How did
you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
I grew up
in a house with a publishing poet, so the rigors of the poetry world were
revealed to me as a child and an adolescent. I even wound up attending
workshops, just a an onlooker, long before I was a participant. As someone who
was a musician and a songwriter, poetry became a natural extension of a writing
practice already established. The real poetry voyage and apprenticeship for me
started in State College in the mid-1990s. I was an undergrad at PSU, though I
wound up finishing the degree at Penn later. I had mentors or figures of
inspiration at the time, like Bruce Weigl and Michael Waters, but most of the
work was done by me. What I liked, and still like, most about poetry, is that
it opens up a vista by which another world, set against the quotidian world, also
opens, a language world, which can establish heightened states of awareness,
heightened states of consciousness, heightened clarity of perception, and
heightened depth of vision, if the doors of perception are kept clean, to
paraphrase Blake. Poetry, done in earnest with a substantial amount of
brain-matter behind it, beats everything the human mind can encompass or
accomplish except science and philosophy. Poetry, in fact, resonates, then, as
an adjunct ot add-on to philosophy, a way of making sense of the world by
establishing new worlds, language worlds.
How does
a poem begin?
Book
project by book project, the genesis of different pieces fits different molds.
When I was writing the book called Apparition Poems (2010), I was
riveted to a sense of splitting a kind of vernacular atom by working with
double, triple, or quadruple meanings. The Apparition Poems series
tended (and still tends, when the mood strikes me, as the series is still in
morion in 2026) to begin, piece by pierce, as a way of framing pierce-throughs,
if you will, insights into what phrases, if run together in verse form,
resonate the most doubly, triply, or even as quadruples.. Equations, which
first came out in 2011, takes dialectic form, is prose or prose poetry, and is
much more about the practicality of attempting to fulfill that dialectic form.
The book attempts to answer a question— is sex what makes us most human— so all
the pieces orient themselves, once they’ve begun, around different imperative
issues attendant on the dialectic’s thesis. Something Solid, which I am
still writing, is done, piece-by-piece, travelogue style, so that each incident
or situation in each poem feeds the idea of travel, dynamism, and adventure.
What I would tend to start from would be a germ or idea either of a specific
adventure or adventurous experience, or of detailing someone or something’s
past, past history, to lead up to the flight into the air.
How did
publishing your first book change your writing? What have the differences been
since?
My first
full-length, which came out through Otoliths in 2007— Opera Bufa— was
written as a reaction to a large trend prevalent in the Amer-Po avant-garde in
the Aughts. The sense of a book manuscript comprised of a set of about sixty
interlocking prose poems was massive then. It’s something I had never done
before— I was familiar that it had been big in France, in earlier century XX,
Max Jacob’s Dice Cup, things like that— but it never resonated to me
that personally. When I took a stab at it, working more from the outside in
than usual, I found that the result was interesting, but not necessarily
something I’d want to repeat. The book did well-enough to get taught in Chicago
at Loyola the year after it came out, but I made a conscious decision not to be
that much of a trend-hopper, book by book. I would try to work, as much as
possible, from the inside out. Those are the lessons or changes built into Book
1. I also do understand that publishing books changes the writing process, or
at least it did for me. From the mid-Aughts forward, I tend to look at writing
as a book-by-book, rather than poem-by-poem or piece-by-piece, enterprise.
Single pieces tend not to be as important as the idea of an entire book, what
it’s going to be, in its totality. That’s variable, but the preponderance of
writing book-length manuscripts, rather than individual pieces, is very big for
me.
Have you
a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between
other activities?
Day by day, that’s a variable one, too. I have editing work to handle, and a fairly ambitious agenda to manage in relation to the Aughts in Philadelphia. The times, day by day and week by week, do tend to be the same in regards to when I produce new material. I fit a lot of writerly stereotypes— I like mornings with coffee and cigarettes as much as anyone else— and the freshness of the morning hours, when they are available, I usually find adequate to produce new work. I went through a period, in the late Aughts and early Teens, of writing in the middle of the night, when I still lived in Center City Philadelphia, but my schedule is less crazy and more practical now.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
You have to hand it to Bill (William) Allegrezza— from moria to MossTrill, he’s kept an eagle eye on the Chicago scene, tracking it in his e-journals. I have an affinity with the Chicago scene, so I have to do a tip-of-the-hat to him in that respect. In terms of permanence and durability, PennSound, here in Philly, is hard to beat. I also like what I’ve seen, print-wise, over a long period of time, from Tears in the Fence, David Caddy’s journal, from the UK. The back issues of TITF are filled with gems, and stumbling across, for example, another brilliant Giles Goodland piece, is always fun. Otoliths, for a long time, got the best of both worlds— print and online— and I found Mark Young’s inclusive approach commendable. The issues of Otoliths that are the good ones will always be around. In terms of newer ones, I like e-journal Scud from Minnesota— classic template, classic formatting, and pages that preserve perfectly. You can’t ask for more than that.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
Oddly
enough, I’ve returned to William Butler Yeats as someone to do all over again.
The twentieth century never really got around to deciding what he was, a
late-Victorian, an Edwardian, or an early Modernist, so he still seems fresh to
me, as someone to work on, and with. His early experiments with free-verse, I
feel, are remarkable ones. Where the Chicago affinity is going, I have Kristy
Bowen going like there is no tomorrow. The situations she writes about are
appropriately edgy for the Twenties. And nice to see Chris McCabe is still
churning out hits in London. As I know from my own experience— the Aughts sweep
up through the Twenties is a fucked up one.
Adam Fieled is a writer based in the Philadelphia area. His print books include Opera Bufa, When You Bit…, Apparition Poems, and Cheltenham; e-books include Posit, Beams, The White Album, The Posit Trilogy, and The Great Recession. In 2023, the prose dialectic Equations appeared in its entirety on PennSound. A magna cum laude Penn grad, he edits P.F.S. Post.
Fieled has work in the fifteenth issue.