(Soma)tic in BORT Quarterly #3

CLICK HERE PLEASE

9 (Soma)tics for FLYING OBJECT

VERY LIMITED EDITION of

handmade letter press chapbooks

9 (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals for

FLYING OBJECT of 

Hadley, Massachusetts

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

(SEE SAMPLES BELOW)

#105: HANNAH WEINER Double Life

Flying Object (Soma)tic Poetry Ritual 1 of 9

Poet Hannah Weiner saw words on foreheads, and so we will honor her poetic perceptions today. Poet Eileen Myles tells the story of attending a party years ago in New York City and seeing Hannah Weiner across the crowded room. Myles thought to herself, “I wonder if she sees words on my forehead right now?” Weiner looked at her, walked across the room and said, “I see no words on your forehead Eileen.” The poet, the psychic, the prophet, we give these words to you.

Blue lace agate is a gemstone used to expand and intensify communication faculties. Borrow one of the pieces from the table at Flying Object and walk to a bookshelf. Turn to page 36 of a random book, choose a word on the page then use the stone to write the word on your forehead. Do this 36 times with 36 different books; the number 36 depicting the ancient signifier for Double Life. Pause every ninth time to take notes for your poem. Take the notes as fast as you can, allowing the experience of the ritual to wash over you, writing faster than you can even think about what you are writing.

CATHETER ENJAMBEMENT in Evening Will Come

CLICK HERE TO READ IT 

MANY THANKS TO EDITOR LARA GLENUM

New One & THIS TIME with John Wieners POEMS!!!!

so the cops shut me down on the Alaska (Soma)tic at the airport
they ran me off
I came back, they ran me off again
the 3rd time they cuffed me and searched me in a special little room
PLAN B for ALASKA coming soon

in the MEANTIME
I'm driving to Tucson starting Monday, August 11
reading John Wieners poems at truck stops
in men's rooms
in diners
reading to as many folks as I can find in our beautiful country
and getting signatures for this petition

HALL OF THE DECOMMISSIONED PANTHEON

(Soma)tic Poetry Ritual Response To

Art of Its Own Making
for the Pulitzer Foundation

  Thinking within strict limits is stifling.

--Christian Bök

The Mona Lisa was wrapped in fine red satin and sealed in a specially designed wooden box before being transported to the countryside in 1939.  Art in the middle of war needs dedicated stewards to keep it hidden from invaders.  Even with the most trusted well-trained people a museum’s curators and other staff can fall prey to enemy gunfire, poison gas or drone attacks.  You are in the museum alone at night and the staff’s dead bodies are stacked in the basement.  You have a chance to save one piece of art before the looting begins, what do you save?  What are your criteria for choosing which to save, because it’s the most valuable, the most popular, because it’s your favorite, or what?  Take notes.

(Soma)tic poetry rituals provide a window into the creative viability of everything around us, initiating an extreme present.  Documentary notes are not important; in fact the movements we make inside the ritual inform the way the notes come out of us, no need for exacting detail.  Take notes as fast as you can, faster than you can think about what you are writing.  Later type the notes into a single document, print it out then carry it around to extract lines and words to shape your poem.  Approach your chosen work of art, thinking about the safest way to remove it from its mount on the wall or floor.  What tools do you imagine needing?  Stop to take more notes.  You will live with it hidden in your attic or as a lover under the covers next to you.  How will it feel seeing this coveted object each day?  Take notes.

Create a password for your hidden art by first choosing an ancient god or goddess.  What is your favorite home appliance?  Think of the nights you turn them all on to sit and listen in the dark for the most pleasing of the chorus.  Combine the god to the appliance, like Jupiter Egg Beater.  Take notes.  Go into a stall in one of the museum restrooms and write the password onto your naked flesh.  Take notes.  Write it again harder, then harder.  Take more notes.  Walk up to a stranger and say the password.  Just say it.  How do they react?  Take more notes.

Future Wilderness (Soma)tic Pt.2: ALASKA

STARTING JULY 15, 2014

I WILL BE OUTSIDE THE

PHILADELPHIA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

WITH MY SIGN FOR A TICKET TO ALASKA

my suitcase packed and ready to go I WILL BE THERE FOR 7 HOURS A DAY FOR 7 DAYS writing for this new (Soma)tic poetry ritual or until I get a ticket and go directly to security to check my bag of clean socks crystals rice cakes MUJI pens and notepads ONE WAY OR THE OTHER I WILL WRITE POEMS FOR MY FUTURE WILDERNESS PROJECT which is the followup to my new book ECODEVIANCE forthcoming in September

celebrating Hoa Nguyen & GHOSTS

CLICK HERE

for Scryer's Invitation

(Soma)tic Ritual

and poem

#103: Calling Across the Watermelon Field For You

Titling Yuh-Shioh Wong’s Paintings

We met in Marfa, Texas when I was on a Lannan Fellowship and Yuh-Shioh was painting in Marfa Book Company’s gallery provided by Tim Johnson. Murder Prevention was how I thought of her work when watching brows soften on anyone who walked into the gallery. All who visited felt the soft penetrating light of her paintings enter us to recalibrate our tools for examining the human condition. She shows us art can provide autonomous worldviews beyond formally designed perimeters of culture, letting us be free in the internal terra incognito.

We became friends and on one trip to an ancient petroglyph cave we were looking at bite marks on cactus made by javelinas. I said, “Javelinas are made out of cactus because that’s what they eat.” She asked if she could name one of her paintings this. A few months later when I was on a Tripwire residency provided by David Buuck in Oakland, Yuh-Shioh invited me to her house in Berkeley to name the other paintings from the new Marfa collection.

We spent eight hours with Yuh-Shioh bringing paintings out one at a time, perched on rocks against the

wall. I would meditate with cactus quartz, known as a collaboration stone, then hand it to her as I approached the painting with my deck of Dakini Oracle tarot cards, rosemary, lavender and Mercury’s fennel sprig in my hair. We built the concentration, always in the room together, and I would stand with the cards close to the painting, then cut the deck nine times. Of the sixty-five cards, only five kept repeating, and I would sit at my computer to begin hammering out a block of text. The title usually appeared at the end of a text block. I would read it aloud and it always connected. For instance, “framing vapor of the departed” came at the end of a text block and Yuh-Shioh explained that this painting was created after an encounter with a ghost in the house where she was staying in Marfa. The eight hours we spent for the titling ritual was the opposite of draining as we burned Palo Santo wood chips and used Steve Halpern’s DEEP THETA music as a trance vehicle. It was an honor to collaborate with an artist creating some of the most astonishing paintings I have ever felt enter me to transform me.

Title samples:

writing the letter of your life in the clearing

flying over the transmutation of the quiet

stethoscope to the petroglyph

the horns in the distance when we leave for the mountains

thinking with the longbow

bending the muscle of light

#102: Saguaro Assimilations

a collaborative (Soma)tic by CAConrad & TC Tolbert

Deep inside the Saguaro forest outside Tucson we chose a saguaro cactus and chaparral shrub to sit between. Selenite crystal in the sand between us to thaw etheric blockages, we burned sage for one another, then pressed our foreheads together while holding each other’s temples. We hummed low, loud, extended OM vibrations, the selenite directly under our joined heads. Then took notes.

We took turns imagining someone we had conflict with then danced around the cactus while the other took notes. The dance of conflict around the cactus combined with short, tender interactions touching between the thorns, combing hair with thorns and pulling the conflict to the surface. Then more notes. 

The chaparral shrub touching the cactus was in bloom. Chaparral has been used for centuries as a deep blood cleanser, said to even rid the body of cancer. We were continuing our conflict dance, gazing into a small yellow flower with the face of the person troubling us then we would eat the flower, slowly chewing while writing.

The fourth movement was choosing a cloud. Locating it, we would think of someone we loved who died. As the cloud moved we chanted their name, chanted over and over, and then morphed that chanted name into the name of the person we are in conflict with, chanting, chanting, then writing.

new work in THE SENSATION FEELINGS JOURNAL

TAROT AS VERB 

TAROTING MEAT 

 for Selah Anne Saterstrom 

 CLICK HERE 

 MANY THANKS 
TO THE EDITORS

(Soma)tics in HUFFINGTON POST

PLEASE CLICK HERE

MANY THANKS TO PAUL LEGAUT 

& GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI

5 poems in the latest issue

these are from the

FULL MOON HAWK APPLICATION chapbook (Assless Chaps)