eurydiceunderground

[eurydiceunderground]

reveal what heart now hides

Once upon a super blue moon I release a new song.

nominatissima is from Intimate Things, my genre-bending meditation on passion (erotic and mystical) forthcoming from the Lazuli Literary Press. In the poem, Heloise interrupts a lecture about her life with a haunting slideshow of words as she sings this song.

LISTEN to me on Spotify

The book will be published soon. And, yes, Heloise is the 12th century abbess at the Paraclete, lover of Abelard.

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un-becoming

Somehow nine years have past…nine years since The Lost Films of Theda Bara was published in Issue #30 of Fence. The time of its making feels immediate but that’s a deception: nearly a decade has past. I am not now where I was then. The Lost Films was an imaginative essay/fragmented screen-play of almost-erotica about all the things I love because they do not exist. It was a solid experimental inter-genre work that captured where I was then.

Nearly a decade, later, my themes are different. But they have found a home, once again in Issue #39 of Fence. Un-becoming is a pun and the title of a 100+ line poem. While procrastinating on the final proof, I made this Venn diagram to map the terrain it covers:

My old friend Orion makes an appearance (he’s also Come on Lonely from my concept album these fountains rare here). Editing the middle section, which smashes up astronomical facts (the start that will soon go super-novae in Orion’s shoulder) + our mythical projections onto the stars + impending planetary doom, made me appreciate Emily Dickinson for maybe the first time ever. Complexity in brevity. Ah, there’s something worth mastering.

Un-becoming begins:

Though I have spent night under stars drunk and not drunk abandoning myself to way-out universal wow

now the walk from door to yard feels epic embarkment drunk or not drunk as if wolves as if pestilence as if deranged men as if

my mind, unhinged like a jaw, might not shut if darkness swarms. ..

I am pro-the Fence mission and you will be, too, if you like work that deviates from the American literary norm. You can get yourself a copy with a Fence membership, at your library, at a Barnes & Noble or an independent bookstore -- if in NYC, try Quimby's, if in Philadelphia try Avril 50. You can subscribe to Fence here.

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night well

Believe it or not, I’ve never had internet access. I didn’t want the distraction at home: better to read or write or cut up pictures or cook. The pandemic changed that. I was lucky: I had a job that worked from home. But to keep it, I had to stick my home, at last, into the world wide web.

For the first time, I binged something other than fantasy fiction. I watched everything in the Marvel cinematic universe, all of which was new to me. I watched the LotR director’s cuts multiple times. This isn’t exactly binging: it’s more decadent feast. My true binges were like main-lining sugar candy: a frothy suspension into the air-angst of the gen z v log.

To redeem the time redeem the dream (till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew), I vlogged myself to burn off the sugar high. It’s a favorite device of mine: take an banal, almost non-form (I’ve used power-point presentations, training videos, memorandums, bad pop songs…) and alienize it with my choice of words.

<Insert clickbait here>

You’ll see some familiar editing tricks, and the vlogger version of Brecht: sitting obviously before a computer camera with recording gear in plain sight. If you’ve ever watched anything on youtube you’ll recognize the opening music. In fact, the whole less-than-5-minute video is pure vlogging trope. Except everything I say.

I say: you could stay here in this shimmery blue scroll, or…you could go down down the deep well…

I suspect the jewel-in-the-well image is from The Rescuers of which I have disturbed childhood memories . I’ll re-watch it soon; “it’s in my queue!”

don’t forget to like and subscribe!~!!”

is the only possible way to close.

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bleak fragments of desire

Full moon in snowy January—I look out the window like into a white room with long, soft shadows.

I’m getting pretty good at wintering. I was even better at it 20 years or so ago. In my youth, darkness was a challenge I had the inner fuel to light. At 20-something, night is a challenge. With age, it can feel like a threat. But I’ve other skills now, beyond innate wild fire, and now is the time to hone them.

I hope you are wintering well.

I write to share some poetic extravagances perfect for wintering with:

she considers his question in fragments of verse

Long ago, I wrote a terrible love letter. I tore it up. Inspired by Carson’s translation of Sappho, I reassembled the torn paper into fragmented poems; a little reckoning with a love as vagrant as wind.

Later, I recorded myself reading the fragments, mixed them with dissociated sound effects and a broken riff, then made a movie with images of the text. she considers his question in fragments of verse was published this year in the University of Alaska’s Permafrost.

she considers in Permafrost

the whole issue

Two pretty postcards

For you. The first contains a line I too often repeat to myself : “bleakness shimmers.” Were I to moon-gaze tonight in the snowy cold, I could repeat it to myself once again.

I love the second poem: it’s in almost-verse and the closing image— of stars ordered between two cracked columns amongst a colossal ruin— is my own private, sardonic, epic vision of love.

Note my hand-made postage stamp.

Two postcards in Wild Roof, Issue 4

The whole issue

“Shore” is discussed Ep 3 of this podcast

A drunken passion play

After nearly 2 decades of strange theater-making, I pulled together some unfinished work into one miniature magnus opus. Intimate Things is a surreal and poetic mix of dialogue, essay, song, slide-show, and interrupted monologue. Swell Henry imagines conversations between legendary Medieval scholars, monastics, and lovers, Heloise & Abelard, climbs to the top of the Empire State Building hoping to hear from God, then winds up drunk in a bar.

I am blessed that Azure fell in love with the whole thing, and has published it in its entirety.

The script in Azure

Volume 5, Issue 1 of Azure

Is this a good time to mention

that my art-pop radio-play concept album these fountains rare here was streamed in 17 countries last year (according to Spotify)! It’s the story of one woman’s quest for the peculiar springs that are deep enough for her to bathe in.

LISTEN TO my most streamed track Hekate on Spotify—my own take on the crossroad blues. I don’t meet the devil; I meet the dark goddess of hounds and liminal thresholds.

Have you watched the three videos for the album lately? Gosh, I look young.

with joy and a little shimmer,

L

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A post shared by Wild Roof Journal (@wildroofjournal)

A postcard I made published in the last issue of Wild Roof Journal (i made the stamp, too)

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memorandum on desire

In the early days of my artistic career, I worked part-time for the Feds. Off hours, I was preoccupied with experimental forms. At work, I wrote memorandums.

The memorandum is a solid form with a prescribed voice intended to clearly communicate objectively on a topic that has been researched or investigated. Usually, that topic is bureaucratic. But must it be?

No. I’ve written several memorandums objectively addressing my own heart. One of them has just been published in Azure, along with meeting notes from a committee on irreconcilable desire.

The memorandum on desire features what I call an “image segue:” a dead insect on an empty library shelf resembles a stone amongst gravel in a Zen garden where a novice shakes leaves from a tree and consequently, pages of fallen books in the library flutter. It’s cinematic and all connected to the interior landscape of desire.

The “Notes on Irreconcilable Desires” prominently features ideas from Yeats’ The Shadowy Waters. which likely casts Yeats as the King luring to his rare Byzantium-like kingdom a more sensuous, earth-bound Maude Gonne as queen. She doesn’t want his glittering, eternal realm. In my version, the two ships crossing in the night enable a she to tempt an unwilling king. The notes close with powerpoint slides graphing birds’ flight over the prow of her sinking ship.

This final image was lovingly illustrated by Evgenia Barsheva for the journal of literary thought, Azure. Please read my “Memorandum on Desire” and “Notes from the Committee on Irreconcilable Desire,” and see more of Evgenia’s drawings in Azure, Volume 4, Issue 4.

Azure will be publishing more of my work in upcoming issues—in fact—they will be publishing one of the seminal works of my writing life. Stay tuned!

This has been a difficult week. In one day my President suggested shooting American citizens, and a journalist was arrested during a live broadcast—two things that violate my understanding of what the United States of America is. I don’t watch much television beyond late-night monologues and I haven’t the tolerance to watch a man being murdered by the police—but other people had to witness this trauma unfolding right on the street of their hometown. They recorded it.

That is NOW. I am isolated outside New York City, which is just now emerging from wave 1 of a pandemic that killed tens of thousands. When I was still in the city, I sat in a chair listening to ambulance siren after siren while I sewed myself a mask out of an old tea towel. People are protesting NOW in Brooklyn. In Atlanta, where I lived for a decade, there are riots.

This work doesn’t speak to NOW. But if you are awake long into deepening night (it is 2:30 am, here, now, as I prepare this post) knowing the world is not all right and you can’t refresh anymore feeds or stream another flash of live footage, this work does speak your soul’s language (the soul speaks in imagery—like mythology, like dreams), quietly, intensely, at a different level of time. If that refreshes you for our world’s hard work, here it is for you. That is all my work has to offer this NOW.

For now.

with gratitude,

Laylage

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I threw up fortifications to protect myself from the love and tenderness that menace the freedom of women; I did not know then that one builds fortifications only where there is weakness.

Agnes Smedley, Daughter of Earth

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I won Exposition Review’s Flash 405 contest with my short experimental script featuring two women who were totally dissed by major Greek heroes (Medea, and Ariadne) and one powerful witch, Circe--who played her part in the Odyssey--but hardly let it ruin her life.

Read my work, the editor’s comments, and the other winners in the link above.

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W.S. Merwin reading his poem “For the Anniversary of My Death”.

He died at age 91 on March 15 this year.

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cover to a book I want to be blank for notes on my garden. 

Public Domain.

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covers to a book I now want to read.

Public Domain.

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cover to a book I want to be blank for love letters I imagine you’ll read when I’m gone.

Public Domain.

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covers to books I want to be blank so I can write songs in them.  Songs that will make you feel there are mysterious places you barely see through the fog this habitual world casts on your seeing glass. 

Public Domain.

[eurydiceunderground]

covers of books I want to be blank so I can analyze my dreams in them.

Public Domain.