THE FLOWING LIGHT OF THE FILM'S END
A BOOK OF POEMS
30% off subscriptions to Cosmic Edges for this full moon week, expires Feb. 14!!
What is S*bstack for? With the introduction of the app and the proliferation of Notes (“This, this right here”) it feels like the platform is changing, and sometimes I don’t know how I want to use it. I’ve been writing here for five years, and I am feeling the urge to do something different. Usually I keep my fiction and poetry elsewhere, using S*bby mainly for criticism/essays/note-taking. Weaving, basically (before Trump took it from me).
I have a book of poems I’ve been working on for a long time. It’s called The Flowing Light of the Film’s End and poems from it will appear here on Sundays. I’ll do almost the whole book, and being a weaver, I might also write around the poems, stuff about my process…I can’t help it.
This will be for paid subscribers only. See the link up top. Subscriptions are on sale for 30% off through February 14th.
A little about the book’s genesis→
It was two Februaries ago. While in the midst of feverishly drafting The Flowing Light of the Film’s End, I took a vacation to the gulf coast of Florida. I thawed out under hot sun in my bathing suit and jean shorts and did some light reading, Victorian novels, Wallace Stevens, and Dante’s Paradiso :). I was also writing. A lot. I couldn’t stop writing. Everything in Florida, from the cineplex to the swamps, felt awe-inspiring, feverish, effervescent, decadent.
Then I got sick. My supposedly boundless vacation energy evaporated and a terrible flu took its place. I hadn’t been sick for years. It’s something I would annoyingly brag about. My hubris finally caught up with me on the night flight home, descending over New York City as a chill crept through me. I wasn’t in Florida anymore. It was a metaphysical flu, which somehow lasted until April. During which time I was mostly in bed, and that is the state in which I edited this book of poems.
Later that spring, in the hangover of the illness, I went to Los Angeles for a month, where I taught a class and continued working on the poems from the flowing light. A dreamzone had formed: Florida grafted onto California via a tiny stretch of northeast, green humidity changing into desert and back again.
In the cosmology of my poetry books, Confetti is hell, Magenta is purgatory, and The Flowing Light of the Film’s End is paradise. It was supposed to be published, but it never happened…more on that later, maybe. A few of the poems have appeared (like here and here) but the whole thing remains mostly unseen. So, I’m just going to share it with you, my hearty and true paying subscribers, poem by poem, every Sunday, starting next week.
The book takes its name from Mechthild of Magdeburg’s mystical guidebook, The Flowing Light of the Godhead. Mechthild was a bitchy German mystic, unruly, devoted, and inspiring.
My version of Flowing Light opens with a quote from hers:
The Desert has twelve things.
You should love nothingness.
You should flee somethingness.
You should stand alone.
And should go to no one.
You should not be excessively busy.
And be free of all things.
You should release captives.
And subdue the free.
You should restore the sick.
And yet should have nothing yourself.
You should drink the water of suffering.
And ignite the fire of love with the kindling of virtue.
Then you are living in the true desert.