Tag: animism

ceremony and conduits

On By l noelle mclaughlinIn booknotes, publicationsLeave a comment

Sometimes you read a request for submissions and just know you have found kindred spirits. Such was the case when I received the call for Volume 12, Number 1, The Braided Gift.

The ritual of ceremony has been on my mind since a recent conversation with a friend – a yoga teacher and musician returning from a journey to the Badlands. She encountered garnet in the mountains there, that stone that can resemble the seeds of a pomegranate. What is our fascination with stones? To me, it feels like they hold so much time inside. They are doorways into another dimension.

The Plumwood Mountain Journal is an Australian and International Journal of Poetry and Ecopoetics. Their most recent submission call was written by the issue’s esteemed guest editors: Shari Lynell, author of Foxstruck and Other Collisions and The Semiotics of Arrival, and Lucy Van, a poet listed for the Stella Prize and Mary Gilmore award. They quote Kimmerer: “You start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten. Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we ‘remember to remember,’” (5).

May we all remember.

your hands were comets crossing

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The North American Review has a great translation up of Macario Matus’ “Binnizá.” This world of ocelot grandparents and fish brothers is vivid and green, welcoming in the depths of New York’s midwinter grays. I had no idea there were so many different Indigenous languages spoken in Mexico.

In flamenco dance, the hand movements are referred to as floreo. These are what I pictured in reading the line “your hands were comets crossing.” The Spanish word “floreo” comes from the Latin word for flower, and – in fencing and music – means a flourish.

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Psalm Ambulista

On By l noelle mclaughlinIn publications1 Comment

I used to spend a lot of time going to shows.  My sister lived walking distance from Union Pool, an easy stroll or train ride to most of the venues we were all going to in that 2005-2012 or so time period.  

TV on the Radio, Bardo Pond, Stars of the Lid, Brightblack Morning Light, Mogwai, Fursaxa, Hammock, Weird Owl, Zelienepole, Grouper, Holy Fuck, School of Seven Bells, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Fourtet, Panda Bear, Explosions in the Sky, PJ Harvey, Black Angels, Dead Meadow, Beach House, Lower Dens, Coco Rosie…music seemed much better back then.  Le Poisson Rouge on Bleecker, the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, Music Hall of Williamsburgh, Prospect Park and Union Square Park.

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birth-stone to head-stone

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Sometimes a good rejection is the highlight of your day, and it was for me a couple of days ago.

Letters Journal is supported by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music (ISM), and a dream spot of mine to be published in. Read it here.

 “What logos lights the filament of time, / Carbon arc fusing birth-stone to head-stone?” (Jean Valentine, “Afterbirth”).

These little deaths we dance our way through, that is where we find our value.

the pines

On By l noelle mclaughlinIn booknotesLeave a comment

An exerpt from a story of mine from 2022:

When I walked there it was always in a circle, for it was laid out that way, like a ritual.  The pines would get pushed around by the wind like the little lights atop ten thousand candles, and that is where I would bring my questions, I would bring my questions to the field and she would answer me, sometimes immediately, in lively conversation, sometimes slowly and over a season or so.

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