magickal poetics: the Poet as en-chant-ress
wonder the first: is poetry dead?
When I think of enchantment, I think of chanting, of weaving or manifesting something through language. Sometimes, though, I catch myself jotting down a poem on a napkin or in my little black book—and I stop to wonder if poetry is dead. There’s a doubting voice within me, whispering that writing poetry is meaningless, a trivial gesture in a culture that doesn’t value it. Today, it seems that not just poetry, but language itself, loses its meaning. In the mouths of cunning politicians and manipulative advertisers, language serves to alienate and separate, dissolving the meaning of the words themselves as the people who speak them live fragmented, separated existences.
Language works to separate us in different ways. It is in language that we construct ourselves as subjects; through language, we are able to express ourselves as “I” (distinct from “you”), and therefore language works to affirm our egos. Moreover, language, once a sacred tool of communication, is being used not to communicate, but to coerce and control. “My impression,” writes eco-poet Wendell Berry, “is that we have seen, for perhaps a hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities... the two epidemic illnesses of our time.1” If there is a soul-sickness in our modern world, where did this plague of vacancy come from, and what does language have to do with it? For starters, we are living in a scientific paradigm where only the observable is accepted as real. Only the rational, the explainable, the objective truths are prized; therefore, the subjective reality is denigrated, and quality is disregarded. Dreams, God, art, and yes, poetry, are all devalued, since they exist qualitatively, in a subjective realm—they are no longer part of the “real world”.
I had considered it the role of poetry to touch the heart of the “ultimate reality of things”, to say what could not be said... and poems, which bear witness to the sacred, they move me in a way few other things can. Yet, because language itself is no longer sacred, it almost profanes mystical experiences to put them into words. 2 writes Hakim Bey. If poetry were alive, it would be dangerous. If people could be moved, really physically energized and moved by poetry, it would surely be a threat to the corporate state that... but what are we going to do with empty word-shells? Can speech ever have the power it once had; can language be reappropriated; can people even find the attention to focus on something like poetry in the midst of our hyper-media?
Wondering, I turn to magick itself. No books of material that already exist, no studious research, is going to give me the answer to this question of whether or not poetry is dead. Our texts no longer apply; they can guide us in some ways, but if anybody knew how to solve the problem of meaningless words and vacant lives, they’d probably be doing it. People know parts, I think, but nobody’s figured it all out.
wonder the second: What is the relation between poetry and magick?
The most oft-quoted definition of magick is “the art and science of causing change in conformity with will.” Another favorite is “the art of changing consciousness at will”. A magician is an artist of change; like a scientist or artist, a magician has tools and techniques to bring about that change. Physical tools: the wand and the chalice; also the body, breathwork, chanting, dreamwork.... most importantly, the magician’s own mind. Drawing on centuries of tradition, also creating her own ways and means, the magician negotiates reality, walking between the worlds, using tools and herself becoming a tool of the universe and the rite. A magician is a maker; a magician is made by the forces around her. A magician wields her own power; yet is connected to the power of the universe, and responsive to it. A taoist flowing: the magician avoids tension, the magician bends as well as directs.
The poet has tools. Physical tools: the pen, the paper, the keyboard; also words, dreamwork, chanting, altered states, freewriting... most importantly, the poet’s own mind. Drawing on centuries of tradition, also creating her own ways and means and meanings, the poet negotiates reality, walking between the worlds, using tools and herself becoming a tool of the universe and the poem itself. A poet is a maker: etymology informs us of poiein, to make: a maker of realities-in-poems; still, a poet is made by the forces around her. A poet wields her own power; yet poems come through her; she is ever-responsive to the universe that flows around her. There is a deftness and a skill to poetry, a balance between contriving poems and letting them happen.
There are many mystical poets, certainly; there are fewer magickal poets, I think. The mystic and the magician are yin and yang, being and doing, contemplation and action, exploring inner transformation vs. outer-directed manifestation. It is fairly easy to see how poetry can be mystical, exploring and contemplating the inner realms, but less obvious to see it as magickal—as a means of action. Robert Duncan is one poet who works with magick, raising counter-spells to the evil he perceives in the world... Duncan who, in “The Truth and Life of Myth” states that “I am not an occultist or a mystic but a poet, a maker-up of things”. The poet is “not master of reality but its lover”, Duncan writes, and this is also true of the magician. This is a subtle realization that makes a profound difference in the art of magick. The magician is a person of power, who works with power; yet the magician who tries to master or impose control upon reality will eventually fail. Power, without connection to the universe, is finite. Magick is responsive and fluid, in a Taoist way; like water, it is infinite. I think of magick as love directed, and I think of healing poetry in much the same way.
wonder the third: Can we see poetry in a new way?
Poetry is connective. If our wounds stem from alienation, poetry can heal them. Poetry connects one person to another, one place to another, one time to another. Poetry heals by knitting together pieces of a broken world; making connections in a reductionistic worldview; showing people how things can be made whole. We’ve experienced this connection through words before, most likely, when reading a book and glimpsing the poet’s vision; I have met Whitman and Eliot and Emerson at certain crossroads.
The experience of language can be intimate, but it can also be dry, as most of us know from sitting through boring English classes in school. Moreover, what can you when people don’t even desire to read poetry? It seems that it is time to renew how we view poetry, and, in doing that, redefine the poet. Poetry is not some lost art for stuffy intellectuals, and the poet is not some emotional loner who spends her time scribbling w ords that nobody will ever read. Rather, poetry is magick, and the poet is a maker-of-worlds. Like the bards of tradition, she can perform a sacred function, weaving things together through words, making them whole in the stories she creates.
Furthermore, the poet exists not alone, but within her community. Poetry is not just something to be performed, but something to participate in. We have to dance with people through our poetry, with each and every one of them, so that they are all partners. It’s not a dance recital, it’s a participatory dance. So how does one dance with words? How do you say, here, come into me, we’re not alone in this often-cold world? You project your energy—your words are the medium—you project yourself and say, this is me, I see you, we are here. Like the dancer expresses herself through motion, the poet expresses her essential energy through language. Can we chant the world back to vibrancy, and heal it through words? I believe we can, if our words—the words we spell, our spells—are charged with our energy. If we speak consciously, and write accessible poetry with the intention to connect, then poetry will be alive, and so will we. If we view poetry as a dynamic, interactive event, rather than a static, alien object, then it will carry our vibrancy. Magick and poetry are not lost arts nor lost causes. They’re just far away, and we can bring them home again.
1 Berry, Wendell. "Standing By Words"; in Standing By Words, Essays by Wendell Berry. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983.
2 Bey, Hakim. “Pornography” in Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism. New Jersey: Grim Reaper Press, 1985.