Having come well through Decadence, we're now Decayed.

May have seen today what poetry book #3 will look like. The definite import of this is that it means poetry book #2 is under enough of its own steam that I no longer have to work on figuring out what it will look like; years ago -- years and years, now -- I had an initial idea of what poetry book #2 would be and it's come to be in a completely different and much better form. So it might change, and in fact the logistics aren't all worked out, so it will have to change, at least to go from a notion with a lot of blank space in it to a fully-realized object. But it's there.

A while ago I wrote an entry here that dipped into an alter ego as Iscariot "Tokyo" Davies (I took her other s back away), a Gibsonian dystopic near-future fortuneteller/poet. She got a poem the other weekend, in which all my wimpy, nervous, not-especially-helpful parts went to her for a reading, and got all sorts of bizarre stories & advice they couldn't even interpret, let alone use. Tokyo, it turns out, is a brusque and prickly, if still garrolous fortuneteller.

I sent the poem to my advisor and he wrote back saying that he liked it, but also obviously at a loss as to what to do with it; said he thought he'd be able to access it better if he had the context -- and I replied that there really isn't any. Parts of it came via making fun of an Etsy seller, referencing a conversation I had with my poetry band bandmate about our name, referencing "Love for Sale" which also (in my head) came out of that conversation, lifting a phrase from the Meador translation of Enheduanna, lifting others from blog posts here about how poetry works, referencing a blog post (not mine) about children's names in the 1800s, using up some words and phrases I'd gathered in my search to generate a name for Poetry Magazine, using up a bunch of other stuff about winter I had saved up. . . and so on. I've written lately by declining to look for what the things I put into a poem mean, and trusting that my subconscious/the poem/the muse will do fine without me hauling on the reins. It works, too -- a couple weeks ago I realized that I'd put the same image, described differently but the same image, in two poems written a couple years apart, and the two have very different tones and perspectives, but in those moments they're both about surviving erasure.

The image, incidentally, is of wings/a wing without. . . wingness. One is insect wings without membrane; the other is bird or angel wings, but instead, they're enormous antlers on a person's back. In both cases the subject "flies" and I think it may be "flight" as in fleeing, not as in flying upward through the air, and the argument therefore may be that running is a way of soaring, in certain difficult circumstances.

In the new fortunetelling poem, the person goes to the dystopic psychic/prophet to ask about her love life, and instead gets all this gobbledygook about work and fragile things and vaguely dire somethings and urbanity and I really don't even know what. My advisor implying that he didn't know what it was about made me curious, and on just a very short look, I saw one place that's obviously about becoming a poet -- inside/via the weird imagery from all the ridiculous places. Other people may or may not get it, but I know exactly what that is. (Yes, I'm being entirely literal when I describe my writing now as a process run by intuition. It's normal for me to finish a poem and not know what it's about, and to have to come back and learn what it's about by interpreting it, just as if I were reading some other person's work. If the muse is a metaphor, she's a thoroughly accurate one. Plato was right to regard us as untrustworthy citizens; we're all secret, even to ourselves.) So the message is, as in Spicer's Fake Novel about the Life of Arthur Rimbaud, that if you ask about love, I'm going to tell you your fate is to be a poet, and that may or may not be an answer in the affirmative, depending on whether you think poetry is being in love, or being alone. For the record, I am intensely and definitely ambivalent on that question.

Last weekend, I got my own cards out for the first time in a very long while and asked about. . . my love life. It's pretty annoying, reading tarot for other people, because all anyone ever wants to know about is love life and money. They never even ask about career aspirations or non-career ambitions; based on what they ask tarot readers, most people may very well not have those. They don't ask about religious or theological issues. They only very, very, very rarely ask things like how a trip they're about to take will go. Love life and money. And me, well, most my questions, over the now twenty years since I started teaching myself to read, have been about my love life, or, most the time, my lack of such. I have asked a few times whether I ought to be doing tarot for money, and always get the answer in the affirmative but then don't do it. I've also asked about social circle issues, time management, career goals, likelihood of publication. . . I don't know what all. Not much about money, I think because I assume I'll never have much of it and don't feel a need to question that. But love life, that one, I do.

I was afraid to go for it, actually, and did two readings, one asking about the immediate future/next couple months (til I defend/submit my dissertation), and the next in a very cowardly, dodgy frame of mind where I said I didn't even know what to ask, what time frame or who or what I should even be asking, just to tell me what they would about my love life future. Closest I could bring myself. And then both readings, as far as I can tell, and I do have some years doing this, were all about career stuff, frustrated, thwarted, unsteady career stuff to boot. Wands and swords everywhere (not everyone's career, but definitely mine), lots of reversed cards, a couple pentacles in important places. The best news I had was getting the Fool signifying myself in the second spread, and most the time, the Fool is not a card I like pulling for myself! Things were that pain-in-the-ass, though. At least I still get to be ridiculous and intuitive-impetuous. By, say, giving my highly intellectual, career-driven self a tarot reading about my sopping and silent swamp of a love life.

This is just what happened in my poem for Tokyo. The cards/I told me exactly what she/I told fictional-wimpy-querent/me.

I don't care how it works; I'm as happy thinking the subconscious is that good as I am thinking Mystical Forces Are At Play or -- truly -- thinking things like this are nothing but willed delusion stilted up on fear and being histrionic. I regard experiences like this the way users do computer programs, in that it doesn't matter what language you build it in; what matters is the interface with which we interact. Or, if you want to insist that the language does matter, say that it doesn't matter whether you write a particular routine using regular expressions or not. The level at which the architecture of your code makes a program more or less efficient, gives it a slightly different feel, etc., is so fine that no one will ever notice. The person at his or her keyboard will do his or her taxes, or shoot polygonal zombies, or whatever, and get an equivalent experience without knowing or being able to know the nature of the apparatus that provides said experience. Tarot do their best work in helping you think about things in different ways -- one way those readings did so for me was to get me to think about some interesting equivalencies and reflections between situations in my own life and surprisingly similar (similar in a geometric sense, even) situations in a friend's. Whatever the avenue to get to that new perspective, it's good to reach it. A decent reader will get you there, whether or not she or he tries to give you a date to expect your raise or a hair color for your next amour.

This evening I was reading some Crane criticism because I'm reworking that chapter (and, gawd, Brian Reed -- by turns so intriguing and then so slavishly LangPo-worshippingly disingenuous), and I kept thinking about how very uncanny it was to write a poem and then unwittingly to do what it described to myself. For that matter, without the intention to write the poem that way in the first place, or awareness of what it was doing until after I'd both written the poem and done its story to myself. I have no idea how I'll eventually work out the significance, but in thinking about poetry and tarot, I got the idea to do a series of poems -- poemlets, even, just very elliptical, quirky scraps of language -- one for each card. I have no idea why I never thought of this, unless it's that as the PhD has made me a better poet, it's also made me a much less consistent tarot reader. You only have so many hours in a day, and I spend more of mine doing pointless bullshit online than doing interesting bullshit offline. Eh.

I thought first of printing them on small cards, maybe 3x the size of a business card. Then I thought of (oh, no one's done this) working with a visual artist to do maybe abstract impressions/expressions of/responses to the cards/my poems, but I don't know any visual artists who'd be interested in that. Then I thought, oh ha, Tokyo should get to talk in this; she should get little wry commentaries inserted in, like Cooperman's "tissue" poems in his Still project and also like the "Explanatory Notes" in Homage to Creeley. At about that point it morphed from something I could write as a very large part of Magpie to, this would be long enough to make a whole book.

I picture designing the card pages as though they were tarot cards, with the Roman numerals at the top and name of the card at the bottom, maybe (maybe?) some lines to suggest the card shape. Not sure what language for the titles, probably English. I love my Latin and French would be appropriate, but I think English will be best for the personality. In the space where you'd have an image, instead I'll have spare, cryptic poems, and interspersed throughout, other poems (maybe untitled? maybe some but not all having titles?) that comment on the cards, on fortunetelling, that lampoon or ironize the language & methods of instructional books on divination, etc. This would really be one persona all the way through, or at most two, Tokyo and the cards, which would be an interesting/challenging project. The physical constraint will probably be VERY different for me, and anxiety-inducing, but I think it would also take advantage of things I haven't been able to do, and free me much more from having to make characters and places and fully-realized emotions, as I still usually do, even if my characters, places, and emotions are uninterpretably bizarre.

I run into poetry that uses tarot imagery off and on, but other than my dead pals Eliot, Spicer and H.D., none of it's ever very good. People may have written books I haven't seen that basically consist of a series of poems about tarot cards, but I doubt very much anyone's brought an idiom quite like mine to that table. . . since people capable of trapeezing and tunnelling in an idiom like mine generally go pop-eyed and grimacey behind fixed, polite attempts to smile when they run into the idea of taking anything like tarot seriously enough to write good poems from/for it.

In high school, and I think even for a while after, probably still while I was working for my alma mater's art department, I had ideas off and on to make a tarot deck, but I've never been the visual artist, and truthfully, I don't think I care enough about being some Llewellyn/Lo Scarabeo celebrity to put in the effort, even if I had the talent. But I do care about poetry, and I love navigating complex discursive fields, and I remain irrepressibly amused by and ethically invested in posing before the world a person who's a real intellectual and a real mystic, in whatever incomplete and partially-tutored ways I can perform both those roles. I think this book will be a great ride to write, and that it'll be a distressingly good read -- conditions to which all poetry ought to aspire.