Stucky Admits to Witchcraft

Janaka Stucky is the founding editor of Black Ocean Books and the author of newly-published Ascend, Ascend. Stucky will be "performing public rituals for personal transformation [...] around the world in 2019." "When I say my poems worked as spells," Stucky explains at Lit Hub, "I mean it in a very literal sense." 

For the past ten years I have been writing poems exclusively from a trance state, in a strictly controlled and highly ritualized setting. The poems that emerged from this process feel not only like visions to me, but actual conjurings. The earliest poems of heartbreak that manifested from this process appeared in my last book and presaged the sudden, unexpected collapse of my first marriage. Conversely the later poems in that book, on ecstatic ego-death and its rapturous cracking open, laid the groundwork for a new, great love. Whether the state I wrote from allowed me to auger the future, or whether the lines I wrote manifested my reality, the poems felt intrinsically tied to the progression of my life in a concretely magical way.

Today, the conversation around witches, witchcraft, and spells has permeated every niche of our media. October of last year even saw the publication of an anthology titled Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry, featuring a number of notable contemporary voices. As the political discourse in the United States and abroad becomes increasingly divisive and cruel towards the most vulnerable members of our human society, the attraction held by the Occult—as a revolutionary kind of spirituality in opposition to the status quo, as well as a way to seize ontological power over our personal condition—in turn becomes increasingly strong. Grief, too, is a necessary step towards transcendence.

Read more at Literary Hub.