Recent and upcoming readings, pandemic edition.

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.

Upcoming readings.

Some readings are coming in support of Earth Is Best and beyond.

Louisville Conference 2020

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!

Earth Is 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.

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.