A Craft Essay by Michele Battiste
Other Wisdoms: The Divinatory Potential of Poetry
Every word is haunted by its past and potential variations.
—Kenji C. Liu
Sometimes when I’m learning about divination, I think I’m learning about poetry. I’m learning how to tell the truth about language. It can be easy to think of divination in terms of reading and writing. It is a language-based, narrative art. We read the cards, the coins, the bones, the birds, the signs. We read not just as an act of receiving knowledge but of seeking knowledge, summoning knowledge, manifesting and transforming knowledge. To read the signs is to write a new story, one that pushes back against narratives we are compelled to believe and absorb and repeat, no matter how incongruous or harmful. To divine is to read both backwards (in understanding and perspective) and forwards (in alternatives and possibilities). But does it work the other way? Can writing be oracular? Can the act of reading a poem be an act of divination?
Selah Saterstrom coined the term “divination poetics” to help understand the confluence between writing and divination. In her essay collection Ideal Suggestions, she writes, “So I tell students, ‘It is the realms of uncertainty, simultaneity, contradiction, paradox, and parable that one needs to access in order to give a good reading.’ Teaching divination workshops feels the same to me as teaching writing workshops.” What she means, I think, is that good writing, like a good reading, offers up possibility to the reader.
When I studied Greek mythology in high school English, I learned about the Oracle of Delphi. I was told that the priestess provided equivocal, cryptic oracles to test seekers’ abilities to discern the truth behind the riddles. If they could, it would prove to the Fates that the seekers had the right to influence the future. Yet that interpretation preserves a power structure that withholds and controls knowledge instead of sharing it, that denies the basic right of agency.
These days, I read the Oracle of Delphi’s story this way: her riddles disrupt expectations of clarity, causality, and logic to create ruptures in understanding. In those ruptures, she offers seekers the potential of multiplicity, opportunities to slip between meanings, different access points to different archives, the power to interpret, and the power to act on those interpretations. I believed the priestess knew each one of us has agency to influence a future that is filled with options, alternatives, and glorious possibility.
To make apparent the invisible. To divine.
—Destiny Hemphill
Divination is a subversive practice, one that refutes the accepted narrative and the proscribed outcome. Instead, we insist on seeing what we’ve been told doesn’t matter, isn’t real, has no value, holds no water. Poet and healer Destiny Hemphill says, “to divine is to make a covenant with, to draw nigh and forth that which has been invisibilized. The hidden. The obscured. The deliberately destroyed, effaced, subjugated.” Voices that have been diminished or denied can claim and reclaim their own stakes. They can say for themselves what was and what is and what could be.
Some people think divination is a predictive art, seeking knowledge about the unknowable. For some it can be, but more often divination seeks information from the unknown to help us unravel the tightly knotted thread of conscious knowledge. When we divine, we are open to enchantment, which is to say we are open to other wisdoms, other ways of knowing: ancestral, somatic, elemental, natural, spiritual, and intuitive.
Poetry, like divination, insists readers suspend what they know and access wisdoms outside the narrow boundaries of common sense. A trope or image or volta will rupture an established association or assumption, and will go, as Marlanda Dekine writes, “beyond the world as we have known it.” Even the line break insists on possibility by invoking a pause before the automatic synaptic connection of language. And in the pause—between one word and the next—anything can happen. Poetry can go beyond the world as it has been told (dictated) to us, to a world that isn’t and so is yet to be. And something that is yet to be—it can be anything.
The divine thing about poetry is that as poets write beyond the known world, they create a gap between the known and the unknown—a caesura (or the Oracle at Delphi’s rupture)—and the reader falls into that space. The reader must make meaning to reach the other edge of it. And if readers are to make new meaning, they must privilege sources of information other than conscious and canonized knowledge. They must be open to other ways of knowing, other values, other paths, other archives.
The act reading a poem, then, is similar to the act of reading the signs. The act of reading a poem is an act of making meaning and asserting possibility. It is an act of divination.
She said a poem was a combination of sounds like abracadabra was a spell. Words elicit an experience; you create your own meaning that is always generative.
—Lou Florez (referencing Dorothy Lasky)
If reading a poem is divinatory, then writing a poem is oracular. In his poem “For Those Who Mispronounce my Name,” Kayo Chingonyi asks,
Did no one tell you
naming is a magical act,
words giving shape
to life, life revivified
by utterance […]
Poetry, made in and of language, can conjure, and to conjure, it must create space—and hold space—between the known and the unknown where words can give “shape to life.” Poetry must trust the reader to find meaning in the space between signs.
My friend Ruby lost her brother Rob a couple of years ago. He was celebrating his 20th anniversary with his wife at Stearns Wharf in Santa Barbara when two groups of young men—boys, really—began shooting at each other. Rob was hit in the crossfire and died. I cannot speak to Ruby’s grief except to say it was unfathomable. I was not witness to much of it and, of the small part she shared, I could not see its depth. In her long period of mourning, Ruby asked her youngest son, if she were to return to him after death, how would he like her to appear to him. He told her that he’d like her to come back as a bee.
Shortly after that, Ruby began seeing bees in places one does not expect to see bees. Nestled on her older son’s shirt during a graduation ceremony. Molded into the frame of a woman’s sunglasses sitting behind her husband at dinner. Resting at her foot as she stood in a parking lot, talking. Recently, on a trip to the California coast to mark the second anniversary of Rob’s death, Ruby almost stepped on a bee nearly hidden in the beach’s sand. She picked it up, and it stayed with her while the family took photos, and throughout the car ride back to Rob’s house, and for several minutes in Rob’s yard until it caught a sudden breeze and flew away. In the space between what she knows and what she doesn’t, Ruby read the bees as a message from Rob—his way of saying I am still here with you. I am still a part of your day, our family, your life as it continues. We, he says through the bees, remain connected.
A skeptic may say that we see what we want to see, that we will always find patterns and signs if we look for them. And I say, “Yes, exactly. That’s the point.” The patterns and signs are there for us to seek them out. Ruby opened herself up to understanding Rob’s death by opening herself to other wisdoms: spiritual, mystical, familial. Reading the bees as a sign was Ruby’s receptive act of openness, an act of agency, an act of divination. She moved beyond the dominant narrative of death to a different narrative, one that transformed Rob’s absence to presence.
When poets use patterns and signs (and imagery and metaphor and sound), they ask us to suspend our conscious understanding and make—in the space (caesura, rupture) they hold for us—a different kind of knowing.
Poems are not the words themselves but what the words transmit. Not the thunderclap, but how our bodies respond to the boom.
—Dominique Matti
When skeptics say we see what we want to see, they remind me of the misunderstood idea that the poem means whatever you want it to mean. The word I get stuck on is “want.” What we want is our dreams, our aspirations, our vision. What we want is different from the world as it has been dictated to us. And what we want has often been suppressed, effaced, or disappeared by what we understand or believe is possible. What we want often isn’t accessed or acknowledged by our conscious minds. And what we want can be a powerful divinatory tool.
Sometimes a divinatory revelation happens before we turn the card. In the moment before the sign is revealed, our intuitive or somatic or affective knowledge may surface what our subconscious knows to be true through the sudden realization of what we hope the signs will say. In this way, we divine a possible future, one that we may not have given ourselves permission to consider. Subconscious desire can be a powerful driver of our futures. What do we want the sign to mean, and what does that tell us about ourselves? What do we want the poem to mean?
Even refusing the sign or resisting comprehension in a poem can be a form of divination—a Delphic rupture that provides an opportunity to explore what our agency insists on. At futurefeed, Hoa Nguyen tells a story when discussing the genesis of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, a collection of poems that draws from a haunted archive of upheaval and war in Vietnam. Finding writing difficult, Nguyen turned to the I Ching and received number 51, Chen, a hexagram that translates to Shock and Thunder. Her immediate reaction was “Not this!” Nguyen’s refutation of the oracle was part of the oracle. Exploring her reaction, she gained understanding in how she should approach the daunting and dismaying project of writing in and through calamity. What don’t we want the sign (the image, the symbol, the poem) to mean?
If it goes too far to say that a poem can mean whatever we want it to mean, it is not too far to say that a poem can help us understand what are looking for when we encounter the rupture, the caesura, or the resistance. We may misread a poem and we may misread a sign, but no matter—discovering possibility in a poem or in a divinatory reading doesn’t depend on accuracy or getting it right. Nothing about poetry or divination is about correctness. It is in the messy chaos within the ruptures where possibilities become limitless.
I do not love that word “about” when it comes to poetry, because it feels as if it privileges conscious knowledge over the intuitive.
—Matthew Zapruder
Writers who study divination quickly recognize devices found in poetry: symbol, metaphor, imagery, motifs, allusion, form, juxtaposition, caesura. And just as divination integrates poetic devices, poetry often mimics the divinatory rejection of sequence, linearity, univocality, cohesion, clarity, causality, and fixed meaning. But to say that each practice borrows from the other is the wrong idea. Divination and poetry draw from a common pool of ancient tools used to subvert proscribed expectations, roles, and outcomes. Poetry has always been about more than language; it is about what language can do. It is where language is at its most powerful, most laden, most multiple, most molten, most essential, most contradictory. And language—unleashed—is divine.
AN ARCHIVE
“Divinatory Poetics: A Talk” by Hoa Nguyen. futurefeed
“For Those who Mispronounce my Name” by Kayo Chingonyi. Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry, edited by Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás. Ignota, 2019
“Hopeful Wildness of Thought: A Conversation with Matthew Zapruder” by Karan Kapoor, Only Poems, 2024.
Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics by Selah Saterstrom. Essay Press, 2017
Poetry as Spellcasting; Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power, edited by Tamiko Beyer, Destiny Hemphill, and Lisbeth White. North Atlantic Books, 2023. Especially the following works cited in this essay:
- “Poetry as Praxis for Spellworking” by Lou Florez
- “Ain’t Got Long to Stay” by Destiny Hemphill
- “Text of Bliss: Heaping Disruption at the Level of Language” by Kenji C. Liu
- “Articulating the Undercurrent” by Dominique Matti
Michele Battiste is the author of three books of poetry and The Elsewhere Oracle, a poetry guidebook + oracle deck, just released from Black Lawrence Press. She is also the author of several chapbooks, and her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. Michele has taught poetry workshops across the country, from Gotham Writers Workshops in New York City to the Boulder Writers Alliance. Winner of the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, she has also received grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Center for the American West, the Jerome Foundation, and the NY State Senate. She loves parlor games, space buns, silent discos, and the bear cam at Katmai National Park, and she works for The Nature Conservancy, raising money to save the planet.
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