Dan Beachy-Quick has written an appreciation of The Four Horsemen at Colorado Review.
Writes Beachy-Quick: “What recommends this book so highly in my mind is the alternative path it points out for what poetry scholarship might look like—not an arcane exploration of academic expertise, but an enthused initiation into the arcane mysteries poetry still embeds within itself.”
I have a new book! It’s available for purchase through the Cultural Society website.
Here’s what Steven Toussaint says about the book:
Those in the know know that Peter O’Leary is the torchbearer of a rich if neglected poetic lineage: the “American Gnostic.” Through his critical and editorial labors, O’Leary has initiated poets and readers into the secret wisdom and apocalyptic promise transmitted unbrokenly from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, down through Robert Duncan and Ronald Johnson, to contemporaries like Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Donahue, and Pam Rehm. Those who read O’Leary’s poetry feel the wind and precipitation of a unique imaginarium peopled by dreamers, ascetics, birders, analysts, foragers, sorcerers—all of them watchers, watchful for God in his multiform emanations.
In The Four Horsemen, O’Leary turns his eye to Dante, Milton, Blake, and Whitman. His critical style is enthusiastic, quite literally “god-possessed.” His passwords are vision, power, and transmission. His reading is fired by conviction: that the revelatory imperatives of apocalyptic poetry flout our current cultural inertia and spiritual despair. The result is a book of true importance, which is less concerned with rewriting literary history than with seeing what happens when the shocking and destabilizing language of poets works on the souls of other poets, on O’Leary himself, over time, and then with following those lines of force wherever they lead. As rigorous as it is rapturous, The Four Horsemen is the best guide I know for how to live intensely with poetry.
Very pleased to announce the publication of The Hidden Eyes of Things, a new book-length poem out from the Cultural Society. You can order the book directly from the Cultural Society here; or you can order it from SPD.
The Hidden Eyes of Things completes the trilogy on poetry and consciousness begun in Phosphorescence of Thought (about the evolution of consciousness), and continued in Earth Is Best (about altered states of consciousness). The Hidden Eyes of Things explores the unconscious through the discipline of astrology.
I decided not to include in the book itself the list of all the books I consulted and used but include it here for anyone who might be interested.
THE HIDDEN EYES OF THINGS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
These are the books I consulted, borrowed and quoted from, and ruminated on over the long course of the composition of this poem.
Abu’l-Rayhan Muhammad Ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, The Book of Instruction in the Elements of the Art of Astrology, Astrology Classics 2006.
Robert Hinckley Allen, Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning. Dover 1963.
Tamsyn Barton, Ancient Astrology, Routledge 1994.
Austin Coppack and Daniel A. Schulke, The Celestial Art: Essays on Astrological Magic, Three Hands Press 2018.
Brian Cox, Wonders of the Solar System, Collins 2011.
Franz Cumont, Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans, Dover 1960.
Dionysius (Pseudo-Dionysius), The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, Classics of Western Spirituality 1987.
Marsilio Ficino, The Book of Life, trans. Charles Boer, Spring Publications 1980.
The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, volumes I-III, trans. members of the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, London, Gingko Press 1985.
Fred Gettings, The Arkana Dictionary of Astrology, Arkana 1985.
Fred Gettings, The Book of the Zodiac, Triune 1972.
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Penguin Classics 1960.
Robert Hand, Horoscope Symbols, Whitford Press, 1981.
James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War, Penguin 2004.
Homeric Hymns Homeric Apocrypha Lives of Homer, ed. and trans. Martin L. West, Loeb 2003.
Brian Innes, Horoscopes: How to Draw and Interpret Them, Arco 1978.
Carl Kerényi, Prometheus: Archetypal Image of Human Existence, trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series LXV.I 1963.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. W.H.D.Rouse, Loeb 1992.
Manilius, Astronomica, trans. G.P. Goold, Loeb 1997.
Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephan MacKenna, Pantheon 1969.
David A. Rothery, The Planets: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford 2010.
Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, Viking 2006.
Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, Faber and Faber 1958.
Truly, the best.
My new book, Earth Is Best, will shortly be published by the Cultural Society. It’s a book of odes about mushrooms, mushroom foraging, altered states of consciousness, modern crises, and antique realities. It is a sequel to Phosphorescence of Thought. (In turn, it will one day be followed by its own sequel, The Hidden Eyes of Things, a planetary epic that approaches the unconscious through the discipline of astrology.) Earth Is Best takes its title from the opening three words of Pindar’s magnificent first Olympian Ode, elementally adjusted. The book, which features a gorgeous illustration of amanita muscaria by Todd Buck (below), was designed by Crisis.
Illustration by Todd Buck.
I will be launching Earth Is Best at a reading/performance at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore on Tuesday, November 12, 2019 at 6 p.m. I will be joined in the performance by Mark Booth, who will accompany the reading with improvised and found music.
The book will be available at the reading and, before too long, at the Cultural Society’s website. For the curious, here is a more detailed description of the book.
In a time of ecological crisis, Peter O’Leary finds in mushrooms “an elaborate pattern,” a circulation of energy, a strange Kingdom with the power to alter consciousness. From the opening line “Earth is best,” each proposition takes root in the terroir of soils, in the woods and meadows of the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest. On each foray, we find hidden systems bearing fruit, “crowning from the duff of white pines / and birch trees,” extending upward from “loam’s rich undying gloom.” Equally, these poems bloom from a rich mulch of linguistic inheritance, a compost of ancient texts and esoteric knowledge, searching out old words of exquisite exactitude and resonance. As readers, our attention quickens as we join the hunt, discovering elemental pleasures on every page, sometimes with the prickling onset of psychedelic consciousness. And like fungi, these poems work to break down false oppositions, returning us to a reciprocity between death and life, panic and joy, anxiety and euphoria, tocsin and cure.
Icon of Moses on Sinai at the Burning Bush, 13th century, St. Catherine's Monastery. Take off thy sandals from off thy feet.
Last month, Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age received a generous notice by Steven Toussaint, native of Chicago, citizen of New Zealand, and presently residing in Cambridge. Steven mentioned the book as part of the "Reading List" feature connected to Poetry magazine. Here is what he said:
"Do we have a functional grammar for theological reflection in poetry today? This question has served as a guiding principle in the choice of much of my reading lately. Peter O’Leary’s recent collection of critical essays, Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age, is doubly ambitious. He not only conducts original, searching readings of nine contemporary poets—among them Geoffrey Hill, Fanny Howe, Robert Duncan, and Nathaniel Mackey—but also convincingly argues a “way forward for poetry” that would honor twentieth-century experimentation and pioneering, while at the same time refashioning a language within which intimations of anagogy and apocalypse might seriously contend. O’Leary’s definition of “religion” is capacious enough to include all manner of syncretism and heterodoxy and yet restrained enough to serve as a transformative (even troublesome) force in the poetry he examines. His critical style is refreshingly personal, even anecdotal."
On March 1, I delivered a talk on Thick and Dazzling Darkness for the Lumen Christi Institute at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. The talk was video recorded. You can watch all 82 minutes of the thing on YouTube. (The talk is forty-five minutes long; a half-hour of questions ensued.)
Thick and Dazzling Darkness/Lumen Christi
I also conducted an interview with Mark Franzen for the Lumen Christi podcast. Stay tuned for that!
Icon of the Second Coming. Greece. From around 1700.
Two upcoming appearances. Well, actually three. The first is two-for-one.
On Friday, February 23 and Saturday, February 24, 2018, I will be participating in two panels at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900.
On Friday, February 23, I'll be a respondent on a panel including the work of the great poet Márton Koppány. Here's one of Márton's poems.
And here's a photo of Márton at Lake Balaton in Hungary.
Photo by Gyöngyi Boldog
Then, on Saturday, February 24, I will be participating on a panel in honor of Nathaniel Tarn's ninetieth birthday, which is coming later this year. I'll be speaking about Messianic Time in Tarn's late poetry, which is magnificent. (The late poetry, that is. Messianic time, which I've only ever intuited, will also very likely be magnificent.)
Here is a photo of Tarn and myself, taken in Santa Fe in July 2016. Look at that beautiful Cultural Society t-shirt.
Back in Chicago, on Thursday, March 1, 2018, at 4:30 p.m. in Swift Hall at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, I will be speaking about Thick and Dazzling Darkness for the Lumen Christi Institute. Here are the details for the event. There's a full Moon opposed to the Sun conjunct Neptune, so it's bound to be mystically potent. I'll be speaking among other things on the work of Frank Samperi, Fanny Howe, Joseph Donahue, and Pam Rehm.
So, what are you waiting for? HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME.
Ladies and Gentlemen: the poet Ronald Johnson.
Thanks to a kind invitation by host Robin McLachlen, a recording of Ronald Johnson reading "ARK 34," his homage to Louis Zukofsky dedicated upon hearing of the death of the poet in 1978, and which begins the parts of ARK that make up the poem's second section, entitled "The Spires," aired on January 11, 2018 on CKCU FM 93.1 in Ottawa, Canada, along with a reading from me of my poem "Dante," which appears in Luminous Epinoia, published in 2010 by the Cultural Society, that resets/para-translates/dilates on Paradiso XXIV & XXV. Lots of other good stuff on the show. Have a listen!
Literary Landscape with Robin McLachlan.
The recording of "Dante" was executed by Gabby O'Leary, who goes by Knapsack. Have a listen to him, too!
The Tarn, in his native habitat.
At Lute & Drum, the cosmophanic internet potentia edited by Ken Taylor and Pete Moore, Nathaniel Tarn reflects on The Sampo, about which he says, among other things, "Basing himself on entry into one of the greatest of all human fables, O’Leary confirms that the North could hold its explosive but purely lyrical epics against anything that the South could produce and with perhaps the greatest and most solemn celebration of chivalry, albeit without ever departing from the commons, kin to the Arthurian legends, the Icelandic sagas, the medieval splendors of Middle High German."
Do you have your Sampo yet?
The Reception, by Michael O'Leary, has just been published by The Cultural Society.
Michael O'Leary with rainbow.
Photo by Syl Flood.
Performing The Sampo at Sector 2337 with Father Bob Hutmacher on the harp.
Buttercup tearing into The Sampo.
The Sampo is here. Official launch on April 27, 2016, at Sector 2337, where I will perform parts of the poem accompanied on the harp by Fr. Bob Hutmacher ofm. Come join us as we loosen the hallucinations.
In the meantime, Steven Manuel conducted an interview with me last month about The Sampo:
Stray Horn interview with Steven Manuel
It's a companion to the interview by Violet Callis that appeared last month in Fnewsmagazine.
5 Questions interview with Violet Callis