The Art of Spell-Casting: Part I

On Revelation, the first principle of the oscillation of magic

Photo by tabitha turner on Unsplash

The summer I was 30, right smack in the middle of my Saturn return, I sat in a ground floor classroom at Warren Wilson College outside Asheville, NC, listening to the late great American poet Tony Hoagland expound on the difference between structure and form in poetry.

At the time I was so unstructured and unformed I didn’t know what he was talking about, at least on a conscious level, but on a deeper level, what I will call innate, I understood him. My form—the bones and tissues that held me together enough to sit upright in that classroom; the spiraling cartilage of my ears, funneled his words into a part of myself I was not yet aware of, but would come to discover on my own circuitous path after I dropped out of that MFA program. (That’s another story involving some chicanery on a professor’s part and me expanding beyond the painful vulnerability of my doe-eyed youth, in which I wanted to be loved so much I set myself up for betrayal at every turn. But since that thread of my life has unspooled into another dimension to be picked up by the next ingenue in need of learning how to find her way out of a labyrinth, I’ll return to the straight path I promised in this title and get back to revealing how a spell is maintained through oscillation. I promise, though this may seem like it’s starting out like incoherent gobbledeygook from a Fool’s mouth, it is an instruction manual.)

The part I discovered after dropping out of Warren Wilson, was my innate structure, which at the time I sat in Tony’s class was somewhat warped. In a world that barely acknowledges we have an inner life, it’s hard enough to know one’s self beyond the outward forms of jobs, family, and social media followers. It’s even harder to contact when the form is warped by the individual and collective traumas that we all experience in our soul-denying culture. My first contact with my innate structure could best be described as realizing I was a whirlpool stuck in the bend of a creek, frustrated at not ever being released into the wider stream, or a wasp whose wings had been torn off by a bratty ten year old boy who believed he was born to rule the world. That poor wasp was in a kamikaze spiral, desperate for one last sip of something sweet, determined to sting anything it could on its way out. Defiance was a badge of honor.

To get to that ground level classroom where I may have looked out the window at rhododendrons while Tony lectured, I hitched a ride to Champlin’s Marina on Block Island, RI, where I walked up the gang plank to board the Montauk Ferry, my one and only time on that vessel in over twenty year of living on Block Island. Not expecting a rough ride, I skipped the dramamine, a move I regretted as the boat pitched and swelled the entire two hours it took to steam from BI to Montauk.

Adding injury to insult, the only seat I could find outside (not a smart move to sit indoors if prone to seasickness) required me to inhale diesel fumes as it was near a smoke stack. Combined with the odious smell of deck paint, I disembarked in Montauk looking like I’d consumed one too many Bloody Marys, when in fact, I was completely sober.

Was I, in fact, sober? I may not have been drunk or stoned, but I was definitely awhirl and ready to strike out. I was so prickly a porcupine might have quailed at a nocturnal confrontation. I had learned the hard way I had to defend myself, and that not many could be trusted, especially men who had a penchant for believing they were entitled to get whatever they wanted, which included my attention in a classroom, which I did want to give Tony because I could tell he was saying something really important to me about being an artist and how to make a good poem, but I couldn’t do it.

My attention was not, in fact, mine to give. It belonged to the intoxicated part of myself I was not aware of, that was easily susceptible to the charms of handsome professors (not Tony to be clear) who said that I was a born poet, not a scholar, and maybe I should consider just going back to that island I came from and dropping out of graduate school after hitting on me at the dance, an event that had a bunch of supposedly adult poets flailing in a gymnasium like junior high school students. I should have been disturbed I enjoyed it so much. In other words, the boundary-challenged professor and I were both drunken fools.

I have leaped ahead in this narrative about a hundred times already, a bad habit, or a good one, depending on who you are asking. Those of you familiar with Robert Bly’s book “Leaping Poetry” will know that enormous leaps can work if the ground on either side is just solid enough to hold departure and arrival. Those kind of leaps are exhilarating. I’m not sure the leap from the Montauk docks onto the Hamptons Jitney counts as exhilarating, it was more a couple of steps up and me slumped in a bus seat recovering from seasickness, cruising queasy through the Hamptons until the bus doors opened on the Upper East Side and I lumbered off and into a cab that backtracked toward midtown to my boyfriend-in-transition’s apartment.

We were not quite yet broken up, which meant we were, but hadn’t actually said it. I suppose you could say I was being expedient asking him if I could crash at his place the night before my flight to Asheville, but I was really just hopelessly romantic, dreaming he’d come to his senses and surrender his bong to the cherb dealers who greeted him whenever we walked through Central Park, and stop pretending a 40 oz. Budweiser from the bodega was the same size as one in a 6-pack.

To his credit, at the time, I was incapable of understanding him. He was ten years older than me and divorced, not of his own volition. His wife had married someone else within months of the conclusion of their marriage and moved to England. Marriage was a contract I knew nothing about. Now I can see how the loss of that form devastated my boyfriend, destabilizing his entire structure, which now that we are referring to someone’s inner life is getting closer to what Tony imparted in that classroom in the poetry workshop I am still on my way to.

So there we were drinking margaritas in midtown in a bar that’s only full at happy hour, the kind of place that’s really depressing once all the commuters go home. There we were pulling out the sofa bed and pretending we weren’t broken up. Not an auspicious beginning to any journey.

The next morning after another taxi to La Guardia, flung into the air by the dream of going down in history like a gothic romantic poet, say Christina Rossetti or Emily Brontë, minus dying of tuberculosis, I landed in Asheville, where I got another shuttle to the Warren Wilson campus.

It’s strange that I was there for two weeks, attending workshops, lectures, readings, lunchtime chats, and the thing I remember most is this one class with Tony I’m writing about. At the time, I didn’t know that our paths would cross again in a few years when Tony was a presenter at The Great Mother Conference I’d been attending since I abandoned my dreams of being a famous poet, and decided to just enjoy the company of people who loved poetry. I certainly couldn’t have imagined that Tony would come back the next year, after being an honored presenter up on the podium, as a humble member of the audience, and that for the years until his death he would continue to return, becoming a beloved member of the Great Mother community.

What precipitated this change? I’m not an authority on Tony. That right belongs to him, and he’s gone, so I can’t ask him. But I have, over the years, become a bit more of an authority on myself. Knowing myself has not come from knowledge of my form—my physical skin, bones, eyes, etc., or from the roles I enact in the world. It’s come from knowing the very thing Tony was imparting in that classroom—my structure.

I believe this is what happened to Tony, what brought him back to sit in the audience the next year after being up on the podium. He came into contact with a part of himself beyond the body’s physical foundations, and most importantly, beyond the roles the ego invites us to perform. This is what I mean by structure. It doesn’t rely on anything external. It’s not a sonnet, though it can appear in one. Structure, in a person or a poem, is a signature, one written with an actual poem, not electronically. It’s unique as a fingerprint. Structure is soul. Writing, from any other place, is imitation, no matter what the content. If we don’t get our own unique rhythm into the poem, we are just echoing others, which is fine, except for the fact that we have a shortage of soul on our world at the moment, and that this shortage, this failure to recognize the precious uniqueness of every individual life, including the non-human, is probably the main factor that keeps us from being gobsmacked by the awe we need to stop careening toward mass extinction.

At this point I have to backtrack again and say that I am not speaking for Tony. This may not have been what he meant at all in that workshop, and there’s a good chance he’d jeer at me for saying he came back to the Great Mother Conference because he got a glimpse of the shape of his soul, but this isn’t an essay about Tony so we can let him deride me from wherever he is if he wants to. I’m fine with that. In the past, I might have been crushed at his derision. Now, I can say I’d be fine with it because I’ve brought in just enough of my own structure in order to shore up my form. I’m not so fragile as I was.

You may be wondering why I didn't just get to the point and define structure and form in poetry in the first paragraph, why all this meandering. Well, that’s not what The Corpus Callosum Chronicles is here for. The CCC is here to show you how to get to know your own imagination by showing you mine. In showing you mine, I am revealing my structure, aka my soul, and my soul does not move from Linear A to B, it is a whirlwind, a spiral, Pegasus lifting off the mountaintop, a black hole devouring itself to give birth to a new universe. The linear has its appropriate uses, like how to assemble an Ikea bookshelf, but ensoulment (the process of bringing the soul into the body) does not come with an instruction manual. It can’t, because the soul is a never-ending process moving through various forms, bound together by patterns of movement, color, light, sound—all the glories that comprise a structure contained for a lifetime by skin and bones and jobs.

I may not remember a word of Derrida’s content from literary theory classes, but I do remember my professor saying the book was practically impossible to read because Derrida was demonstrating his thesis of the impossibility of experiencing stability through language with his writing technique. The reader was supposed to be confused. This is what I’m going for in The Corpus Callosum Chronicles, with the added twist that confusion returns us to the primal awareness of how one individual life reaches into so many dimensions, combined with a delight in rare and wondrous images from the legacy left to us by the gods when they slipped into the world between worlds, the matrix of wonder we call the myth world, holding us together from within like fascia penetrating every organ in the body, and hopefully not boring you to death like Derrida. Myth is a matrix of wonder and all the meaning we need. Love is the greatest myth of all. Even a glimpse of your inner world, your structure, is enough to banish all doubt. And when love becomes a verb, when your structure flows unimpeded in a poem, the forms change, bodies, and maybe even entire worlds.

See? I can keep it short and simple when it’s needed. Even a whirlwind has a resting point before it hurls itself back out. And Tony, wherever you are, thank you. Forgive me if I misread you. Whatever you were saying that long ago afternoon, the rhododendrons were beautiful.

Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light