Occulture

Janaka Stucky is a mystic poet, performer, and founding editor of the award-winning press Black Ocean. He’s here to talk about his latest book of poetry, Ascend Ascend, recently released by Jack White’s publishing imprint, Third Man Books. Ascend Ascend was written over the course of twenty days, coming in and out of trance states brought on by intermittent fasting and somatic rituals while Janaka secluded himself  in the tower of a 100-year-old church. The book is rooted in the Jewish mystical tradition of merkabah literature, chronicling an ascent up the kabbalistic sefirot. Janaka noted in his description of the book that traditional merkabah prose tends to be rather dry and focused on preparations for the journey while sort of avoiding descriptions of the experience itself. But Ascend Ascend skirts that norm and Janaka instead has chosen to document the entire journey, which he describes as the ecstatic destruction of the self. There is a 25-minute Patreon extension with Janaka, and more on that after the