Tag: Inspiration

SETTING UP FOR A ‘QUIRKY QUEER QUAKER PERFORMANCE ARTIST AND SCHOLAR’

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Peterson Toscano, an extraordinary “Quirky Queer Quaker Performance Artist and Scholar” with bizarre and wonderful stories to share, is coming to my corner of New Hampshire next weekend — and it’s good reason to be excited.

I’ve heard him present the Bible half-hours at Friends General Conference and New England Yearly Meeting and can say he’s both insightful and original in his exploration of Scripture. It’s a matter of encountering a passage for the first time, no matter how often you’ve read it or heard it or think you have. I’ve also seen him delivering his comedy routines to teenagers, not the easiest of audiences, and he’s had them hanging on every word.

His topics will likely range from climate change (from a social justice point of view) and environmental awareness to human rights and gender outlaws in the Bible to coping with privilege or our most tragic losses – and back again. He’s both outrageously funny and a delightfully original thinker. Who would want more?

He’ll appear in the Dover Friends Meetinghouse Saturday at 4 p.m. with his “Everything Is Connected (a collection of stories – many weird, most true)” as a late-afternoon event that’s free to all. We’re hoping this fits in between busy rounds earlier in the day and those of the evening to come – giving folks a shot of humor and hope along the way.

Other performances are at 6:30 p.m. Saturday in Portsmouth, and Sunday at noon in Rochester and in the evening in Concord.

If you can attend any of them, great! Obviously, I’m a big fan. But why not amuse yourself and sample him in his own voice? For starters, let me suggest:

Hope to meet you there, if you can. Meanwhile, we need to get him back from Wisconsin and Maine … en route to Massachusetts.

PLEASE ALLOW QUIET

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Look at the modern American addiction to noise – TV, cellphone, iPod, who knows what else. All of the mindless twitter.

Anything to keep us from thinking or reflecting deeply. From direct, sustained experience, observation, and tinkering.

It’s enough to run away, toward freedom.

IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHENTIC AMERICA

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I said at the time …

I’m a sucker for writing that stays close to the grain of everyday experience. The charge often leveled against such transparency or luminosity accuses such work of being “superficial” or even “banal.” (Recently, I saw a blast of “shallow” fired at one poet, and I’m still angry – maybe I just don’t have a lot of patience anymore with work that baffles me more than it informs or moves emotionally or spiritually. After more than a quarter-century of returning repeatedly to his pieces, I’m still amazed at their depth and continuing revelations.)

You also seem quite aware of what I call the “motor oil” dimension, something I think is required in the sustained voice of any current, authentic American artist: an ability to acknowledge the oil stains and discarded cans in the American landscape – urban or rural. It comes up as cigarette butts, the Port-o-John, the neighborhood Arby’s, or the sounds you detail. Makes the beauty of the turtles all the more authentic. (By the way, what is the sound of a turtle’s voice?)

Turtles – like serpents – go into realms humans cannot. Must be part of their mythological empowerment.

Hmm, thinking of Snyder again, how his Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems came from summer employment, as a forest fire lookout atop icy Sourdough Mountain, while yours was more Siddhartha-like along a muddy river. Also, of the gentle humor I’ve admired so much in Brautigan’s work, also present here.

~*~

Rust and Wound 1

For my own resulting poems, click here.