Robert Eric Shoemaker

Know Future

Queer mythopoesis, or, How Eliot's "Waste Land" failed us

A man stands in a field of yellow grasses under a blue sky, trees framing him. — Robert Eric Shoemaker; photo credit Olivia Welsh.

This post serves as a coda to my Jacket2 blog series on magical poetics by engaging with my own writing and magical practice.

At this year’s Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, which is a one-hundred-year-old occult gem of magical poets and thinkers, renowned critic Stephanie Burt asked if poetry has a future. By this she meant, "can poetry imagine a future?" mostly leaning into a sci-fi future-imagining for queer folks, as well as everyone else.

Poetry-as-power

Spelling the ritual, urgency, and the future lineage

Robert Eric Shoemaker

Line-drawn veve featuring a heart shape for Maman Brigitte, a Vodoun loa. — The veve of Maman Brigitte, Vodoun loa. Veves are spiritual and magical symbols used for bringing the energy and presence of loa.

As we start to practice magical poetics and create real effects in our poems, we also begin to think about the consequences. The ethics of magic is at the very core of historical perceptions, definitions, and discussions of magic itself.

Give me aliens!

Trance and memory practice

Robert Eric Shoemaker

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), founder of Theosophy and leading spiritualist, with James Morgan Pryse and George Robert Stow Mead in London, 1890. Blavatsky inspired poets including W. B. Yeats with her occult beliefs and practices, including mediumship. Public domain.

Nearing the end of the run of these blog posts, I’ve wanted to tie my concepts together, especially into practice. I can’t get everything to align, but I want to at least briefly explore what it means to enact or to practice a magical poetics. Practices of magic do not necessarily yield magical poetry, so how does one make that leap to text? I am especially interested in crafting poems that are not just reflections of or imitations of practice but are themselves practices of magic. How does one pull these threads together into a web one writes with? Give me a prompt or procedure!

The first obvious book that bridges this gap for me is Kristin Prevallet’s Trance Poetics, which coaches the writer using practices of trance and automaticity to approach mythopoetic and extra-personal poetic relationships like those of H.D., Yeats, and Merrill. Trance is a state of being and writing, a “state of absorption” that, relaxed into vision, can lead to epiphany (hear ecstasy and sublime) (9, 27).

Wobble the gyre

Symbolist magic

Robert Eric Shoemaker

An illustration of W.B. Yeats’s “gyre” as described in “A Vision.” Published in “<a href=https://www.faena.com/aleph/a-brief-approach-to-wb-yeats-lunar-system>A Brief Approach to W.B. Yeats’ Lunar System</a>.” — An illustration of W.B. Yeats’s “gyre” as described in “A Vision.” Published in “A Brief Approach to W.B. Yeats’ Lunar System.”

Like a molecule when energy infuses it

Sublimate the symbol, the image

Reach through the punctum

Move from ground state to excited state and back again

Terribly human

'Helen in Egypt,' over-mind, and other hermetic definitions

Robert Eric Shoemaker

‘Ecstasy of Saint Teresa,’ 1645–1652, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Photo credit Joaquim Alves Gaspar, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The ability to see the self and one’s work in communion with one’s poetic ancestors is different from merely employing allusion or reference in one’s writing. Modernists like T. S. Eliot or H.D.’s friend/lover/mentor Ezra Pound made the past new by setting themselves among the dead and interpreting their work as such, to paraphrase Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In works like Eliot’s The Waste Land, much of this deadness is referential. H.D.

Header image: Book of the Dead of the Priest of Horus, Imhotep (Imuthes), ca. 332–200 BCE, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by Robert Eric Shoemaker.

Imhotep’s Book of Coming Forth by Day, known commonly as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, contains 182 columns of spells, prayers, and incantations written in Hieratic. These spellbooks, included in burial chambers or coffins, assisted the deceased with passing through to the next life phase. “Vignette” line drawings reiterate key incantatory phrases from the spells, much like amulets, to ensure the spells’ success.

MAGICK is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will. — Aleister Crowley

That is where the real magic happens. It doesn’t happen through attempting to craft a thought through clarity. “And let me just move you into a beautiful image of a garden …” That’s rudimentary. The ultimate magician is the one who can put together paradoxes and words that don’t actually go together; you know, have someone who’s receiving that enter into a state of deep, deep confusion … and then at the end say, oh, huh. That’s a change in energy. That’s a trans-migration. — Kristin Prevallet, oral history interview with the author

Magic is a difficult term to define, maybe especially for scholars. David Frankfurter’s edited volume, Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic is largely spent defining ancient “mageia” (itself a contentious term for sets of ancient practices) and no conclusive, or maybe satisfactory, definition is reached. Magic is pulling rabbits out of a hat, or the illusion of doing so, or the belief that it is possible. Magic is ancient rituals practiced outside of religious dogma; magic also weaves itself into religious practice. Some, particularly those thinking of the rabbit in the hat, might think of magic, as James Frazer did in his work in The Golden Bough, as an attempt to control events by technical acts based on faulty reasoning, normally reasoning of “primitive” peoples (a colonizing term and definition), while religion is an appeal for help to spiritual beings. Religion is a colonizing system, just as definitions can be, and theurgic magic that connects its practitioner with the divine is, practically, no different from religious prayer. Magic is not primitive in the sense that there has been “progress” since this thinking. Progress is a faulty narrative, and magic is primal. Magic is an essential mode of thinking, and, as I argue, magic is an essential quality of language itself. Language makes things happen, language is a high-energy construct, language is the vector (perhaps especially in colonial languages like English) of meaning, and those who craft language — poets — are language’s magicians and meaning’s disruptors.

Magical Poetics is, for me, an umbrella term for a theory of language and a network of poetics that are rooted in the efficacious, imaginative potential of language expressed through intentional ritual, gestural, and performance-based acts, written or otherwise, of poetry.

Robert Eric Shoemaker
Photo credit: Olivia Welsh.

Robert Eric Shoemaker is a poet and interdisciplinary artist. Eric holds a PhD in Humanities from the University of Louisville and an MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics from the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University. Eric’s work focuses on magical poetics, queer theory and poetry, public history, translation, and gender and sexuality. Eric is the Digital Archive Editor at the Poetry Foundation and is the Poetry Editor for the interdisciplinary journal Plath Profiles. Eric has published three books of hybrid writing, poetry, memoir, and playwriting: Ca’Venezia (Partial Press, 2021), We Knew No Mortality (Acta Publications, 2018), and 30 Days Dry (Thought Collection Publishing, 2015). Eric has published scholarly work in Signs and Society, Jacket2, Entropy, and Gender Forum; translations in Rattle, Asymptote, Exchanges, and others; stage plays in Plath Profiles; and poetry in Analogies & Allegories, Verde Qué Te Quiero Verde, and other journals. Follow Eric at reshoemaker.com, and find Eric on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @Robert.E.Shoe.

Naropa University Archive Magical Poetics Oral Histories, ongoing research interviews with magical poetics practitioners

Poetry Is, an ongoing community-based performance project

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Jacket editors here.

Eric’s website

Poetry Is