Running bibliography

Book of the Dead of the Priest of Horus, Imhotep (Imuthes), ca. 332–200 BCE, Met — Detail, 'Book of the Dead' of the Priest of Horus, Imhotep (Imuthes), ca. 332–200 BCE, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by the author.

When I cite a text in a “Magical Poetics” post, I’ll drop the citation here to keep up a “reading list” for the commentary series.

Sidebar/Introduction

Header image: Book of the Dead of the Priest of Horus, Imhotep (Imuthes), ca. 332–200 BCE,

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Frankfurter, David, ed. Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2019.

Prevallet, Kristin. Oral history interview with Robert Eric Shoemaker. September 18, 2021.

Frazer, James. The Golden Bough. New York: Macmillan, 1979.

Crowley, Aleister. Magick in Theory and Practice. New York: Castle Books, 1929.

Spelling the amulet, the shape, the poem

Conrad, CA. Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibration. Seattle: Wave Books, 2021.

Montgomery, James A. Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur. Philadelphia: Philadelphia

University Museum, 1913.

Instress, part 1

Trachtenberg, Joshua. Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion. Behrman’s Jewish

Book House, 1939.

Reines, Ariana. A Sand Book. Tin House, 2019.

Bergvall, Caroline. Drift. Nightboat, 2014.

O’Leary, Peter. Earth is Best. Cultural Society, 2019.

" ". Phosphorescence of Thought. Cultural Society, 2013.

" ". The Hidden Eyes of Things. Cultural Society, 2022.

Durling, Robert M., translator. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Oxford University Press,

2003.

*Another recent translation well worth mentioning is rendered by Mary Jo Bang.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Major Works. Oxford University Press, 1986.

H.D. Notes on Thought and Vision. City Lights, 1982.

Instress, part 2

Duncan, Robert. Selected Poems. New Directions, 1993.

Frazer, James. The Golden Bough. New York: Macmillan, 1979.
Halberstam, Jack. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Duke University Press, 2020.
Jakobson, Roman. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.” In

Language in Literature, edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Harvard University Press, 1987.

Walcott, Derek. Omeros. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.

Instress, part 3

Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse.” In Collected Prose, edited by Donald Allen and Benjamin

Friedlander. University of California Press, 2009.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Major Works. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Mariner Books, 2016.

Inarticulability, part 1 and Inarticulability, part 2

Crowley, Aleister. The Book of Lies. 1913. Reprint, Boston: Red Wheel/Weiser, 1981.
Eth, Alexander, host. “#111: Hoodoo, Rootwork & Conjure with. Dr. Rev. Aaron Davis.” Glitch

Bottle Podcast. Feb 3, 2022.

H.D. Trilogy. New Directions, 1973.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. Penguin, 1966.

Halberstam, J. Jack. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Beacon, 2012.

Mauss, Marcel. A General Theory of Magic. Translated by Robert Brain. Routledge, 1972.

O’Leary, Peter. Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness. Wesleyan University

Press, 2002.

Washuta, Elissa. White Magic. Tin House, 2021.

For more information on Mithraic cults:

Seething Cauldron: Essays on Zoroastrianism, Sufism, Freemasonry, Wicca, Druidry, and Thelema

Write or Die

H.D. Helen in Egypt. New Directions, 1961.
H.D. Hermetic Definition. New Directions, 1958.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Roudiez, Columbia

University Press, 1982.

Quinn, Vincent. “H.D.’s ‘Hermetic Definition’: The Poet as Archetypal Mother.” Contemporary Literature 18, no. 1 (1977): 51–61.

Terribly Human: Helen in Egypt, Over-Mind, and other “Hermetic Definitions”

Bernini, Gian Lorenzo. The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. 1645–1652. Marble. Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome.

Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism.

Knopf, 1920.

--. The Waste Land. Knopf, 2021.

H.D. Helen in Egypt. New Directions, 1961.

--. Hermetic Definition. New Directions, 1958.

--. “Notes on Thought and Vision.” Notes on Thought and Vision & The Wise Sappho. City Lights,

1982.

Shoemaker, Robert Eric. “After After Lorca: Anamnesis and Magic between Jack Spicer and

Federico García Lorca.” Signs and Society 7, no. 3 (2019): 289–453.

Spicer, Jack. After Lorca. Published in My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian. Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

Wobble the Gyre: Symbolist Magic

W.B. Yeats. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume XIV: A Vision, The Revised 1937 Edition.

Scribner, 2015.

--. “The Second Coming.” From The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, 1989. Courtesy of The Poetry

Foundation.

H.D. Helen in Egypt. New Directions, 1961.

Give Me Aliens: Trance and Memory Practice

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Richard Howard, translator. Hill and Wang, 2010.

Duncan, Robert. The H.D. Book. The Collected Writings of Robert Duncan, University of California

Press, 2011.

H.D. Helen in Egypt. New Directions, 1961.

Johnston, Devin. Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice. Wesleyan

University Press, 2002.

Prevallet, Kristin. Trance Poetics. Wide Reality Books, 2013.

Poetry-as-Power: Spelling the Ritual, Urgency, and the Future Lineage

Conrad, CA. 2021. Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibration. Seattle: Wave Books.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation.

Autonomedia, 2004.

Frankfurter, David, ed. 2019. Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

Betz, Hans Dieter, editor. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Volume 1: Texts, 2nd ed.

University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Jarnot, Lisa. Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus. University of California Press, 2012.

Reines, Ariana. A Sand Book. Tin House, 2019.

Know Future: Queer Mythopoesis, or, How Eliot's "Waste Land" Failed Us

Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. From Collected Poems: 1909-1962, Faber, 2020.

September 22, 2022

next post >

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.

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