I’m excited to consider myself a Boog participant for a third of its 30 years, bookended for me at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn from the summer of 2011 (a week after a satellite poetry marathon bbq in Boston) to my last live reading before the pandemic shutdowns: an evening of mystic and magick-inflected poetry curated by Deborah Morkun for Welcome to Boog City 13.
To be sure, if I think of Boog, I think of David Kirschenbaum above all. Even as much as he assiduously enlists myriads of others to organize and support the endeavor—generously, conscientiously sharing the unfolding experience—David is Boog: it’s his vision, his tireless dedication, his baby. In that, he sustains Boog’s exceptional openness toward fresh occurrence from whatever quarter (source of my gratitude)—because it’s clear he pays attention. He’s listening through it all; he’s paying attention.
So, as I’m sure many other poets are, I’m grateful for his giving my work a hearing recurrently at various intervals, as well as a stage for my own poet’s theater/poetics theatre work. Also, he invited me to curate and host Poets Theater Night for Boog 8 in 2014 and my memory continues to cherish what happened that evening with works like Geoffrey Gatza’s Duchamp chess piece, Joyelle McSweeney’s Dead Youth, Carlo Parcelli’s Simon Kananaios gospel, and Laynie Browne’s Tardigrades. And more!—words and images and imaginings engaging mindspace of the poetic.
I’m particularly grateful he gave my daughter, singer-songwriter Hero Magnus, a stage for the first time a few years ago based on his paying attention and listening to some of our family Facebook posts; this launched her immediately into regular live performances and recordings.
Doubtful any poetic space other than Boog could offer such nurturance as to make me comfortable presenting such disparate pieces as an Idyll version of Antigone, a drone play based on cut-up Department of Defense texts, a recitation of the Ballad of Sam Hall, and a Staring-into-the-Sun Rite of Sol Invictus. Thank you, Boog! Thank you, David K.!
MAGUS MAGNUS (www.magusmagnus.com) is a poet and writer based in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Books include Verb Sap, Idylls for a Bare Stage, Heraclitean Pride, and The Re-Echoes, along with a Kindle ebook, The Free Spirit. His works of poetry, theater, and creative philosophy incant a primal dynamic for rising above the chaotic present.