The Samhain season seemed the perfect time for writer Sharon Nichols to launch a book signing party for Black Flux (ISBN 0-9723169-0-6 USA $10.95), a book of dark, hypnotic poetry. The event took place on November 9.
A journalist for Woodstock Times and Chronogram magazine, this featured reader in the 2002 Woodstock Poetry Festival is also a long time occult practitioner. Her mindset is revealed in Black Flux through poems such as "Ancient Thessaly 1666," which tells of a folk healer murdered by witch hunters. "Medea blows upon the knots/ bends the Fates" as her oppressors cry "Whence the brains for this foul creature?" As she prepares for the pyre, she repeats the lines of her healing spell: "Shorn, she pleads/ In Bamberg,/ In Hexenhaus:/ Light Beff, Cletemati, Adonai." The themes in Black Flux include more than witchcraft, however; they explore sexuality and celibacy, love and death, possession and betrayal, hopelessness and empowerment.
The author's poetry is unconventional, often embracing euphony more than literal meaning. "My work is about the blossoming of dark beauty in the phrase and the expression of a shadow that so few of us consciously embrace." The book's appearance is also unconventional. Published by Origin of Souls in Woodstock, NY, Black Flux contains centuries-old images by esoteric philosophers, and its dual covers, featuring a photo of a macabre ballerina, are hand bound to the inner pages with steel cut masonry spikes and wire.
Nichols also included dark pieces by Sylvia Plath and William Blake in the reading, but her performance inevitably led to comedy. She presented a divinatory moment with some bibliomancy; opening Harry Potter for a message from the cosmos, she randomly pointed to the word "stool." She then exclaimed, "And there you have it!" and tossed the book over her shoulder. "This is why we're so misunderstood," she said. At another point in the reading, Nichols read a lead warning from the State of California on the back of a box of Christmas lights. "It's a good thing we don't live in California!" she mused. Nichols also read from her hilarious book, Woodstock Haiku, and delivered other silly pieces, such as "Kevin The Transvestite Pirate," "Nosehair Man," and "The Virtuous Tale of Chuckie Pung." Undoubtedly, the highlight of her reading was a lengthy narrative on the evils of a giant styrofoam Santa head that haunted her in her childhood. The audience, which seemed an equal mixture of witches and poets, rewarded her with boundless laughter.
Jazz Cooper