Sanctuary

with collages by t thilleman
2020 • 142 pp • Spuyten Duyvil

ISBN 978-1-949966-74-9
$40.00 hardcover

ISBN 978-1-949966-65-7
$18.00 paperback

Author’s note

“We are not yet born, we are not yet in the world, there is not yet a world, things have not been made, the reason for being has not yet been found.”
—Antonin Artaud, 1945

How it started to be Sanctuary as an Addenda as a kind of zine, and a collage was clear bell of writing, with voices ringing (“Sung Devotions”) that belonged in frame of the Iovis project, which purported to take on Patriarchy, war, the polis, plutonium… and considered male poets riding a book of male energy morphing to a more feminized “end” in concert with a rattle snake “visitation.” An antidote to fear, and a bow to the animalia dharma mind and practices of attention moving beyond boundaries. The asylum of vipassana. Wanted next to return to Southeast Asia. And land periodically to center of chronicle which was a little green folder already including “Moon in Aries” & “Ceremonies in the Gong World” that had been put aside as chapters in The Iovis Trilogy (lovingly published by Coffee House Press in 2011) but cannibalized for best bits and stood ground. Decided on Kuala Lumpur: start back there as if I were hitching another ride.

Editor Thillemen was reading Iovis on his back porch and sending encouraging response that initiated some lifeline through political calamity and vicissitude. And this selection pulled together July 2019 when something snapped about children being separated from their families at the borders. And there were already these skinny Iovis poems responding to Kavanaugh, Mueller, the “evidence” of text and testimony. And homage to Black Mtn, a sanctuary, and more protest. And cut-up odd asides to methodologies of Hannah Koch, and Donald Judd in his Marfa, a sanctuary.

Had to see for myself the border on the ground. Had been half a century since I crossed by foot. Sanctuary is someone writing to you about writing, sanctuary is a dream shelter from the injections of poison, sanctuary is a montage of notebook antidote, sanctuary is the places given you to perform in public space. Sanctuary is Giambattista Vico’s enlarged plebian sense of rights, an “arc of justice.” Sanctuary wants to be the wide skirt, like a tent, of the Madonna del Parto for those who seek shelter.

Almost a book of hours a book of days as lines respond to times and places on the fly including pics taken of protest in hotspots around the world. Spain, Italy, Mexico, USA, my editor morphed into collages. I was also spending more time in Mexico from 2016 with artistic cohorts on numerous projects. I remember looking toward Juarez as we performed on the site of the Agricultural Workers in El Paso, where a month later innocent people were felled because of the racism emanating from this increasingly toxic side of the Divide. Sanctuary is ongoing daily practice of the wilds: call and response. Do no harm.

Excerpt

CIA inserting voice in one’s brain? call thee astral?

cop escort to the parking lot at the ICE Detention Center

Aurora
raising the Mexican flag
a night dawn song

aubade for the liberators,
sweet beloveds
at dusk

upsidedown
dawn song of transitional objects & persons & events
shame shame shame shame shame shame