Magus Magnus : coda

 

Magus Magnus : part five

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book you return to? A particular author?

For perceptual refreshment (when I find myself dulled in habitual ways of seeing, perceiving), I return to Malcom de Chazal’s Sens-Plastique. Ex.: “The sun’s slowest reflexes are the shadows it casts. Shadows are restless echo-lights whose rate of travel depends on the air’s lubricity and the smoothness of surfaces. Shadows run on the plains, walk in the valleys, gallop in summer, and trot in winter.”

For spiritual refreshment, I relied on Emerson in youth. Now, rarely does reading help revive my zest. I meditate, I write, I get some sun. Sometimes I have a cannoli.

Magus Magnus : part four

How does a poem begin? 

A poem begins with an intimation. Now, whether this is the echo of a hint and whisper of some profound intimacy with knowledge up to that moment unknown or thought-words themselves arising as event and deed from the source, I doubt it will ever be for me to know. 

Magus Magnus : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Towards the Primeval Lightning Field, Will Alexander

Dancing in Odessa, Ilya Kaminsky

Yr Skull a Cathedral, Param Anand Singh

Stretched Warp, Maria Damon & Alan Sondheim

Split Series (chapbook), Christophe Casamassima

Share the Wealth, Maureen Thorson

Magus Magnus : part two

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Poetry in its experimental and contemporary freedom – also, on the level of context and genre, with its embrace of hybrid forms – allows us to draw nearest to the present as it is happening, to the actuality of the imagined, and to the flow of thought, of mind, brainstorm; it allows us to approximate each of these phenomena (presence, imagination, thinking) through words. Indeed, even the ancient and traditional forms, through their constraints, provoke a freedom that defines the edges of what arises in the world and in the mind. 

Poetry, as it is the literary art working closest with language and syllables and letters themselves (the latter at least since Dada and, later, the Lettrists), has the capacity to break language off from the rest of existence as its own plane or, alternately, to fuse itself with thought and knowing – consciousness itself coming to words and resonance. This is when the poet aligns with the plasticity of the medium: language itself as a self-proliferating, fractal, unfolding, which has the capacity to form and be formed, informed, as or in accordance with thought-as-it arises and, ultimately, reality. 

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.