Linger

I was in State College for the summer of '94, living in South Halls. It turned out to be uneventful. My first real semester was the Fall 1994 semester. I found myself living in North Halls, which, as a dormitory set, in the Nineties, was about artists and misfits. What is detailed about Kelly McCabe in Elegy's Ends is detailed with a great deal of affection. Mary and Abby were creative girls who could also come across as standoffish and pompous at any minute; Jen was amiable, usually, but displayed the hauteur of the beauty queen much of the time, too. Lo and behold: Kelly McCabe was not only genuine, she was what they call a nice person. She was good-natured, in a way that Mary, Abby, and Jen were not, exactly, or always. Kelly was also a gifted photographer, which would've received scoffs from Mary and Abby, but there it is. It remains strange that Linger, here, is such a plaintive song, because my memories of it, and of the fall of 1994, are so sanguine. Kelly was a Cranberries-head; not in least because Dolores O. seems to have lived for a while on her block in Lansdale. That feeling always happens when I hear The Cranberries: of the world opening up, of a bright new horizon set out before me, or a new expansive vista making itself known. Why I didn't stay with Kelly is that she only did one full semester at PSU, before disappearing into the mist. Her impact was, proved to be, indelible, as someone who, for me, was mostly about joy. 

Subterranean Homesick Alien

I always say that for the time I spent in State College in the Nineties, Smashing Pumpkins were the Chairmans of the Board for me and most of the people I knew, rock-wise. Radiohead were second in command. Yet when I look back at my time in Central Pennsylvania, it occurs to me that, towards the end, which for me was 1998, Radiohead had taken a lead over Corgan & Co. When OK Computer was released in the summer of 1997, it pushed Radiohead onto a new, lofty plateau. I cared enough to buy OK Computer the day it came out. This is a tune that illuminates my final year in State College. The environs of and around State College are full of country lanes. I also did have a way, first in '96 and then again in '97, of being abducted by aliens in State College. An uptight, hallucinatory scenario, indeed. This is a tune, also, that brings me back to one night, in the summer of '98, I stayed up all night with a friend of mine, doing random, meaningless tasks, as one might do in a small town in summertime. We wound up on the roof of the Weaver Building. At dawn, we got free donuts from a bakery where another one of our friends worked. Then I went back to my South Atherton Street sublet and crashed. Were aliens watching, and taking notes? Small town life sometimes does feel like living on the moon, or on another planet. Yet that's where I earned my stripes towards being the writer I am today, for whatever that's worth or not worth. What are all of these words worth? To small towns, aliens, donuts, and the Nineties. Peace. 

Fake Plastic Trees

Thirty years have past; thirty summers, with the length of thirty long winters, and all that jazz. The spirit in which I revised this one, now called The Rustic Inscrutable, was about the eternity of living through that time— the autumn of 1996 in State College— and recollecting it in a way or manner only semi-tranquil. Too many questions remain, even thirty years later. One thing is not in question— Carrie had the ops over Jen about music. As we drifted into our version of Nowheresville, Carrie set up The Bends as a mood-enhancing soundtrack. This was the Radiohead platter that had made them famous in the States. I heard it briefly in the spring of '95, then forgot it for eighteen months. Now, it lit up all the incidents and situations of that time for me— Jen and I united, then severed. Then, Jen herself disappeared off-campus into a foggy mist, after which she was never seen again in State College. Even as, unfortunately, bylines continued to appear with her name on them in The Daily Collegian. Carrie and I smearing our blood on various walls, groping towards real contact we couldn't make with each other. A brief anti-marriage. The fragility, the sense of alienation in The Bends was in us, too. The sense was, of course, that Jen's departure was planned to coincide with Carrie's arrival. I was a dummy-doll to be passed between them. Creepy stuff. It's all covered in Fake Plastic Trees, down to the fact that Carrie's physiology was famously an exhausted one. State College, and the drama department, wore her out. I happened to be stalled on the way to Outlaw Playwrights at that time. I tried the quaalude exuberance of Third/Sister Lovers with her, but that was (come on!) too extreme. Winter was coming. And spring. 

I Will Dare

For those of us who knew him, let's face facts: Andrew Lundwall was a punk. He was snotty, bratty, and a take-the-piss kind of dude. He was also extremely obsessive about rock, especially the avant or indie side of rock. The 'Mats, here, aren't exactly a punk band. Semi-punks. But when we picked him up in Beloit on a hot June day in 2007, Andrew Lundwall strutted into Steve's car in as completely an I Will Dare attitudinal fashion as was possible. He was ready to rock and roll in Chicago. The display of spontaneous virtuosity Andrew lucked into in Palatine, writing Chicago, as is here on P.F.S. Post, in Steve's living room, as Steve and I attempted to walk upright on a groggy morning, out-punked both of us about what it meant to be in the moment: alive, electric. Even if it's not like I didn't notice, then and now, that he seems to be aiming several pot-shots in my direction. Punk! But American poetry in the Aughts needed him, because poetry needed punks and punk energy: still does. Chicago may prove to be the central dare of Andrew's life fulfilled. It is the Keats-meets-Gordon Gano climax of what Amer-Indie could do around, or with, or among books. God bless you, Andrew. 

War On War

Another one from the Stacy files: Mobiles. Another one, also, begun in 2009, finished in 2026. Proving, again, that the road goes on forever. Chicago, a road-place for me, by which I was marked, among others, also of mine: New York, New England, Central Pennsylvania, Montreal. A quirky map, to be sure. And other places that might need to be rejuvenated at any moment: Pittsburgh, Florida, New Jersey. Back to Chicago, and the sense that through the latest two rewrites here presented in The Stacy Saga, I've done justice to everything Chicago meant to me in the Aughts. Also an acknowledgement, especially regarding Pittsburgh, that there must be more work to be done, because roads can develop out of old situations, and time creates strange loops whereby time past that wasn't, or didn't seem, relevant, imposes on time present to revivify, reinstate, even electrify it into awareness. So we can all live and die as Emperors of Eternity. Including Wilco. Also noting that the summer of 2026 for me was about time loops. The Time Warp. And if the process of creating time loops does have Rocky Horror-ish dimensions (come up to the Lab, and see what's on the slab), it is amazing to me that time, which is really only matter eternally changing form (there is no time) really can be looped, and moments exist inside each other in uncanny ways. And it's worth the fight it takes to make this happen. A War on War. This shoots back to the late Aughts.

I Am Trying To Break Your Heart

The love poem To Stacy Blair begins, of course, in Chicago, Illinois. Whatever else you might say about a piece supposed to be that intimate, I can only say that Stacy, who was a critical genius, remains the number one reader of my books, even now. There are top tier reviews I've received as substantial by other people; but nobody means it like Stacy does. And the many letters she wrote me did break my heart. After that, it's all best left to the imagination. Except to say that, in a way experiences can have of marking or not marking an individual, I was, indeed, marked by the time I spent in Chicago and the Midwest in the Aughts. The world I felt open up then was about boundlessness, and about dreams coming true. A poet who was truly on the road, was always who I wanted to be. When I walked around the Loop, or hung out in bars in Bucktown, it was not worth questioning anymore whether I was on the road. I was. Chicago and the Midwest will always mean the road to me. Maybe an uncommon association (nowhere near New York, where I also did plenty of road-time, or San Francisco, where I did not), but so what. And To Stacy Blair brings home to roost that most effectual time I spent on the road, with the most sense of hinges to the roads that are, or could be, the eternal ones. The choice of Wilco is an obvious one. So what. As a gag in Chicago, I took a replicant picture of the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot cover. Everyone's road-place is full of gags for them, and anything else that could make it memorable. So, the poem linked here is one I began in the late Aughts and never finished. In 2026, it's now finished, ready to be aired. The road goes on forever. I am trying to break your heart. 

The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get

As I risk dragging us into the realm of Halloween and Friday the 13th, and initiate Dominique III, a word about 1994. The Nineties were, in some places, in some ways, a revolutionary time. Cheltenham and Abington dropped their respective battlements and became friends. Kurt Cobain expressed something for a lot of us that couldn't be hidden. Pop culture got more real, as the Alternative Revolution and Lollapalooza made all the changes communal (I went to '93). Morrissey had his first real hit in the United States, in Philadelphia, from WDRE on out (who themselves emanated from Jenkintown, right next to Cheltenham). The center of Pennsylvania was set to be more revolutionary, too. But Morrissey's first bona fide hit was a source of comic relief for Chris and I, who did have moods in which we were completely fed up with Dominque's posturing antics. The song is funny on the surface, but even more funny for Chris and I, who understood that that was something true about Dominique: she liked jokes, but intensely disliked when the joke was at her expense. After all the antics were said and done, a real self-serious broad. And a master, she'd be happy to tell you, of human psychology, of why people say what they say and do what they do. Yet, in the spring of '94, we watched Dominique make a flaming fucktard of herself, as victims or semi-victims, and were happy to engage in the catharsis, through Morrissey, of a good laugh. The revolution was on.