Readings.

I will be giving a reading with John Tipton and Leila Wilson on Tuesday, December 6, 2022 for the Cactus Flower Reading Series at 3454 N. Bell Ave., in Roscoe Village. I’ll be reading from The Hidden Eyes of Things for the first time in Chicago since the book was published this past summer. John will be reading from his amazing new book Believers. And Leila will be reading from new work. Exciting!

Speaking of Hidden Eyes, I read the Neptune section of the poem at the Poetry and Spirituality symposium at Xavier University last month, hosted by the great Norman Finkelstein.

Here is a link to the video from the reading.

Last month, I joined Al Filreis, Laynie Brown, and Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué to discuss H.D.’s legendary poem “Heat,” along with Robert Duncan’s magisterial reading of the poem from the opening of The H.D. Book. This is part of the free ModPo (“Modern & Contemporary American Poetry”) course that runs out of Kelly Writers House and Penn.

Speaking some more of Hidden Eyes, here is a link to a flatteringly perceptive review of the book by the (once again) great Norman Finkelstein. You may have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to get to the review.

And here is a similarly perceptive and impressively argued interpretation of The Sampo by Sean Reynolds. This essay, “Translation for the End Times: Peter O’Leary’s The Sampo,” appears in an anthology called Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms, edited by David Hadbawnik.

Translation for the End Times: Peter O’Leary’s The Sampo

Finally, “I’m Sorry for Everything.”

Vigorous incantation.

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.

Tarn on the Sampo.

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?

Readings: Grand Cross Full Moon

On January 12, 2017, there's a Grand Cross Full Moon happening, with the Moon and Sun in opposition (and with Pluto very close) and Jupiter and Uranus in opposition. Lux Hominem court astrologer Victoria Martin calls this formation and the days surrounding it "highlights" of 2017. There will be a lot of energy available; what better way to expand its properties than to gaze through the archetypal telescope of a poetry reading?

On January 10, 2017, at 6 p.m., at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, one of the great bastions of Western civilization, I will be reading with Steven Toussaint, a label mate at the Cultural Society, currently of Auckland, New Zealand, but native of Chicago's South Side.

Anticipate mystic mastery of time and space.

On Saturday, February 25, 2017, at the University of Louisville, at "The Louisville Conference," along with Joseph Donahue and Mark Scroggins, I will be presenting a paper on the work of the great Norman Finkelstein. My talk is tentatively called, "Thaumaturgical Energies and Ceremonies of Crisis: Apocalyptic Transmission in Norman Finkelstein's 'From the Files of the Immanent Foundation.'"

Anticipate unreconstructed bad-assery, especially from Donahue and Scroggins. Who Do Not Mess Around.

And on Monday, March 13, 2017 at Xavier University, I will be reading with Brenda Iijima. I don't have any details for this one yet, but they should arrive shortly.

Reliquiae and the Sampo.

Pleased to report that I have new work in the fourth issue of Reliquiae, the very fine journal edited by Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton, and published by Corbel Stone Press. My poem, "Thirty-Third Amanita Ode: Parmenides/Clouds," is a meditation on Gerard Manley Hopkins's descriptions of clouds in light of his invented term of uplift, instress. For anyone who might have been keeping track, this poem concludes the series of Amanita odes that comprise Earth Is Best, my manuscript of ethno-mycological effervescence. Scroll down to find my "Mycopoetics," published last year in Hambone.

Also, a review of The Sampo in Publishers Weekly. Nice!

Spectral Sampo.

Performing The Sampo at Sector 2337 with Father Bob Hutmacher on the harp.

Sampo arriveth.

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