Foreword is Forewarned.
An excerpt from a finally-done full book draft for this dweeby New Moon in Gemini
You can listen to me read this post here.
I turned a full draft of my dissertation over to my committee earlier this month, and have been flippin out ever since. I have even taken up jogging. Today the moon is new in Gemini, and so, in its spirit of exuberance and learning, I am here again, sharing some writing.
What follows is the most recent version of the Foreword to my new book, A Blessing in Disguise: Spiritual Pedagogy in Earlier John Ashbery. This excerpt has to do with another mutable sign, Virgo, the disciple. Where Gemini and its opposing sign Sagittarius represent the more “rational,” academia-oriented trickster-philosophers of the mutable cohort, I consider Virgo and complementary Pisces as “intuitive” lifelong students of a more mysterious, eminently spiritual discipline.
It’s an understatement that I have a soft spot for mutability: my own natal chart has three “personal” placements in Virgo packed into the ninth house (of Sagittarius) that exist in constant contention with a Pisces moon nestled in the third (Gemini). One of my favorite practices in “nondual”-ing Western astrology is to tease out all the ways that opposing signs resist, attract, and become each other, co-creating archetypal and psychological and mythopoetic content. I like to imagine this is how we might circle round the squares.
The Foreword introduces California poet, priest, and teacher William Everson. The cosmic Christ of Pisces is reborn in Everson’s Virgo, as his own Foreword indicates quite explicitly…
In February 2023, I was working as a Teaching Assistant for my mentor and dissertation chair, Rob Wilson, who was giving a course on the Beat poets out of the UCSC Literature Department. The pandemic and online education were (mostly) behind us, and this was my first teaching job in-person, back on campus in Santa Cruz, since 2019. I was commuting six hours per class day (from Oakland) for the job, and risking the winding 17 Highway made for much fear and trembling. I lived for the richness of Rob’s lectures, and my mind and spirit were sustained that quarter almost exclusively from those hours. One Tuesday or Thursday, Rob mentioned a text whose title I scratched into my notebook, but I forgot to look it up by the time I got back up to the Bay.
It is May 2025, and I am finishing this project in Vienna, having moved here from Leipzig last winter, where I left two suitcases with a friend, a theoretical mathematician from UCSD who had space in his attic. My partner recovered the contents of those suitcases for me earlier this month, and I reveled in paging through a stack of notebooks from 2021—2023 that I had brought when we left the US last year. This title that Rob mentioned called out to me from those hundreds of pages of notes, so I finally looked it up, and right in time, too. It provides the perfect reminder that this project is neither unique, remote, nor isolated: it is a Santa Cruz project, and the spiritual pedagogy of poetry has roots and lineage there, as I do. Conceived, like me, in California, this dissertation was born abroad, completed far away; yet this last-minute synchronicity reassures me that my project is doing place-based work, allied by like minds all along, though I didn’t know it, and suffered for not trusting.1 I am very grateful to have found out now.
The book Rob referenced is William Everson’s 1982 Birth of a Poet: The Santa Cruz Meditations. It is a Black Sparrow Press book printed in Santa Barbara (and Ann Arbor, where I did my Poetry MFA). It contains transcriptions of talks given by Everson when he was invited to be Poet-in-Residence at UC Santa Cruz in the 1970s. Birth of a Poet was delivered to undergraduates as a series of meditations on the vocation of the poet, the place of the poet in academia and in greater society, and the place of spirituality in the poet’s personal and social formation.
In his Foreword, Everson begins by connecting the private religious act of meditation with the public “secular” act of giving a lecture, reflecting on the contemplative nature of both vocations:
The word meditation has religious connotations and doubtless seems strange in an academic context. In the classroom the corresponding term is lecture and one who teaches is a lecturer. The monastery has its classrooms and those who teach are also called lecturers, but meditation is associated with the chapel. However, a meditation is not the same as a sermon or homily. According to a commentary in the Oxford English Dictionary, traditionally "the sermon was a discourse developing a definite theme; the homily pursued the analytical method and expounded a paragraph or verse of scripture." Neither, however, required the meditative method, which is closer to prayer but differs in its object. "In meditation we converse with ourselves; in prayer we converse with God." Meditation, then, is the art of talking to oneself.2 This is something everyone can do privately; it takes a special gift to do it in the presence of others.
[…]
Suffice it to say that when I left the monastery for academe the method I brought with me was meditative rather than discursive. For I had learned how concepts seemingly exhausted by endless repetition could suddenly, under the probe of intuition, blossom into life. I decided that if this method worked with divine truths there was no reason why it would not be equally effective with human ones. Taking a common subject, one of concern to all my students, the problem of vocation, I began to meditate on it as I would on the Word of God.
In his Introduction, Lee Bartlett (adorably) points out that Everson was a “triple Virgo”. Bartlett remarks that curiously, despite Everson’s personality chart being dominated by “the sign of the critical intelligence, his vocation has not been, in the main, that of critic or teacher, but that of poet.”3 Everson’s natal Sun, Moon, and Mercury (like my Mercury, Venus, and Mars) are all in Virgo, the Earth sign characterized by devotion and precision. Virgo is analytical, discriminating, a bit harsh and frenetic, but generally motivated by the desire to be useful. The sign’s motto: “I serve.” Another key phrase might be: “divinity is in the details.” Virgo is Mutable,4 ruled by Mercury, the messenger and trickster of the zodiac. There is something of the “holy fool” in the communications of the Virgo archetype. Bartlett contextualizes:
At Midnight Mass on Christmas of 1948, Everson, who until that time had a rising reputation as a poet of the California Central Valley, had an intense religious experience which impelled him into monastic life. He eventually became a Dominican, and over the next years published book after book of poetry as Brother Antoninus, replacing his early concerns with man's relationship to the land with man's relationship to God. He became the leading exponent of erotic mysticism in the Church, and with Thomas Merton enjoyed a reputation as one of the two finest Catholic poets since Gerard Manley Hopkins.
After leaving the Order in 1969, Everson accepted an offer to become poet-in-residence at Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Perhaps as a combination of his own lack of formal university training and the eighteen years he spent as a Dominican, in his course he sought to redefine the academic lecture in terms of that with which he was most comfortable—the meditative tradition—hoping to build a series of meditations around the theme of the poet's vocation.
This book, “A Blessing in Disguise,” is a work of critical prose (I call it “Contemplative Criticism”) about alternative spirituality, lyric poetry, psychedelics, and liberatory pedagogy. It is written by a poet whose star chart attracted her to academic criticism and whose 1990s California cultural roots imprinted a feral spirituality onto that already “devotional” nature. In the wake of the lost years of C*VID—which, in aligning with my coursework years (and Saturn Return), seemed actively to prevent me from accessing those people and places which attracted me to a PhD in the first place—I feel a reassuring affinity with Everson, whose religious faith, artistic practice, and lack of formal university training gave him the freedom to occupy contemplative space as a (spiritual) teacher. And in Santa Cruz, no less!
Letting this dissertation manuscript reflect the chaos of its situation—upheaval, poverty, illness—has been the real challenge of earning the degree, which has been my ego’s drive since childhood (may as well reveal the other one: be the second poet in history to win Ashbery’s 1975 “triple crown”). What has made these past six years of work valuable for me personally is how sticking to this program has highlighted and reframed my relationship to consenting to the processes of writing within a system, and of committing to living alongside that writing. I hope that in approaching the inherent contradictions of this book—an anti-institutional document compiled for institutional approval; a poet doing criticism—you enjoy reading it, and find it useful.
D.H. Lawrence, too, was a Virgoan, and Virgo is certainly the sign of the craftsman; yet Lawrence stood as an emphatic anticraftsman. The answer to this paradox is that Virgo also rules the solar plexus, and Lawrence became its apostle. In a sense he had it both ways. By passing beyond superficial Virgoan preoccupation with detail, with craftsmanship, he could touch the wellspring of plexus power and let the native penchant inherent in his sign take care of the tidying up process, even as it emerged.
N.b. Throughout the book, I have distributed quotations from various sources, marked off by section breaks. These are intended to supplement the text and to enrich it, problematize it, help contextualize, and to give readers a break from my voice and the driving of my argument. If you like, think of each quotation as an opportunity to take a break from one sort of reading (reading critical prose) and to rest in another sort of contemplation, taking in the quotations without trying to understand them or coerce them into the project’s narrative. I also quote Ashbery’s poems extensively throughout the book, and would likewise encourage readers to try to engage with those citations in as relaxed, nonjudgmental, and open-hearted a way as possible.
A Blessing in Disguise
Yes, they are alive and can have those colors,
But I, in my soul, am alive too.
I feel I must sing and dance, to tell
Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me.
And I sing amid despair and isolation
Of the chance to know you, to sing of me
Which are you. You see,
You hold me up to the light in a way
I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps
Because you always tell me I am you,
And right. The great spruces loom.
I am yours to die with, to desire.
I cannot ever think of me, I desire you
For a room in which the chairs ever
Have their backs turned to the light
Inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees
That seem to shine at me through a lattice toward you.
If the wild light of this January day is true
I pledge me to be truthful unto you
Whom I cannot ever stop remembering.
Remembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into the day
On the wings of the secret you will never know.
Taking me from myself, in the path
Which the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me.
I prefer “you” in the plural, I want “you,”
You must come to me, all golden and pale
Like the dew and the air.
And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.
The primary wound of this dissertation is how isolated the conditions of its creation seemed to be, the psychological repercussions of perceived isolation. Appropriate for a pandemic document, perhaps. Yet Everson too addresses this when he cites Auden distinguishing between the social status of the “clerkly” poet caste in Europe versus the stateless status of the solo poet-pioneer in the U.S. national container. It is likely I refused or was unable to access available help for this writing project due to internalized elitism, conditioning, and shame.
“To some degree every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one,” writes Auden.
Everson responds with compassion:
“But what pressure this places on the American poet in terms of originality and nonconformity! The almost insane isolationism and egoism! The megalomaniacal psyche of the American poet! There is only one world—himself and Nature. He is Adam trying to create Eve out of his own rib without the help of God! [...] These are, then, the American energies. They are in you, and you can't wish them away. You cannot create for yourself a clerkly caste, not even by joining the university and becoming an academic.” (from “Meditation Nine: The New Adam,” 110-111)
Talking to oneself is a classic description of the genre of the lyric poem.
Everson vii.
Signs in astrology are categorized by elements and modality. Elements are four: fire, earth, air, water; Modalities are three: cardinal, fixed, and mutable.