In the early summer of 2023, as part of a virtual gathering to consider Phosphorescence of Thought, Earth Is Best, and The Hidden Eyes of Things, I gave a reading on Zoom.
If you’re curious, you can access the reading here. At the prompt, the password is: x%pskg7j
Akseli Gallen-Kallela, The Defense of the Sampo, 1896
The Sampo is alive, churning out coins, salt, magic, language. Geoffrey O’Brien mentions the poem in an article he has written about a new translation of The Kalavela published in the New York Review of Books. Writes O’Brien, “Writers of fantasy and science fiction continue to draw on [the Kalevala]. The American poet Peter O’Leary has recently taken its central narrative thread as the springboard for The Sampo (2016), a vigorously incantatory poem to which I am grateful for leading me back to the Kalevala legends.”
Earth, thankfully, continues to be Best. Kylan Rice has written an extensive review of Earth Is Best for West Branch, which includes a similarly extensive review of Toby Martinez de las Rivas’s Black Sun, a book I return to constantly for its incandescent language and bracing severity. About Earth Is Best, writes Rice: “‘What if the god is a mushroom after all?’ O’Leary wonders, reversing the allegorical paradigm that would see in sporing image of the resurrection, rather than vice versa. Intent on its this-wordliness, O’Leary mythologizes fungus in the hope of returning us to the earth not as a purified paradiso terrestre, but as an uneven terrain of laborious and localized healing in the aftermath of catastrophe.”
Finally, Knapsack has become Gabby Start. Here is his first video.
In this time of pandemic, I’ve done some readings, all on Zoom or YouTube. This seems to be the poetic way of the present, not such a bad thing, in fact. I’ve enjoyed “attending” readings from poets all around the country and world in the past four months, a welcome interference with the menace and challenge of the Plague.
Here I am reading “Totality,” the solar section of The Hidden Eyes of Things, a forthcoming epic poem about the unconscious activated through the discipline of astrology. Here I’m reading with Patrick Morrissey, whose book Light Box, John Tipton and I will be publishing with Verge Books in October 2021. My contribution begins at the thirteen-minute mark.
Here I am offering a reflection on the role of Mary in the Church, something posted on the website of my parish, Ascension Church. It’s also a reflection on Henry Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres.
And here I am as part of a large group reading for the new Ecopoetics anthology, Poetics for the More-than-Human World, that appeared on the Dispatches website. My contribution to this reading begins at the ten-minute mark. I also participate in the discussion after the readings proper conclude.
The Ecopoetics anthology includes a review of Earth Is Best, written by the indefatigable Mark Scroggins. Its first sentence gives me thrills and chills.
On September 10, 2020, I will be reading on Zoom for Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, one of the few truly essential cultural institutions to poetry. I will be reading with Roberto Harrison, in conjunction with his virtual gallery show at Woodland Pattern, “Tropical Lung: Tec Alliance,” which is Immense. Magnificent. Terrifying.
Mabila Horizons / earth as interior solitudes, by Roberto Harrison.
Roberto is a Great Companion; I’m thrilled to be reading with him.
Finally, another section from The Hidden Eyes of Things, “The Strokes of the Moon,” was recently published on Blazing Stadium, the already dynamic and thrilling electronic journal edited by Tamas Panitz, Whit Griffin, and Lila Dunlap.
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re well, taking care of yourself, and taking care of others.
Portrait of the author, painted by Michael O’Leary, Cambridge, Massachusetts, circa 1993.
Some readings are coming in support of Earth Is Best and beyond.
February 20, 2020, at 1:30 p.m., I will be speaking on the poetry of John Peck in relation to the Red Book of C.G. Jung, joined in a broader discussion on Peck’s work by Elizabeth T. Grey, Jr. and Joseph Donahue.
February 21, 2020, at 10 p.m., I will be join Jeanne Heuving in a poetry reading for selva oscura press at the Brown Hotel in downtown Louisville.
February 22, 2020, at 2:45 p.m., I will chair a reading by Nathaniel Tarn from his magnificent Atlantis: An autoanthropology, whose respondents will be Norman Finkelstein, Forrest Gander, and Nathaniel Mackey.
March 24, 2020, I will be reading in the evening with Alan Felsenthal at Measure Twice in Brooklyn New York.
April 30, 2020, I will be reading in the evening at Trinity College, Cambridge University.
May 1, 2020, I will deliver a lecture, “Three Apocalypses,” at Trinity College, Cambridge University. The respondent will be Rowan Williams.
Look for readings in Milwaukee and Colorado in the Fall!
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.
Brass sestarius of Hadrian with Nemesis on the flip side.
Four new poems of mine have been posted at the Cultural Society, two amanita odes from Earth Is Best, and two new lyrics, one about Nemesis, the other about Milton.