Studio Magnus
The greatest freedom - the greatest assertion of freedom (against oppressive and/or negating, nonsensical forces) - is that surge of spirit that is the creative urgency of an ever-renewing instant, bringing forth a fresh intention or inkling. No matter what else is going on. Against what else is going on.
How does one think, how does one create or produce, when the foundations of our work and hopes are unstable or under attack? Productivity, perhaps, is simpler, with its tendency towards single-mindedness, a form of escape, shutting out the world in the name of minding our own business; but fulfillment is something broader, which we all crave to the depths of our souls, even in confronting first-things-first necessity or deprivation. If only circumstances and current events - exhausting, grievous, disruptive times (History in the making?) - wouldn’t get in our way!
The personal work if you’ve found it, the labors of love beyond yourself; these needs and fulfillments of the soul are indeed tikkun olam - not least because the exact object of oppression, of hate, of destructive politics on the march is the soul’s inexhaustible freedom for possibility.
Here’s a record of some of my own experiences with the ritual offered here at Poetry, Thought, Word Magick to kick off 2024.
gleanings, leavings 1/12/2024 any phrase can become a mantra in a passing year, what abides - a home if you have one, our bodies and the self that persists, our loves, our bonds, the state of family and friendship if intact, sure there's a degree of weathering, a strange patina of aging in four seasons, but it is all for a deepening of what lasts - not so much passes really in a year yet second to second erasure, blotchy, patching, the flesh peels off so it seems, sensation, raw plasma underneath, let it be bodily plasma or that stuff in the cosmos, disintegration every instant, entropy. You’re melting. Like the Wicked Witch of the West, those cries of horror, that could become your mantra, “I’m melting, I’m melting!” So what if you’re the stillpoint, you’ve melted down to nothing, you’re gone, a puddle of goo. Or, instead of the movement of gravity taking you down with time, instanter, you stand still in the passage and, in being present, future turns to present turns to past as you’re standing there - it is a movement going by you. This is the future coming and going through you. At last calm, facing whatever I’m facing. Enact these postures at your own risk. 1/23/24 Verticality - that posture, palms forward, chin up. Stillness until you go soaring upwards in a rocketing triumphant spiral, jetpack rocketman, musing person, (a) musing person, up and way. Weigh away, victory in the stillness. Standing erect in the instant, time deteriorates, it isn’t so much a wind as melting, the verticality giving in to gravity, melting snow when it's noon and 44 degrees. Bird cheeps in the snowglobe of this extant extension, (my) extension, my neighborhood, the quiet is valuable, to be cherished, so brimming with natural adaptive sounds of wildlife, then the planes, and helicopters, and big hollow drum sounds of huge metal bins as of train cars or shipping containers everything is clear and open, there’s nothing to fear of the future, it is all yet to be decided and we have a say. 1/24/2024 Trump win in NH congealing on the Trump-Biden rematch being real… Standing still amidst unrolling events, gale forces, arrival turning points, juggernaut runover. Equilibrium is everything. Bathe in inner light. Arising, arriving thoughts matter: don’t let them get run over. shadows on the wall, charcoal wash on construction paper, gray smudgy haze in the sight of solidity, and now you perceive walls aren't solid - they open up molecularly, rippingly Retention of one's own thoughts in quiet and equilibrium is intrinsic resistance. To lies. To violence, tyranny. Such isn’t quietism; it’s fortitude for both fight and willing through to whatever one wills, including peace. I'm seeing alabaster, I'm seeing pillars of salt.
With my poetic hybrid book, The Killing Joke, completed in manuscript and forthcoming from The Mute Canary, I’ve been brewing for awhile now on the next project. Long dormant, a seed of an idea germinated over a year ago. So, I’ve been outlining, experimenting, creating structures for the work, and considering and gearing up for what I need to bring to bear personally not only to get it written, but towards performance, since it’s a theatrical piece. Months of research and note-taking re content and how-to, embracing models for form and performance, conscious influences. In short, it’s a poets theater work in development. Bloodwrought: Task of the Poet. An Orpheus story.
Now, at last, over the past weeks, I have actual first iterations. The writing itself. An interation of the opening, 12 minutes, motivated by Boog upcoming, thanks to the indefatigable David Kirschenbaum of Boog.
Details at Welcome to Boog City 17.5 Arts Festival
This version is titled “Bloodwrought: Orpheus in the Nightclub” and involves a volcano, a fiery moon, and a young poet deranging his senses through ritual. My daughter Hero (co-creator of our Allegory of the Llama comic strip) wrote a song for the piece and will play it live during the performance this Saturday, February 17th in Brooklyn (later that evening she’ll play her own set of original music as well as participate in a celebration of The Smiths’ debut album). Hero and I’ve overlapped a couple of collabs this past little while.
Meanwhile, the overall Bloodwrought project is dedicated to my wife, Manya Magnus.
Inside the Studio
Physical space for headspace.
Volume of the room suffusing with voice in the room, volumes out loud trailing volume of voice in the brain. In mind, I had much sensed a shape of the opening of the play, but how to begin to decide it into form? I jump-started the writing process in a new way for me: dictation into my phone, a recording of that in-mind shape of an entry into the piece for transcription - get those first words on the page. Raw notes for an opening. Also, anticipation of the specific event. Instead of writing, speaking; a one-off projection of the context for Boog, narrow space in the venue, crowded (before the recording, I looked up photos of Block Hill Station when it was Bar 718, in Park Slope, and also noted that a series of essayists is scheduled in the hour before us, so I’ll want to be accessible to people working in disciplines other than those of the expected poets, musicians, and bargoers); I allowed the imagined interplay with predicted audience and situation to inform this impromptu roughing out of the piece. Present space gauzed over in outreach towards imagined, future, space.
Hero transcribed the recording, partly for the pay (she’s actively hustling where she can to augment her postgrad fellowship funding), and partly to prepare for what we’ll actually be doing in the bar’s tight space - for zip, and towards timing and blocking. She already knew the planned scene and concept before it was written - and she wrote her song accordingly. At the time of the transcription, she was finalizing most of the lyrics, but there was still some give for us to play into and off of. Her song is an encounter for the nightclub-wandering Orpheus. Part of his environment. But environment isn’t only background; and encounter - visual and aural - impinges.
In the piece, parallel to its own development (from dictation to composition, from printouts of the transcription to finding its real lines in formal layout of the play), a poem or a proto-poem develops as part of this birth-of-a-poet tale. Played live in the nightclub, the lyrics of the song - another’s words - infiltrate the protagonist’s brain, before he has his way to his own words. This is ahead of the incantatory ceremony at the volcano, chants that also take over and influence what formulations stir in his musing towards poetry.
From earlier entries of Poetry, Thought, Word Magick, you’ll recognize I can’t help thinking repeatedly about the poems-within-plays of Samuel Beckett’s Words and Music and Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana.
Our collaboration has been surprising me with creative loops and opportunities for chance operations: Hero’s lyrics (written towards the piece as conceived before it was written) get into the ears and then the dream of the protagonist, along with “other words from other planes,” and the novice poet has to sort through them as he gropes towards his pure, authentic words, source of his true thought. Even as there’s a whole Orpheus plot going on with concomitant frameworks for divine inspiration, here’s the meat grinder of creative process, acknowledging the neuropsychology of language and flow-states, states of entrainment, trance, and dream, hypnagogic and hypnopompic whisperings, the way words spring in an instant and how the poetic finds its own…
Within the piece, should a completed poem emerge? As of now, a would-be poem reveals its tendencies. I’ve a few more days to go to feel into this choice. What is more poetic/dramatic? - a fulfillment, or an intimation, incomplete and seeking?
R.I.P Melanie (1947-2024), who I hadn’t heard of, but thanks to Trav S. D. and his incomparable, addicting, encyclopedic blog Travalanche, I can take comfort in the fact that a song like this once charted: What Have They Done To My Song Ma.
For another instance where I may be late to the party, I just discovered Bookshop.org (founded in 2020) as an effective and convenient alternative to Amazon. A solid portion of the profits go to your favorite independent bookstore. I’ve selected Bridge Street Books, a longtime hub of the poetry scene in Washington D.C. My first purchase was Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Alice Notley’s Telling the Truth as It Comes Up.
Last, you might need to know I actually drink Writers’ Tears Irish Whiskey (from a flask, no less).
Wish I could come up to NYC and be present for the performance. Break a leg!
love love love everything about this piece!