We'll start this new week as we ended the last, with another recently-added recording from Chris Funkhouser as part of his ongoing project to document the work of another poet in his neck of the woods: Peter Lamborn Wilson. In "Peter Lamborn Wilson: A PennSound archive," a Jacket2 essay published in December 2015, Funkhouser describes his relationship with the poet and the origins of their documentary collaboration. Here's his short version of the long history leading up to their reacquaintance several years ago:
I met Peter Lamborn Wilson in the late '80s at Naropa Institute, and after acquiring his pamphlet Chaos, written under the takhallus Hakim Bey, became a devotee to his work. His support of DIY efforts was encouraging and validating, and We Press took up the invitation to "pirate" Chaos by way of corporate resources we had at our disposal at the time.
After falling in and out of touch over the years, on a visit to Woodstock in 2013 I learned he now resides there. Less than a year later — two days after my family moved to the Hudson Valley in August 2014 — I found my way to a poetry reading featuring Wilson, Sparrow, and Michael Brownstein at the Golden Notebook in Woodstock. Knowing him primarily as a cultural critic and writer of prose, to hear Wilson'\'s verse was something new, and a delight. He read from an "unpublished six hundred page-long collected poems"; these works are animated, elegant, erudite, conclusory, sometimes humorous exhortations (e.g., "Bumpersticker": "If you’d 'rather be fishing' / then fish for fuckssake").
Today, we're focusing on Hoodoo Metaphysics, published by Bearpuff Press in 2018 as a collaboration with artist Tamara Gonzales. While her illustrations (like the one shown above) are missing from the audio recording, you can read some examples from the series with their corresponding drawings in The Brooklyn Rail and see several more examples of Gonzales' artwork from the book on her website. Funkhouser's recording runs approximately ninety minutes and can be found here, along with his nine-installment anthology of Home Recordings available on PennSound's Peter Lamborn Wilson author page.
