No longer just a film featuring Mel Gibson
We women want a pretty simple thing, one that society has made so hard and convoluted: to be free from discrimination based on sex.
This line is buried in Ashley Judd’s opinion piece on CNN.com, following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. I read the statement several times, wishing it were larger. Rouged in lipstick on the bathroom mirror. Scrawling across the bottom of the news ticker on every channel. What we want is pretty simple, it’s not to be better or in control or anything outside of ourselves; what we want is our own bodies.
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 — the small death of life that never occurred. This is, in essence what menses signals, is it not?
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The poet Cecila Vicuña recently told me, “a woman does not know who she is until she goes through the pain and power of menstruation.” Vicuña, a Chilean who has long…
Worming our way into spring
The snow is melting, buds are blooming and after a devastating week for our hearts in Boulder, Wisdom Body Collective ushered in the Worm Moon tonight by finishing the layout for More Revolutionary Letters: A Tribute to Diane di Prima on Zoom.
This week brought two surprise additions to our little book (which is now over 80 pages!) a poem from one of Diane’s dear friends and another from her granddaughter. Simultaneously, several independent bookstores across the country are thrilled to stock More Revolutionary Letters on their shelves. Our hearts are full of awe as the call for revolution continues.
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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.
The days after her death various Revolutionary Letters circulated the poetry community in honor of Diane calling attention to this collection revealing a time we still very much live in. Written throughout her career, the letters are both of her time and of our time. Each numbered poem is a testament to the necessity of revolution, the poet’s voice, and a reminder of just how slowly society changes.
Launch of More Revolutionary Letters
Under the snow moon, the last snow seeps into the dry earth of Eastern Colorado, while just yesterday Ada McCartney was planting trees and dancing around a fire thousands of miles away. Chloe Tsolakoglou likely enjoyed her plants amidst costal city noises. C. M. Chady and Emily Willow further to the north, perhaps enjoyed today’s moon by its namesake. For Stephanie Michele and I, here in Colorado, the sun refracts puddles.
Tonight, I reload the computer screen after rolling over on my cat just before ten am to press the green launch now button on Kickstarter. Yesterday in a moment…
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 psychedelics in the rituals at Eleusis. We know almost nothing about the sacred rites held at Demeter’s temple ninteen kilometers from Athens. Sometimes secrets stay secret for centuries.
What we do know is the rituals at Eleusis were held for men and women to partake in a death and rebirth…
“It is not easy,” Thoreau writes, “to realize the serene joy of all the earth when the moon commences to shine unobstructedly, unless you have often been a traveller by night.”
Snow melts and rain falls as the first moon of 2021 greets us today. The women of Wisdom Body Collective have taken the month to move, hibernate, travel, write, and read.
Our first essays of the year focus on the taboo of rejection. How it feels to have writing rejected, why we self reject, and just how arbitrary the rejection process might be. …
A Wisdom Body Series on Rejection
Collages of the Body
The following marries “Collages of the Body” a piece I chose not to publish or submit for several months with present meditations on rejection. Time is irrelevant in nearly all things.
The ritual is in ruin, when the space is not held. We amass our own mal-intention; and ask, what is our role in our rejection?
My most recent rejection letter took less than 30 minutes to receive. It was a series of poems, fragments of which have found themselves on Medium over the last few years. It was swift like tweezing a chin hair, nearly painless.
The next morning, She Who Makes the Changes was recommended by editors on Medium. I suppose I’m a “Medium poet” more than anything else. Medium as in, medial…
amy bobeda
poet. artist. theatre maker. JKS Naropa University MFA candidate. http://blondewanderlust.com. Founder of @WisdomBodyCollective, come join us.
