Lake Angela a poet, translator and dancer-choreographer from Lake Erie, whose books include Organblooms, Words for the Dead and Scivias Choreomaniae. Angela holds a PhD in intersemiotic translation and is a medieval mystic. Her work can be read in Seneca Review, The Common, filling Station, and Poetry Salzburg Review, among others. With her poetry-dance group Companyia Lake Angela, she presents the value of schizophrenia spectrum creativity. lakeangeladance.com.
Author photo by Abigail Parker
Scivias Choreomaniae (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), a poetry collection by Lake Angela, a poet, translator and dancer-choreographer from Lake Erie, transports readers to an outdated prison for schizophrenics and psychiatric inmates from medieval times to the time-space of the contemporary United States.
All who pass through the “mad-houses” are held behind wrought-iron words, including the author as dance therapist, whose great failure culminates when her augmenting madness fells her into a similar psychiatric ward. But her unusual success is that before her downfall, the poet uses dance therapy to rot the iron words of prison cells and chains, exposing the core of the institution where doctors and medical staff treat the patients with brutality.
In the modern wards, the patients are still prisoners whose madness makes them unworthy—as much to their caretakers as to the public—all those who would step over the “psychotic,…homeless prophets” in the streets. This makes Scivias Choreomaniae a valuable first-hand exposé that shows us how to bend an ear to the dirt and listen to the voices of the insane to comprehend what real, hard truths remain worth heeding.
In the book, which has three parts—1: Choreomania 2: Asylums and 3: Three Kinds of Madness—the state asylum’s doctors disrespect those they have professionally sworn to help; other staff scorn their patients as well. The poem “The Doctors” quotes the caretakers verbatim from Angela’s first-hand witness. This poem’s style is unusually clear and accessible for Angela’s poems, moving in a different way from the poet-therapist’s prior and later languages of madness. This excerpt from the poem, written like a theater script, underscores the prevalence of medical and personal biases against the patients:
…DOCTOR 1: Yes, look at S strutting around in those skanky shorts.
Such a whore—I told her, if one of those guys rapes you, you deserve it.
SOCIAL WORKER 1: Good for you. I wanted to say the same thing.
THERAPIST 2: I hope she learns her lesson.
LAKE (interjects): I see other patients wearing shorts—
(Before the dance therapist can say anything more in defense of that slut,
the PROFESSIONALS correct her): Well, the men are not peacocking around for sex.
SOCIAL WORKER 1: That’s right, she just wants one thing when she wears those trashy shorts.
DOCTOR 2: And she has those nasty, hairy legs. Disgusting.
(The PROFESSIONALS laugh at the funny double standards. They know that even if she wanted to shave, her razor is locked away with her rights.)
Dance therapy and empathy are put forth as small steps toward antidotes to professional disorder and the institution’s preferred practice called “reality therapy,” in which the patients are told repeatedly that their ideas are wrong and forced to conform with accepted speech and motions. For example, when the patients move too freely in the view of a psychotherapist who passes through, the dance therapist is chastised and made to hold her therapy groups in a closed room despite the regulation against conducting such sessions in the locked space. Those patients who protest or “piss in the radiator” will be made to sit properly in the restraining chair, strapped in to stillness from head to foot. By way of contrast, the poet-therapist gives the group the following instructions recorded in the poem “Dance Therapy”:
…You move
according to your own patterns, the rhythm
of your blood-water, your exhaustive sacrifice, and all
the way down to your feet you reanimate
your life. The dance that warms through you caresses
you into impossible flowers. For the moment you are whole, before
you leave the dance room, before
you die again.
Aside from elucidating languages in movement and madness, the collection is partly a medieval herbal cure, part God cure, part madness of grief and madness of beauty. The poetry makes sense to bodies in and out of time in the mystical tradition. Unknowing allows the figure of the mystic Angela seems to adore to “know the way,” which is her English translation for ‘scivias.’
Aside from paying homage to Hildegard, the writer, philosopher and Christian mystic, the poem “Scivias” proposes a way beyond the logical word. After “losing my irrevocable words, I root for them in the dirt…” the seer claims, and contrary to readers’ logical expectations for a poem composed of words, the poet—a person who must love words dearly—fails to find the words again and relinquishes these signs. Instead, the madness and magic of meanings are shown as more valuable in motion: as “Scivias” proclaims, what was buried in the dirt…
… rises like a fatal flower. Who knows
with what harm or joy it will bless the next animal who scents it out
and loves it before swallowing its counterintuitive edges. Beauty is
contraindicated for survival, though not for our conception.
Obsession also shines through the poems like polished glass—as reader-writers, let us make of the glass a valuable way to channel the sharpness or acuity of madness. In Angela’s poems, the process is one comparable to learning to dance or to breathe or to walk. Let us take in the example elucidated in the poem“Kind Darkness” in which we are made aware that “we lack the language to sleep.” Everywhere “[w]e lie down without words/ in our mouth, but how can we rest? There is a body between God and us.”
Naturally, all the time we have had the language to create, and this revelation is hopeful for the reader in a way that is uncharacteristic of Angela’s other prophecies and writings. We retain the potential powers of:
1. the “first language, water” (from the poem “Orthodoxy”),
2. the original language that invokes the named— “Another word writes me:// Glory be to her, for under her robes I see nothing but God.” (from the poem “Promises”), and
3. the language that makes up most of the book, the enduring language of movement, human and nonhuman together, as in the poem “Haruspex *Δ↭*”:
The haruspex *Δ↭* is summoned
to read my entrail’s omens,
the crows given a chance to translate
before the last sacrifice. >)))) >)))) >))))
It is good, too, that the book has a glossary. First, readers should appreciate the new elucidations of the medieval and ancient ideas—for example, those of the haruspex, the crow speech transcribed based on sonograms of crow calls, dance as speech and many more ideas.
Second, the glossary can be a help in excavating bone relics as well as understanding new runes—as in Angela’s poem translations of dance from the schizophrenia spectrum wards so that the typical reader may learn to read between, as in the poem-story of “Stomach, Glove, God, and Fruit”:
…I see between
the lines between the lines between the lines,
and I am telling you.
I tell him, I also believe in this between-between; in between
is where I become.
He nods, Oh, yes, I saw you dancing there.
Finally, the glossary itself stands as a more logical, though still poetic, work redefining what it means to be sick in the contemporary social culture—the social culture is the sickness. In my first language we call this living space the Abendland. The sun only sets here in the West on our ruins. But this tome Scivias Choreomaniae holds up time a little longer, transports us—or else makes for our grave markers more perfect poems.—Georg Amsel
Georg Amsel comes from Salzburg and conceives poetic ideas in an Austrian German resembling that of the late 1800s. His poems appear recently in Lotus-eater Magazine, Cagibi, Portland Review and Passages North, among others, and his work "Komfort" translated by Lake Angela as "Comfort" and published by Cagibi is listed in The Best Literary Translations of 2025. His poetry seeks to disrupt the contemporary uses of language as much as its translations do.
Self portrait by Georg Amsel