Performance of book-length poem released on LP
In 2018, Janaka Stucky, poet, performer, publisher, wrote a book-length poem in 20 days in a 100-year-old church as he moved in and out of trance states. The result, “Ascend Ascend” (Third Man Books), holds a surging, bright-dark magic; it’s a yowling praising ecstatic dirgehymn, altering and incantatory. “Cleave to me pitch of zero/ White maggot pulsing in the emerald grass/ Cleave to me great grime of camphor/ Skirmishing our lungs.” Before the pandemic swept in, Stucky did a series of performances of “Ascend Ascend,” in which he entered an other-state and pulled audiences with him, ritualistically dissolving himself, letting something else — what was it, I don’t know — enter him, descending into a chthonic elsewhere, ascending into an infinity, smoke rising around him, encircled by marigolds, face smeared a bone-white, a skull-white, the whole room charged with something ancient and occult. I attended one of his performances and didn’t feel the same for days. He cast a mighty spell. “I ascend with agony the guillotine/ Of laughter raised high above/ The neck of the wind ascending/ I ascend.” This week marks the release of a recording of one of those 2019 performances. “Ascend Ascend: Janaka Stucky Live in Seattle with Lori Goldston” offers Stucky’s initiatory experience across two full LPs holding each of the four acts, with Goldston accompanying on cello. Together, and with the room, they conjure soil, seraphim, rot, black flies, tears, lilacs, and “the immense blue of every distant dawn.”