Found an old notebook today, a journal entry from when I was 25, and an undertaker:
I’m not good at social interactions with people. I feel awkward saying “thank you” or being generous. But I can say things to the dead that I can’t say to the living. I can be with them … simple, caring …
I can say, “We’re going to make you look good.”
I have so much love inside me.
When I am with them alone I become natural and sincere—I am myself more than anywhere else.
The dead’s gift to me is their willingness to be loved.
Years ago my old friend (as well as Black Ocean cover art collaborator, and go-to tattoo artist), Josh Wallis, and I made this comic. We intended it as a sort of overture to a larger project concerning a mortician whose insomnia is blurring the lines of sanity and reality–something we were both intimately familiar with as an insomniac (Josh) and a mortician (me). It was published in a very limited-edition anthology by River Bird Comics and was never reprinted. Some day the longer project may still be realized, but in the meantime rather than let it languish in publishing torpor, we present it now for your reading pleasure. HERE
Here is the full text of the love poem I wrote to Jean Genet, for Poetry Crush’s Halloween Special, 12 Dead Poets (I Would Fuck):
THERE IS A CLOSE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FLOWERS AND CONVICTS
Jean my love for you is prison rape is the vine of moon flowers strangling the sign post outside the prison where ex-cons wait with bowed heads for the bus to return them to the world
Jean my love for you is a tube of vaseline tucked tightly in the pocket of my jeans the cops find when they pick me up is the hot shame I feel as I grow hard handcuffed to the cold pipe waiting to be booked
Jean my love for you is a porcelain tomb at the center of a black continent is rose water is roses is thorns tearing the tender palms of my outstretched hands
Jean my love my fire burning blackly beneath every breath I exhale upon your neck I bind my steps with ropes of honeysuckle and tread sweetly on your naked chest
Jean my fire my exquisite wound my stone of blood in a lake of nails I run my tongue along each vein and quake and quake and quake and quake
Jean my quaking wound my alabaster chainsaw cleaving the ocean from me
Jean my ocean my night I am blacking out
Jean my Genet my Jean my Jean I am forever pinned at the limit of your eyes
I wrote a love poem to Clarice Lispector for Poetry Crush’s third annual Halloween feature, “10 Dead Poets (I would fuck).” You can read the whole supernatural orgy HERE.
Also, if you’d like to read my love poem to Jean Genet, you can find that poem in my post from November of last year HERE, as well as in last year’s feature on poetrycrush.com HERE.
“Stucky’s raw works … give a dreamlike power to an antinomian religion of erotic love”
Basically Publishers Weekly is saying that if you want to be released by grace from the obligation of observing moral law, then you should read my book.
Here’s a short list of confirmed dates for the first half of 2014, also updated on my Live Appearances page. Boston, Seattle, Iowa City, Chicago, and New York: I don’t want your love unless you know I am repulsive,and love me even as you know it…
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2/14. Brookline, MA. BASH series. Brookline Booksmith. w/ Gillian Devereux, and J. Hope Stein.
2/27. Seattle, WA. AWP Conference. Ping Pong & Poetry Crush reading. The Butterfly Lounge. Other readers TBA.
3/15. Boston, MA.Mr. Hip Presents. UFORGE Gallery. Other performers TBA.
4/5. Iowa City, IA. Mission Creek Festival. Black Ocean & Third Man Records event. Other performers TBA.
This year, after a decade of publishing other people’s books I finally had my own full-length debut come out and was fortunate enough to dedicate many of my days and nights to traveling and performing the work–across almost 30 cities, and a few countries. It has truly been a lifelong dream come true, and tonight I’m filled with love and gratitude to everyone who joined me on that journey. Whether you came to one of my shows, invited me to perform, helped produce an event, toured with me, performed with me, promoted a show, played music at one of the shows, bought my book, read my book, reviewed my book, gave me a bed to sleep in / a couch to sleep on / or a meal to eat, or just patiently supported me as I dropped a lot of other things to focus on my book for an entire year, you became part of the realization of that lifelong dream. Thank You.
I’m lavishing my affections upon Jean Genet tonight so that I might write him a love poem for Poetry Crush. All I really need is to skim the pages of The Thief’s Journal to fall under his spell again … but also there is this, from his poem Le Pêcheur du Suquet:
Go supplely on paths of embers where treasures of night are buried beneath your feet. Peace is with you. In the nettles, the rushes the blackthorns, the forests your step sets measures of darkness. And each of your feet, each step of jasmine buries me in a porcelain tomb. You obscure the world.
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Enfouis sous vos pieds les trésors de la nuit Sur des chemins de braise allez en souplesse. La paix est avec vous. Dans les orties, les ajoncs, les prunelliers, les forêts, votre pas Dépose des mesures de ténèbres. Et chacun de vos pieds, chaque pas de jasmin M'ensevelit dans une tombe de porcelaine. Vous obscurcissez le monde.
A Conversation on the Occult Practices in the Arts Between Poet Janaka Stucky and Peter Bebergal
In 2015, Jack White’s Third Man Records launched a new publishing imprint, Third Man Books, and chose Janaka Stucky’s debut book of poetry, The Truth Is We Are Perfect, as their inaugural title. Stucky’s poems are at once incantatory, mystic, epigrammatic, and full of subtle esoteric, and occult influences. His influences, combined with a performative and almost ecstatic presence on stage, make him an unsurprising but nonetheless interesting choice for the record label’s first author.
Peter Bebergal’s book, Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll, was published by Tarcher-Penguin in 2014. Bebergal’s book explains how occult and mystical ideals gave rock and roll its heart and purpose, and made the music into more than just backbeat, and into part of a cultural revolution of political, spiritual, sexual, and social liberation.
Given Stucky’s influences and Bebergal’s interests (and the fact that they play in a Dungeons & Dragons group together), we thought it was natural that they strike up a conversation on the occult imagination in music, art, and poetry. What follows is a conversation exploring the influence of occult traditions on rock and roll—from the Beatles to Black Sabbath—and how the marriage between mysticism and music changed our world.
JANAKA STUCKY: My editor at Third Man shied away from the occult stuff in my book. But I was reading Season of the Witch when I was coming up with the book’s marketing and publicity plan, and it was fantastic for me to see how all of these rock icons express the occult imagination in their personas and in work. Especially the stuff that’s a little more subtle, but still mysterious: like Led Zeppelin’s sigils on their albums. The editor kept wanting to play these elements down a little, but I was like, “Guys this is rock and roll. What are you doing?”
PETER BEBERGAL: These ideas and symbols immediately key into some part of us that just resonates, and sometimes we’re afraid of them. Sometimes we whole-heartedly believe in them. Sometimes we think they are ridiculous, but all those things contribute to what I call the occult imagination. We usually think of the occult as a collection of practices, whether it’s Tarot cards, ceremonial magic, and/or a pagan Solstice ritual. What the practices tend to have in common, both in contemporary and historical ways, is that they tend toward being heterodox. They often position themselves against normative or mainstream ways of practicing a spiritual system. Whether the practices actually reference any real metaphysical state, or whether there are spirits or demons, or whether magic works or doesn’t work, is all in some ways irrelevant to the power of this part of our imagination.
JS: When people talk about imagination, they tend to think of fantasy or something made-up. But really imagination is a mode of perception. Which is maybe why so many artists have turned to the occult. Artists tend to feel like outsiders. Whether they are actually outsiders or not is also kind of irrelevant.
PB: We’re talking about rock and roll and contemporary poetry, but this has been going on for a long, long time. More often than not, whenever a poet, musician, or a composer felt that they were pushing up against what was mainstream—either in their field or in their craft—they often turned to occult or non-traditional, non-Christian mystical texts and readings. Occult practices and ideas can give weight and support to this kind of art. The artist is out on a limb and doing something that feels so different that it’s dangerous. And yet suddenly they realize there’s this whole spiritual system that acts as a framework: it gives another level of language to use for the creative process.
In rock and roll it gets complicated because we have people whose reputation is that of dark magicians. But, for example, there’s no evidence that Jimmy Page ever actually tried to cast a spell. But with Led Zeppelin there is the influence of occult images, the writings of Aleister Crowley, as well as Robert Plant’s interest in ancient Britain and Celtic folklore. Those become part of not just how the music sounds but the whole shape of the aesthetic and impact that the band had. Belief has nothing to do with how much these things actually shape culture.
Happy full moon solstice! Serendipitously I have a conversation with friend and fellow author, Peter Bebergal, about the occult & art over at The Believer today.