Poetry Meets Tarot Synchronicity: Crafting Centos and Leaning on Your Beloveds

While teaching “Election Blues: The Gift of Agency in Poetry” this spring, my poetry student Marcia Meier introduced me to the poetic form of the cento. (Marcia’s cento, drafted during our class and published in April at Writer’s Resist, can be read here: Scent of Mock Orange.)

Here’s a definition and a little background, Cento: Poetic Form, from Academy of American Poets, poets.org. In a nutshell, a cento is a poem comprised solely of a group of lines, each borrowed from a different writer.

I created the class, “Election Blues,” to help me break through the stunned quiet enveloping me after the election. When Marcia suggested centos, I felt immediate relief. I could draw on the strength and power of other writers to “get back home.” That day, I grabbed the volumes within arm’s reach off my bookshelf, women I admire and love (with the exception of WCW—he appears in only one of the centos):

Audre Lord

Kay Ryan

Ruth Thompson

Joy Harjo

Colleen J. McElroy

Emily Dickinson

Maxine Hong Kingston

Bhanu Kapil

Sylvia Plath

Joan Swift

Malinda Markham

William Carlos Williams

Because I was simultaneously teaching a Tarot writing class, I instinctively used Tarot reading principles as I began the process of making my centos.

When reading Tarot cards, you usually start by focusing on a question of the heart, shuffling the cards, and choosing cards blind (meaning the cards remain face down while you are choosing so the images are hidden until you begin the reading).

When drafting centos, I used the randomly selected volumes of poetry as my “deck.” I focused on one person related to the election at a time, put my hand on my heart, and opened to the mix of emotions I was feeling. Each time I let the book in my hand fall open and let my eye fall on a line.

Once I had copied down roughly ten lines, one from each volume for each person I was writing a cento for, I brought my writer self to bear on rearranging the lines into a meaningful order that best reflected my various states of love, gratitude, fear, and concern.

I was surprised by the richness and seeming appropriateness of the images and lines that fell, though after having worked with the Tarot for so  long, I was prepared for synchronicity. Poetry, like Tarot, works powerfully by association and context, so when you plug in a question or a focus for a Tarot reading, or you plug in a title or person as the focus for a cento, the associations boomerang back to that central question, person, or title, causing us to look deeper.

Of course you can argue that any random group of lines can be made to mean one thing in one context and something entirely different in another, but it didn’t stop me from trying the form and enjoying the inadvertent “reading.” I hope that beyond speaking privately and specifically to me, just as a Tarot reading would, the centos still work as poems on their own. You’ll have to let me know.

I’m honored that five in the series, “A Thank You Letter to Barack Obama,” “An Open Letter to Donald Trump, “ “An Iris for Hillary,” “Emerald Dream, For Michelle Obama,” and “Ghost Ribs, For Melania Trump” have been chosen by Nicelle Davis for an event in Venice, “Poetry Postcards at Beyond Baroque: write your political concerns to representatives.” The event is hosted by Nicelle Davis, Armine Iknadossian, and Quentin Ring; please do join us if you are in the area this coming Sunday, April 30, from 1-4. Our generous hosts print up the poems and provide a space for folks to gather, address postcards, pen messages to representatives, and read a little poetry aloud. Here’s the Facebook link to “Poetry postcards at Beyond Baroque.”

Hall and Pryputniewicz blockprint

In case you can’t make it to be with us this weekend,  I’ve recorded three of the centos, “A Thank you Letter to Barack Obama,” "An Open Letter to Donald Trump," and "An Iris for Hillary," as MP3s you can access from my Events page on my main site.

Next time you find yourself poetically blocked or lost I hope you’ll try writing a cento. Take your beloveds down off the bookshelf and lean on their strength! Or set the arrow of your intention and curiosity along any line: humor, love, spirituality, sport fishing—you name it—and see which harvest of poetry lines your deck of books brings you.

Related links:

I’ll be participating in the Ten Thousand Waves reading at the Museum of Women in Liberty Station, organized by Katya Williamson; I hope you’ll join us! Here’s the description from the flier.

Ten Thousand Waves: Come join us for an afternoon of original prose and poetry. We hope to inspire, raise awareness, comfort, entertain, and enjoy each other’s company.

4:30-6:30 on May 13^th

Women’s Museum, Liberty Station

2730 Historic Decatur Road, Barracks 16

92106, SD

Admission: $5

Losing Joan Swift:

In early March, I was heartbroken to learn that the gifted poet Joan Swift passed away (pictured here on the back jacket of The Dark Path of Our Names, photo by Mary Randlett, 1985). I can’t begin to express my gratitude for Swift's poetry. I first encountered her work as an undergraduate student at UC Davis in one of Sandra McPherson’s seminars. What a blessing to have been unwittingly working with Joan’s lines to create the centos in January and February.

If you wish to attend a memorial celebration and reading for Joan Swift, here's a link to an event posted by Poets and Writers, a May 16, 2017 event in Seattle. 

Here’s a link to a selection of poems by Swift that we ran at The Fertile Source in 2010. And  also up at the Fertile Source,  a 2010 Interview with Joan Swift. 

Here's a link to another  beautiful poem by Swift, "Sometimes a Lake" posted by Poetry Northwest in January of this year and another posted by Jennifer Flenniken at The Far Field: "Listening to My Bones." 

I will write more about Joan’s work in a future post. My love and deepest condolences to her family.

A Cat Cafe, A TCJWW Review, Mentor Doll Musings and a Poetry Circus for You

You’d never guess what a stressful month we’re navigating by looking at these two—our husky and the kingly baby, Sam, lounging in their select stripe of sun. They’re my joy spot in a month overflowing with extra laundry (washing machine broken), family frays with flying elbows (five family members plus ocean wet dog in tiny four-door box of a car since engine block cracked in van), the five us falling like dominoes to the flu, water coursing down our daughter’s walls (broken courtyard ceiling pipe), said water driving hoards of termites to plaster their wings across the slider, and more I won’t broach here.

by Padgett Mason

No shortage of love, as always, to balance it out--caught the 14 year old teaching the 8 year old kickboxing moves in the tub in order to faciliate sure shampooing of that 8 year old’s hair…and my darling sister joined me to check out the Cat Café, newly opened in San Diego (427 Third Avenue), where you can order yourself a mocha or a latte and head to the adjoining room to peruse the adoptable cats and the rainbow

psychedelic cat paintings—for sale-- by Padgett Mason (“pet portraits and funky felines” reads Padgett’s business card).

Here's my sister out in front of the Cafe; we enjoyed chatting with owner Tony Wang and noticed a healthy circulation of coffee-wielding potential cat adopters scoping out the cats. Tony mentioned the coffee and the art are local--and he's open to hosting more artwork.

Other high spots: Jenn Teeter-Moore reviews November Butterfly at The California Journal of Women Writers: 

Pryputniewicz’ Guinevere is opinionated and strong compared to Marilyn and is a direct contrast to the helpless heroine she is in medieval poetry.—Jen Teeter-Moore, TCJWW

I also attended a beautiful reception for approximately 300 authors at San Diego Public Library on January 30, thoroughly enchanted by the indigo light swarming the columns and the gold circle lattices crowning the ceiling. Wouldn’t you know just as the speakers started, I found myself more than mildly annoyed to be fighting to hear over the sound of my husband bantering with an acquaintance. Fortunately for him, I fell in love with the friend’s wife, a brilliant millenial named Ellen Gustafson whose book I’m on fire now to read: We the Eaters: If We Change Dinner, We Can Change the World.

This Friday, I join thirty authors honored at “A Night at the Library: A Celebration of Local Authors.” Hosted by Friends of the Coronado Library, the fundraiser goes from 6-9 p.m. at 640 Orange Avenue; $50 person includes food, wine, beer and a $10 voucher for Second Hand Prose bookstore. See www.CoronadoFOL.org for more information or call Brenda Jo Robyn (619)890-6148.

Mary and I wrote about the Universe Card and the Two of Wands this month over at our new Tarot for Two blog; I opened with, “I took a look at this month’s Thoth Two of Wands with its red-faced grumpy Tibetan doorjies set against a blotchy uteral pink mess of a background suffused with a Kindergarten sky blue and decided to focus on the Rider Waite image instead.”

And Mary opened with: “My card this month was the Universe.  I used to get this card fairly often about twenty years ago, around the time I sold my book in an almost magical way and bought the house I live in now with the advance.  Back then I thought the card was telling me that the universe was waving its big old wand over my life…” Read the rest of The Two of Wands and The Universe.

Why Mentor Dolls? 

Why do you use paper dolls in your Writing Past Fear: Free Your Butterfly workshops? When a friend asked, I answered in a post on my main website, Shadow Bags, Joan Swift’s Dark Path of Our Names and Mentor Dolls on #LivetheQuest:

Additional Links of Interest: 

 Sandra Hunter shares her stunning black and white xray ice scapes—at least that’s how I describe them; her interview starts on page 18 and she dives deep into the subject of exposure and agency despite trauma; she says, "Art is the axle tree," and discusses "exhilaration as form of meditation." ART Habens Review, Winter 2015. 

If you are looking for a new place to post a poem, give Christine Klocek-Lim’s new daily publication a try; she’s back, with Autumn Sky Poetry Daily.

And check out Nicelle Davis, such an innovative poet and performance artist, celebrating her latest book, In the Circus of You (a collaboration with Cheryl Gross) with a wild event in Los Angeles, at the Merry-Go-Round in Griffith Park. Here’s her guest post for us over at Mother, Writer, Mentor: Circus as Sanctuary.

My Writing Process Blog Tour Returns: Moving Past Siren's Lament

Thanks to an invitation from Erica Goss, poet laureate of Los Gatos, I'm joining The Virtual Book Tour for a second round; here are my responses from this summer: First Poetry Book Publication: Reckoning with Exposure, and Astral Rubbernecking. 

You can read Erica's answers to the four questions and her guest post at Transformative Blogging, Fairytales, Facebook, and Poetry Prompts, in which she describes the process behind writing her book, Vibrant Words, ideas and inspirations for poets (PushPen Press, 2014); she is also the author of Wild Place (Finishing Line Press, 2012). I highly recommend checking out the video poetry column Goss writes for Connotation Press, The Third Form.

What are you currently working on?

To be honest, I’m working on getting used to a bit of reckless joy. My first poetry collection, November Butterfly, comes out on November 1, 2014, thanks to Saddle Road Press. I am pretty much levitating at this point.

When the box of ARC’s (Advanced Reading Copies) came in August and I first held the book, I realized what an evaporative state I’ve inhabited since most of my writing "lives" online. I’ve blogged since 2007 here at Feral, Mom, Feral Writer and since roughly 2012 at Transformative Blogging and Mother Writer Mentor. While blogging is a satisfying extension of journaling and single poems appearing in online journals benefit from possibly a wider readership than those in print journals, nothing replaces the feeling of holding a physical book of one's own poems for the very first time.

photo by Robyn Beattie

When I lost a friend to cancer in 2011, I decided to stop leaning so heavily on (and waiting for) outside validation. To grow as an artist, I began making short poetry videos. So far, I've "video illustrated" seven of my poems and dedicated the first one, She Dressed in a Hurry, for Lady Di to my late friend Barbara Robinette Moss. The others to date are: Amelia, Nefertiti on the Astral, Nefertiti Among Us, The Corridor (Guinevere), Thumbelina, and Mordred's Dream. New projects are underway for The Three Oranges, Black Angel: Scripted, Never Shot, and several Joan of Arc poems.

I’m also working on a manuscript about an Illinois commune I lived on as a child from the age of five to eleven.  The blizzards of Illinois coupled with disillusionment regarding the group’s spiritual path--disintegrating under post leader exile--inspired our family to leave. My father built a wooden camper for the back of our maroon 67 Chevy and off we trundled to California.

Memories of a sincere longing for spiritual beauty mingle with memories of witnessing human fallibility, and as an adult, I'm left with questions. Why do people join communes or other groups? Why do they leave, and what becomes of the children, parents, and leaders of abandoned communes? 

How does your work differ from others of its genre?

During the first blog tour, I talked about the process of writing poetry; here I'd like to talk about poetry videos/movies. I love the collaborations between Nicelle Davis and Cheryl Gross; watching In The Circus of You you'll find drawings and animation with narration (there's a lovely bell tone to Nicelle's reading voice). Through Erica Goss’s Connotation Press Video Poetry Column mentioned earlier, The Third Form, I fell in love with Nic Sebastian’s, "let me tell you about yourself" (scroll a third of the way down to see Sebastian's video with its amazing Hubble generated imagery). Goss also interviewed two pairs of video poetry collaborators about their process.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

I haven't ventured into animation--my collaborator photographer Robyn Beattie and I call our videos "photo poem montages;" in comparison to animated work or videos with actors, ours are more static, frames fading one into the next. Robyn and I are both drawn to images that suggest or imply but don’t necessarily correspond directly to the line of poetry at hand. 


The third collaborator is often my father (composing and selecting music and performing it on keyboard/piano). Years of kinship make each project flow effortlessly, and each time we finish a new one, I'm relieved to have mapped another portion of the heart. A fourth collaborator technically is a group made up of the artists Robyn encounters. We have been blessed to receive permission to use photographs of work by painters, sculptors, assemblage artists and more. 




Feedback regarding the photo poem montages continues to be overwhelmingly positive, though we also have heard that the words of the poem stimulate one set of images in the viewer’s mind's eye that in turn compete with the photographs. And that the voice recording of the poem also potentially competes with the music.

Trying to finish any particular project given raising my three children always seems a miracle--I get a little crazy trying to nail as much beauty down as possible when the opportunity arises. Or maybe the desire to have those competing strains (photographs, narration of poem, music, motion of the images bleeding one to the next) reflects the effects of our media conscious culture of burgeoning stimuli. I only know I am flooded with happiness when I sit down with Robyn to sort through her gorgeous images and listen to my father's choices for music. 

Why do you write/create what you do?

Lighthouse Eye by Tania Pryputniewicz
Point Loma

I write to ground. As a compulsive empath and eldest child, I have a habit of scanning and jumping ahead of the moment. I see in layers if that makes sense--I’m not sure why. It's great for night time dreaming, though in other instances--dipping into the past, or trying on incarnations from other times--the psychic/emotional projections can be intense. Poetry is a perfect place to channel that kind of seeing. If I had my way, my art would move past siren's lament to bring others closer to their own soul forms of unbridled asking, listening, and responding.

How does your writing/creating process work?

I keep my journal with me and write throughout the day as I ferry children to and from their activities. Without the luxury of portioning out time slots for the various kinds of writing (poetry, blogposts, etc.), I lift blog paragraphs and poem starts directly from the seedbed of the journal.  I run poems by members of my writing group (a beautiful array of friends, many I met through A Room of Her Own Foundation retreats). I subscribe to a number of online newsletters with calls for entries; these calls for entries become deadlines to create new work.

Up Next: 

Jill G. Hall uses found objects to create whimsical mosaics that are displayed in galleries, private homes and downtown San Diego street corners. Her poetry has been published in A Year in Ink, Serving House Journal, City Works, The Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poetry as well as Wild Women Wild Voices. She plans to publish her first novel in 2015. At Inspirations Gallery she curates themed work by local artists and facilitates workshops to help others find their unique paths. Her blog posts share personal musings on the art of practicing a creative lifestyle. Find Jill at: www.jillghall.com

Cathe Shubert is currently living, writing, teaching and learning in Wilmington, NC, where she is enrolled as a MFA student and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington during the academic year. During the summer, she participates in a MA program called the Bread Loaf School of English. She's taught all over the country and world, having spent two years teaching Spanish and English in Philadelphia, a year abroad teaching ESL in Andorra, and a year in Detroit teaching creative writing in public schools. You can read her Virtual Blog Tour post here and follow her blog at ilmwritinglife.wordpress.com