Poetry as Spellcasting
Serpent blessings and spirit language
Story
I closed my eyes as Lisbeth White led us in a ritual for Poetry as Spellcasting.
She invited us—Destiny Hemphill, me, and herself—to visualize the book we were working on together. What did it want to become? How would we manifest it into the world?
The three of us breathed together, went inward, and connected with the energies around this project. We then shared aloud our hopes and intentions.
And that’s when we realized that each of us had been visited by visions of serpents or sea-dragons during the ritual.
We grinned, delighted. This synchronicity affirmed our connection in virtual and psychic space. The book and all our loving labor had just been blessed by powerful creatures who symbolize mystery and spiritual power, shedding and renewal, and cycles of birth-death-rebirth.
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In the following months, as we co-wrote sections of the book, the serpents entered into the essays representing the nature and material of the text. For example, in the introduction:
With its capacity to both build and break through, language in these pages moves like the serpent, embodying qualities of innovation and resurgence. It is in this innovation that possibility toward liberation is activated. In naming the world with imagination and creativity, we come to understand that the harmful structures of society must change. This naming and understanding pose both a great threat to the status quo and a great invitation to transformation.
And in the closing essay:
What this means, dear readers, dear writers, dear workers of words and magic and change, is this book is a living book. Much like the serpentine nature of language, the essays, poems, and rituals that have found their way to this book are shifting and pulsing with mystery. They are ready to show one skin, wind around one meaning, and shed into a new interpretation with each read. They are welcoming of revisitation and revised practice. They encourage and lean toward, “What if?” They like for us to skirt the edges of our knowing. To play there. Sometimes, to pray there.
And now, in just a few days—dear reader, dear writer, dear worker of words and magic and change—this book will slide into the world as its full serpentine self: Poetry as Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power.
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The book is the physical embodiment of the visions the three of us shared. It is a dreaming made possible by the words, energy, and magic of the writers whose work fills the pages. After years of preparation, it is ready to be held in its physical being—paper and ink (with gratitude and blessing to the trees) or sound waves. Ready to be blessed with fingers and pencil marks, graced with smoke, water, wine. Ready to be read and argued with, played and prayed with, ready to be a catalyst for further thinking, feeling, and transformation in all of its power and all of its flaws.
I’ve never been part of a project quite like this—a deeply collaborative work created over years, completely virtually. It was a learning experience for each of us, and looking back, there are some things we would have done differently, for sure. But I am so proud of both the process and the product of our work together. We unraveled time and space, bringing ideas into being in ways that felt profoundly magical.
By and for BIPOC poets, spellcasters, ritualists, and social justice witches, this book enters into spaces dominated by and capitalized upon by white, cisgender, and straight folks. Early in the book, Kenji C. Liu offers one way to think about poetry as spellcasting, through the lens of Japanese and Shinto:
Kotodama (言霊, word spirit), the Shinto belief in the mystical power of words and names. Word and thing, inseparable. A word does not call to a thing, it is the thing itself.
言 = word = koto
事 = thing = koto
If sign and signifier are not a relationship but a single thing, then to use a word is to actually conjure and activate what it refers to. To write poetry is to cast a spell.
—From “Text of Bliss: Heaping Disruption at the Level of Language”
The essays range in style and approach, but all of them are concerned in some way with the intersection of poetry and ritual toward liberation and justice. As Sun Yung Shin writes in her essay “A Korean Orphan Undergoes Catholic Training for Future Poets”:
All of my poems are in some ways prayers for and to the missing and lost children of this world.
Those orphaned, abandoned, neglected, and murdered.
The missing girls, future women, of the world who were never born because of sex-selective abortions and infanticide in favor of boys, future men.
My strongest poem would be a spell to find them and heal them—and myself. My most powerful spell to cast would be to find my Korean family and stitch us back together with magic, some amalgam of English and Korean, but more, a spirit language that transcends space and time and holds the seeds of transformation.
In so many ways, these essays seek to connect to “spirit language,” to make claim to ancestral legacies and lineages that have been violently discounted and ignored.
Lou Florez writes, for example, of decolonization through liberation magic:
The practice of liberation magic is a magic of transgression, a magic that divests itself from the spiritual narrative of the colonizer by saying that my relationship to spirit, my relationship to my body, and my relationship to the world is outside of the gaze of consumption. I am talking about a politics of emancipation.
—From “Poetry as Praxis for Spellworking”
And in “Iniġluu—perpetually,” Joan Naviyuk Kane weaves a story of survival in the face of colonization, made possible by the poetry of her homeland and its flora:
Somehow, in the muggy swelter of my first-floor apartment, just down an embankment that ran downslope from a West Side highway ramp, nearly tranquilized by the fragrance of a massive linden tree that grew from the crest of the embankment, I found my subject: the images and symbols, the minute facticity, the ars poetica of tundra verdure. … These plants, and the images of them fixed in my mind, sustained me, figuratively and literally. I found my voice to be alive through living memories of plants.
Throughout the book, the essays deftly weave embodied experiences with language and ritual to ask questions that have many answers and offer openings into a multitude of paths. In “Revision as Mutability,” for example, Amir Rabiyah contemplates the spiritual and embodied experience of revising poetry:
I know now that just as healing isn’t linear, writing and revision isn’t either. It’s messy, and tricky, and sometimes exhausting. But to revise is a gift and an opportunity to go deeper and to decolonize. It’s a reminder that we don’t have to be perfect in order to be loved, or even to survive under white supremacy. In fact, we thrive when we embrace our imperfections.
There are many more beautiful essays, poems, and prompts in this book to explore. If you’ve been subscribed to Starlight & Strategy for a while, you know that I’ve been featuring the co-editors and contributors in recent issues. (And if you are new to this space, I invite you to browse past issues featuring Lisbeth White, Destiny Hemphill, Hyejung Kook, and excerpts from Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Dominique Matti’s essays). I’m excited to keep featuring the voices and perspectives of these amazing writers and more in the coming months.
For now, we are celebrating the serpentine spirit of this book, and I hope you can join us! See below for information on upcoming events.
Starlight
A prompt
Some of the prompts in Poetry as Spellcasting began as prompts here, in Starlight & Strategy. Here is a prompt from the book, expanded from when it first appeared in this newsletter in November 2020, after the U.S. presidential election.
Both, and
In poetry and in spellcasting (as well as in life!), holding two or more apparently contradictory ideas at once can be generative and illuminating. This prompt uses Tarot or oracle cards to help you tap into that truth. You can also do this prompt by finding images that speak to you.
If you are using a Tarot deck, pull out the Wheel of Fortune, the Tower, the Sun, and the World. If you are using an oracle or other kind of deck, pull out two cards that speak to you in any way about change, transformation, or loss, and two cards that speak to you of stability, personal power, or completion. If you are not using any deck, gather four images that represent these concepts to you.
Arrange the cards or images in an order or formation that makes sense to you.
Spend a few minutes meditating on what the cards or images bring individually and in relationship to each other.
Now, write a poem that holds two contradictory ideas simultaneously, but doesn’t name the ideas. You can use the following structure to get started:
Line 1: Describe a sound without naming the source.
Line 2: Bring in an animal.
Line 3: Write a line of internal dialog.
Line 4: Present an object in its entirety.
Line 5: Describe or refer to a death.
Line 6: Describe texture of a surface.
Line 7: Write a line of dialog that comes from a being not human.
Line 8: Evoke a gap, a leap, or a hole.
Line 9: Write breath into the line.
Stargaze
What I’m reading and listening to
I hope that readers of Poetry as Spellcasting go on to explore the other work of the authors who contributed to it. Some of my favorite new-ish books from contributors include:
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. I’m such a fan of Alexis’ brilliant writing—so full of heart, integrity, intellect, and love. This book accompanies our household almost every morning and during our most important moments.
Sun Yung Shin’s newest collection, The Wet Hex, is truly astounding. It’s a cauldron of magic, language, visioning, art, collaboration, resistance, and reclamation. “A tiger is a poet,” she writes—and this book holds all the fierceness and dexterity you’d expect from a tiger poet.
I recently had the opportunity to read Joan Naviyuk Kane’s forthcoming chapbook, Ex-Machina, and write a blurb for it: “The poems in Ex Machina are their own beings. Full of muscle, grief, and rage, they speak of and for themselves. … Inside violent loss, these poems are less interested in mere survival as they are in embodied, languaged sovereignty—language that ‘reminds us / to create a story and to become part of it, / to stay alive until we come back.’” Looks like it’s not yet available for order; I’ll link in here when it is!
Other important materials I’m engaging with that I want to share with y’all:
Organizing against the police and prison industrial complex:
A Week of Writing: #StopCopCity, Scalawag Magazine
Building Together: On Black & Asian Organizing in LA, from 18MR
COVID-19:
In Defense of Extending the U.S. Pandemic Response, Anti-Racism Daily
Long Covid, The Herbal Highway
Healing justice and the medical industrial complex:
Healing Justice Lineages, by Cara Page and Erica Woodland
Stories of Care and Control: A Timeline of the Medical Industrial Complex, from Healing Histories Project
Starshine
Announcements from the Starlight & Strategy community
Cute notebook alert!
I’m very excited about this giveaway from our publisher, North Atlantic Books. Pre-order Poetry as Spellcasting before May 16, then submit your receipt here to receive a free, matching notebook. You can use it for all the prompts in the book!
Events!
You are invited to the virtual launch party for Poetry as Spellcasting: an evening of poems, readings, a collective ritual, and celebration! We’re gathering as many of the contributors as we can, including: Amir Rabiyah, Ching-In Chen, Hyejung Kook, Lou Florez, Sun Yung Shin, and Tatiana Figueroa Ramirez.
Wednesday, May 24
5pm PDT / 6pm MDT / 7pm CDT / 8pm EDT
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Live event hosted by the Brookline Booksmith in Boston & livestreamed on YouTube
Thursday, June 8, 7 pm EDT
Featuring contributor Joan Naviyuk Kane and me
If you are not in Boston and want to tune in, here’s the livestream link
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Save the date:
Live event in Seattle on Thursday, June 22. Stay tuned for more details!
Virtual event hosted by Left Bank Books in St. Louis
Thursday, July 13, 5pm PDT / 6pm MDT / 7pm CDT/ 8pm EDT
Featuring all three editors and contributor Hyejung Kook
More info to come
Do you have an event, a book, an album, a gallery showing, a theater production, an action, a rally, a retreat, a podcast or other artistic/spiritual/activist announcement you’d like to share with this community? Send it my way!
Thank you for reading to the end. That’s it for this month. I’m excited to feature poet and contributor to Poetry as Spellcasting, Ching-In Chen in next month’s Pride issue. Look for it in your inbox on the full moon on Saturday, June 3.