Poets have been medicine people, shamans, griots, and bards in tribal cultures the world over, using the craft of rhythmical language to change consciousness and channel the powers of the land and its deities. Craft derives from kraft, the ancient Norse word for power, and a poet’s craft — the precise mental, physical, emotional, volitional and spiritual labor of crafting language into repeating patterns— brings the most logical, left-brain human activity—language—into rhythm with the unconscious, holistic, embodied realm of pattern and cycle.
I have devoted decades of study, writing, and editing to the crannies and nooks of English, tracing its energies back through many of its ancestor-languages and down into the physical and spiritual roots of each syllable and sound — and out through its ritual, magickal branches in the way we live as well. My books include books of magickal poetry, books about the craft of poetry, and books about just plain magick.
In the spirit of my ancestors who trace back through poets on both sides, to the bards of the Celtic people and the volurs of the Norse, I make these vows:
As a descendent of some of the first Europeans to come to North America, I vow to use my education and privilege to help guide my Northern European kin back to awareness of the earth-centered, matricultural way of life that we shared with the rest of earth’s peoples for tens of millenia, before patriarchy.
As a writer, poet, performer, ritualist, and speaker, I vow to share my heart and my heartbeat fully with my readers, listeners, and audiences and to use my poetic craft to help re-empower the Divine Feminine energy within humanity.
As a critic, editor, and teacher, I vow to share the best secrets of my poetic craft with all other writers who desire to learn them.
I vow, in these three ways, to do my best to help sow the seeds for a loving and sustainable future for the human species as we recover from the inevitable collapse of the current temporary, death-centered patriarchal systems.
So may it be.
March, 2019
Washington, DC
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