Whether Deconstructionism happened to be a cohesive, authentic intellectual juggernaut movement or not is up for debate. What is not up for debate is that the central tenets of Deconstructionism— the evanescence and arbitrary nature of language, and the dichotomous push-pull both away from and towards the text and textuality— inform Posit to a very significant extent. That Deconstructionism can also apply to painting— that there is also, proverbially, nothing outside the image— makes Deconstructionist thought relevant also to the Philly Free School and Neo-Romanticism in totem. What Posit seems to signal, as a literary talisman initiating the Neo-Romantic endeavor (encompassing also, what Abby had already painted), was the reemergence of non-arbitrary language, of a kind of lyricism-within-Deconstruction, one that attempted (and attempts) to make aesthetic its own contradictions:

“I” must climb up
from a whirlpool
swirling down,
but sans belief
in signification.

“I” must say I
w/out knowing
how or why
this can happen
in language.

“I” must believe
in my own
existence,
droplets stopping
my mouth—

alone, derelict,
“I” must come back,
again, again,
‘til this emptiness
is known, & shown.

To what extent can form and formality (lyricism) redeem the arbitrary nature of the signifier? Is the lyrical signifier arbitrary? An empirical answer would have to put the truth in the middle of things— that, for instance, with “known” and “shown” in the poem’s concluding line, the sonority of the two words together (that they rhyme) makes for an effect meant to engender pleasure, and not to be arbitrary; yet, why k-n-o-w-n and s-h-o-w-n mean what they mean, rather then meaning something else, is as arbitrary as any other word, or words, meaning what they mean. Bring in, or draft, so to speak, the issue of subjectivity-in-text, the first person singular, and you see how lyricism drafts Deconstructionism, also, away from corrosive nihilism and towards some discrete affirmations: of form and formality in art as redemptive, of formal effects as meaningful against the arbitrary, and of the first person singular as a potential textual meeting place or median point around which all these imperatives assemble.

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.