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.

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.

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!