to cover my entire cultural life in Aughts Philadelphia. This created a context for Abby, Mary, and Jenny to be representatively Free School artists, as well. Not to mention, those who had participated in Free School events in Chicago and New York, and everyone who had been published in Philly Free School Post (P.F.S. Post). Why Philly Free School acts as a correlative to Neo-Romanticism and the Creatrix is that it is, to be obvious, based in Philadelphia. On a less obvious note, “Free” and “School” together are meant to imply a group of artists on a vision quest, past the confines of post-modernity, multi-culturalism, and academic feminism, to learn what keys will turn what locks where so as to establish a maximum sense of residency in the most spacious, loft-like socio-aesthetic, socio-sexual, and generally socio-cultural rooms; to know, if it will be known, the boundless. Then, to begin to define the formal parameters of boundlessness in art, if they can or will be defined. And not bypass the imperative to understand what might be boundless in human life and thought, too.

From Milk Magazine

INSTRUCTIONS FOR WHEN TRAVELING ABROAD

A petticoat beneath a black skirt
may mend the interstices between
syllables. Be prepared— for every
vaulted ceiling, or tattered calendar,
draw an X across your forearm.
Do not long to steal the chandelier
or place oranges at the foot of St. Cecelia.

On Saturdays, wash your lingerie in white, scentless soap.

© Kristy Bowen 2005

From diode poetry

 WE'RE ALWAYS GETTING THE STORY WRONG

The film tells of a gigantic, island-dwelling ape called Kong who dies in
an attempt to possess a woman.

They’re out there flying, those tiny machines,
the wind-up birds that want to carry my love
from the cradle of my hand. I hear them rushing

in the shiny distance, see them buzzing
black rings around my head, trying to calm
the shrieks of their metal wings by diving down at me.

I think how my thumb swipes across her body
and something thumps inside her chest, how
if those machines would let me, I’d pour oil

along the noise of their necks and clear
the caked ore from the engine of their jaws. Instead,
I hear the sound of their biplane wings shearing off.

How I marvel at their speed as they ping past, my hands wanting
but so useless to hold them.

© A. Bowen 2013

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