Where poets and science collide in the body — “Could menstruation and its observances in fact be experienced as empowering for women?” Social anthropologist Camilla Power writes, discussing the tradition of menstrual huts of Northern California’s Yurok people. I read this, while menstruating alone in my basement apartment, in the middle of quarantine, grieving the loss of blood —…

Winter Rituals A Flame — I just typed this line: in time all things burn. In a new adaptation of Bluebeard also known as the woman murderer, I’ve made Blu aka the man with the azul beard the fourth generation man to inherit coal land. Each time I read the story of Bluebeard (this happens…

A Wisdom Body Collective Series on Artist Statements — Weeks ago, I launched our series on artist statements with a call to action — why artist statements are an important artifact of artistic communication. In reality, I’ve made very few public artistic statments. Call me old fashioned; I like my statements like my art — tangible objects in the…

On writing artist statements, A Wisdom Body Series — In the summer of 2008, I enrolled in Writing for Artists at UCSC. Taught by Christina Waters, a local journalist whose name was (any likely still is) always a byline in the Goodtimes, we spent the summer writing and rewriting short statements about artwork. We watched Andy Goldsworthy’s Rivers and…

A Wisdom Body Series on the origin of our first book. — They may say don’t judge a book by its cover, but we all know we still do, so what does a small woman-run artist collective dedicated to process and the tangibility of matter do when designing their first chapbook? Our first collective book More Revolutionary Letters, was born out of the collective loss of poet, woman, activist, and Jack Kerouac School founding member Diane di Prima last fall.

Encountering the Greek rites in “The Poet as Shaman” — Sometimes, it seems like everything is about drugs. In her first lecture in the “Poet as Shaman” series from the 1970’s on the Naropa Archives, Anne Waldman briefly touches on the Rites of Eleusis, and the book Road to Eleusis by ethnomycologist Gordon Wasson. Wasson‘s research in the realm of medicinal mushrooms brought him to the study of…