Helen Adam’s jubilant performance of “Cheerless Junkie Song” appears to the viewer as a conjuring of internalised memory recovering a familiar story. Her gestures, rhythms and body swaying, tempo and lyrics soon reveal the performer is possessed by the ballad. Attempting to put the viewer under a spell, we are now hooked. Helen Adam has produced a portal and connected us to ancient forms through her powerful storytelling.
I can never remember who said that no one can be a true artist who has never been touched by a feather of the wing of madness.
The tenderness and humor of the ballad and its remarkable camp aesthetics are but starting points for all that Adam was and continues to be. Stylish, erudite and bohemian, she was also a stubborn visionary, “I can never remember who said that no one can be a true artist who has never been touched by a feather of the wing of madness.” When asked about magic, she calmly and simply would state she knew it was real, and, in her own words, “it’s far more important than the awful world of offices for instance. It’s devastating to me that I have to sit there from 9-5.” Magic remains too small a word for Helen Adam, who so effortlessly continues astral voyages through her readers to show that a consistent alternate order of things is the only true way to exist.
Helen Adam’s Early Work
Embodying her ballads, Helen Adam’s talent was recognised from a very young age. She was 14 and still living in Scotland when her first book, “The Elfin Pedlar and Tales Told By Pixie Poole” was published. Her talent, strict adherence to the ballad’s form and singular mind were immediately celebrated throughout the country. She later dismissed any mention of this praised collection as mere “doggerel,” uncomfortable with the politeness and “pretty pretty” within the work. In a 1979 lecture at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she speaks of her early work as being ‘positively ghastly’ and when asked to reveal its title, she responds “alright, if you can listen without being sick,” and finally proceeds to referring to her work as “poison.” Once “developing a critical mind” enough to realise she no longer identified with Victorian politeness and sensitivities, she stopped writing altogether. Thankfully picking up again when she was 30 after having moved to New York with her mother and sister (a trio dubbed “The Real Addams Family”) bringing to surface the comforting veneer of monstrosity within sanguinary tales. Ever since, Adam’s poetry has been consciously between worlds, inhabiting the thin line of what lies in between. As described by Maureen Owen, “She was a poet out of time, stretched. Out of a dark visceral realm. Every cell of her body wrote ballads, every cell of her body chanted them. […] She could scare the pants off God.”
Women’s mystic power is seen as having real consequences for those who threaten to limit it.
To speak of her chronologically would be to remove the mystical vitality of her character, her life and her work. The poet isn’t a mere whatnot or footnote as historical writings claim her to be: Helen Adam continues to jolt and jitter those who come across her, whatever medium calls out to them first. A woman’s perspective and experience of Helen Adam’s work is a long overdue permission to straddle the deathly, overriding dread related to love and its obsessive dreams. To read, see, listen to Helen Adam is to finally feel free in the subterranean horror of all that womanhood possesses, complete with the positivity this all brings to the waking world. By opposing “madness and manners,” revelling in taboo whilst maintaining the veneer of her deluxe speaking style, she spent her life chasing, finding and sharing “the grue,” a rare “spine-tingling shudder,” qualified by Emmanuel Swedenborg as being “the speech of an angel:” goosebumps and shivers down the spine as the most prominent “sign that someone’s body is inhabited by the worlds or thoughts of something from outside one’s self.”
“The vision of the outcast as paladin of a forbidden knowledge, free from society’s shackles finds its greatest expression in the oeuvre in the verse opera San Francisco’s Burning and its central character The Worm Queen,” as seen in the Scottish Poetry Library’s entry of “the bardic matriarch,” The Worm Queen was played by Adam herself. With Tarot and other forms of magic, she unleashed destruction on the city and with each male victim she drained and possessed, Adam explored her own blasphemies. As Cindy McCann argues in her brilliant essay “Helen Adam and the Feminist Gothic Imagination,” this illustrates that “women’s mystic power is seen as having real consequences for those who threaten to limit it.” The musical ends with our queen worm emerging from destruction, bigger than ever and brandishing a gigantic ace of spades across the stage. As recounted by Kristin Prevallet in “A Helen Adam Reader,” The Village Voice columnist Michael Smith wrote a negative review of it during its run in New York and so, Adam cursed him: she had a breakthrough during one of the performances, relaying how it came to be to her close friend and confidant Robert Duncan.
Helen Adam was of the opinion that all women possess ancestral knowledge of the arcane and don’t need training to unlock any powers.
“I was standing in a green light through the Voodoo scene, busily cursing Michael Smith as usual, while the savage young ‘Hanged Man’s Beauty’ cursed Spangler Jack & suddenly Anubis glanced at me along the beam of green light, and this austerely simple idea shot into my head, as though the god himself had suggested it. The next day I just sent him the big Ace of Spades I had used in the show, with a line “‘From the Worm Queen to Michael Smith, January 1967,’ and that was all. I hear from several sources that he is badly frightened, and it serves him right.” Through her notebooks and careful annotations, she demonstrates an innate knowledge of spells and curses. Forever aware magic was never for casual consumption, she explored this privately but never fully brought it into her public work and poetry. Until bad boys like Michael Smith dared cross her. Helen Adam was of the opinion that all women possess ancestral knowledge of the arcane and don’t need training to unlock any powers, which she described with surprising and exciting language: “and suddenly I was overwhelmed with the most extraordinary feeling of evil!!”
From Poetry to Collage
Not only a master at ballads and poems, performance and conversation, she was also a dexterous and celebrated collage artist. Together with her sister Pat, the latter perhaps attempting a lighter take on womanhood’s internal magic, “the coven of two” highlighted even more of their creative input and magical political ideas by transforming the invalidated women in fashion magazines into “alluring supernatural witches through the juxtaposition of haute-couture beauty and perilous animals traditionally associated with witches’ familiars.” (Alison Fraser, “The Weird One: Helen Adam’s Visual Work”) An eternal and firm favorite being “I had sweet company; because I sought out none.” The “real Addams Family” were subversive women, eager to show others that they could only thrive in a non-normative lifestyle.
Helen Adam didn’t need external authorisation to function effectively. When listening to or watching her in conversation, her contribution is a clear visitation, an ancestral and clandestine knowledge which illuminates her interactions. Cindy McCann argues that Adam herself declines to control her women, allowing them to create their own value systems. “With insistence on autonomy, mysterious power of the character who refuses to stay in her textually ordained place.” Through her ecstatic and almost breathless communication and knowledge, she speaks to the subconscious and reconnects us to the invisible world where werewolves and “nimble footed roaches” are our familiars, rat tails write our epitaphs and golden hair can strangle with no remorse, as seen in “I Love My Love” where a man strangles his wife whose hair later seeks revenge beyond the grave.
The hair rushed in. He Struggled and roe, but whenever he tore a tress,
“I love my love with a capital Z,” sang the hair of the sorceress.
It swarmed upon him, it swaddled him fast, it muffled his every groan.
Like a golden monster it seized his flesh, and then it sought the bone,
Ha!Ha!
And then it sought the bone.
It smothered his flesh and sought the bones. Until his bones were bare
There was no sound but the joyful hiss of the sweet insatiable hair.
“I love my love,” it laughed as it ran back to the grave, its home.
Then the living fleece of her long bright hair, she combed with a golden comb.
“What do you want of me?” “Your marrow bones.”: Helen Adam’s Magical Legacy
Helen was recognised, celebrated and saluted by her peers. Robert Duncan referred to her as the “Nurse of Enchantment.” She inspired the character Edna Silem in Delaney’s “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” worked on experimental filmmaking, opened for Patti Smith at the Free Music Store in 1975, and was featured, alongside her sister Pat, in two films by german film-maker Rosa von Praunheim: “Death Magazine or How To Become A Flower Pot” and “Unsere Leichen Leben Noch (Our Corpses Still Live).” Helen Adam also played a part in Marjane Enzensberger’s “mad vampire movie,” and appeared in Lynne Tillman and Sheila McLaughlin’s 1984 film “Committed,” a biography of the actress Frances Farmer. On screen and offscreen, Helen Adam captured attention in an exceptional way:
“She would step onto the podium looking like an eccentrically dressed neighbor (with a rather strange glint in her eye), and become transformed as if in some magic ritual that took place before the very eyes of the audience. A leaping fire, a deep glade mist would engulf her, she would dance and sway to the music of her own brogue flinging her hat into the air. There was a Lear madness in her; her eerie intonations wrenched the listener from the secure comfort of a room and chair, and reminded them that myth is just real life moving invisibly in the background. […] She could make a contemporary audience believe in shape-shifting and doom and then with her uncanny sense of humor cause the scene to be awash with satire and completely hilarious. […] Her work championed the tenor of the inexplicable, the unexplainable.” (Maureen Owen)
Helen Adam captured attention in an exceptional way.
In “The Helen Adam Reader,” Prevallet strengthens the beautiful web Helen Adam so tenderly wove during her lifetime and Adam’s perfectly singular drum echoes in our hearts as it nests within each of her rhymes and each story told of her. I’ll forever cherish my own copy as it’s been annotated by its unknown previous owner, a person who revelled in experiencing the poet’s extraordinary grue, gladly celebrating the magic of a woman who didn’t need to compromise or fit into our “abominable mechanised civilization” to be the greatest. Just like the woman who showed me Helen Adam in the first place.
“The only reason I managed to live as long as I have is never thinking ahead of time … and certainly never worrying ahead!”
