Magus Magnus : part one

Magus Magnus sources poetry and “the poetic” as central both to the extremes of interiority (thought, philosophy) and exteriority (performance, deed). Books include The Re-echoes, Idylls for a Bare Stage, Heraclitean Pride, and Verb Sap, as well as, on Kindle, The Free Spirit. His Substack newsletter, Poetry, Thought, Word Magick, is an ongoing writing project designed to track in real-time the creative process and its confrontation with impinging circumstance. 

What are you working on?

My focus into Fall 2022 is to complete the manuscript of The Killing Joke, a poetic hybrid that frolics in poetic forms, philosophy, and cultural criticism. The book is forthcoming from The Mute Canary. 

The Killing Joke traces the history and concept of the "Killing Joke" upon three pop cultural nodes: Killing Joke, the band; the Batman/Joker comic by Alan Moore; and the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus with its lethal joke sketch – “no one can hear it and live.” In so doing, the ancient archetype of the Trickster - in the guise of Jester or Evil Clown – emerges. Laughter isn’t so much an antidote to our increasingly unanchored, deranged, chaotic times as it is a looming, cackling, echoing, funhouse mirror, non sequitur non-answer.