Dusie Abebooks (.de) Category:  Poetry Publisher: Dusie Press ISBN-10:  1003459361 Pages: 18 Copyright: June 9, 2007 ISBN-13: 1111003459361 Posit was released both online and in print by Dusie Press in 2007. Posit explores the dimensions, horizontals, and verticals of poetic subjectivity ("I") in the twenty-first century.  Excerpt Illinois Sky One could sink upwards into it, lose brown earthy stains. Conglomerated air-pockets, tucked into figments, wide enough to lend temporality sense, day’s square progress. This I don’t know about, this feeling, expanse contracted, sex impulse etherealized, I can’t see this w former eyes. It is, after all, a doorstep, just me entering me again— cream purse, vulval sheen.

from Exile and Exegesis
Another twentieth century lesson: New York is a fool’s paradise. Anyone in America, especially along the Eastern seaboard, who lives past thirty-five will probably notice that, despite a tremendous press build-up to reinforce the “mega” quality of New York City, New York has no more material power in America than several other commensurate, or more than commensurate, cities: Atlanta, Baltimore, and, of course, Philadelphia. Indeed, the inversion between Philly and New York is almost perfect: i.e., Philly is precisely what New York is supposed to be, and vice versa. Philadelphians over thirty-five will usually have discovered the labyrinthine dimensions and depths of Philly, reaching out in myriad directions (including why the press has to put up NYC at our expense), and touching Philly’s tremendous, forcibly underrated material and spiritual power in the United States. There are few American power-structures without Philly roots somewhere; yet, this structuring is largely “operative,” and not directly verbalized. So, older Philadelphians must live with what we can and cannot express on the surface, the way in which, in Philly and out, we must be criminally misrepresented in the media, and also the false luster of NYC (and LA) lording over us their empty, bloated narratives and mythologies.

New Yorkers, in comparison, are a naïve race, who understand little of what they see, and make every attempt to stay on the surface and embrace the false idol which is the city where they live. Yet, as they age, there will always be something missing for them, a sense that everything they see is a mirage, and that New York is the kind of city where fools rush in and almost no one else. New York art stinks. And, to the extent that I am winding this around the note something about the poem “Le Chat Noir” from the Posit chapbook, it stands to reason that I should express where I feel New York School poetry needs to go: into the garbage forever, with all the other gamer crap from century XX. What I’ve discovered is that “Le Chat Noir” can be taken as a heave-ho to the New York School, if we take the protagonist of the poem to be spry, pop-culture consonant, semi-hysterical, never profound or verbally gifted Frank O’ Hara (and this poem improves on his stunted prosody):

I pressed a frozen face
forward into an alley off
of Cedar St., herb blowing
bubbles (am I too high?) in

melting head I walked &
it was freezing & I walked
freezing into pitch (where’s
the) blackness around a

cat leapt out & I almost
collapsed a black cat I
was panting & I almost
collapsed I swear from

the cold but look a cat
a black cat le chat noir oh no

The poem is a sonnet, but the form doesn’t seem to be as important here as the thematic gist and the spin I want to put on that particular ball. If this is Frank O’ Hara, stuck in the bowels of North-West Philadelphia (the Eris Temple was located at 52nd and Cedar in the Aughts), and he imitates a Lana Turner-ish (for those who know his poems) collapse, it may be because the real decadent glamour on the East Coast is not where it’s supposed to be, in the West Village or Soho, but in Philly. I would like to argue that the real glamour has always been in Philly for the truly hip and worldly-wise, and O’Hara’s New York is a non-existent joke in comparison. People forget what Le Chat Noir was in Paris in the 1890s— a Bohemian haunt where artists like baby Picasso and Lau Trek used to hang out, in absinthe-laden, concupiscent decadence. So that, if the real Le Chat Noir vibe on the East Coast is here, in Philly, then all the NYC stooge celebrations in the world can’t redeem O’Hara from knowing that his aesthetic number is up, and we’ve got it.