Hypnosis With Peggy Ahwesh Prompted Anna Gurton-Wachter's First Poem in First Book

Anna Gurton-Wachter publishes and discusses the first poem in her debut collection, Utopia Pipe Dream Memory (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), at the Poetry Society of America. "Poem from Hypnosis" is dedicated to experimental filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh, and was "written while thinking through an experience [Gurton-Wachter] had as an actor in Ahwesh's film The Ape of Nature." More:

...For this project each actor was hypnotized before being filmed—a nod to, and meditation on, Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass, which followed the same procedure. On the first day of filming the hypnotist arrived and began working with the other actors on a scene that I was not in. I was to be just an observer, and I sat nearby with a notebook of lined paper in my hands, curious what this unusual specialist would do to hypnotize my fellow actors. As I listened, I found I had started swaying my body back and forth, rubbing the notebook pages and smiling joyously. It was as though I could feel in the blank page, the unwritten words, the entire concept of possibility, of before. I’m a bit suggestible generally but I was also in an environment that Ahwesh had created where I felt that her vision for the narrative of the film remained open as we moved through making it, and that is a really joyful thing to experience. I like thinking about all of the variables that go into making a work of art happen. Sometimes the motions we go through look recognizable, integratable into regular life like measuring things or handling construction tools, but what we are building is play and unreality. There is also a relationship between the hypnotized person, drooling and blissed out, and the creative mind that needs to shut off judgement and editorial tasks until later.

So for me, this poem returns me to the site of openness, a feeling that is older than the material world could be. Yet it returns often to an idea of architecture, of structure, of what would it mean to let animals take over part of your house? [...]

Read "Poem from Hypnosis," and more about it, at PSA.