Poetry is not a luxury.
I connect with my great-grandmother's spirit through a deck of tarot cards and an essay by ancestor Audre Lorde.
One of my favorite things to do as a child was to sit at my great-grandmother’s feet while she told me a story. It didn’t matter what was going on in my life, I knew I could find an adventure in her memory. Sometimes she would play with my hair as she’d talk, and I slowly learned this is how she kept from getting stuck back there. Instinctively, I learned to rub her feet when I felt she was too far away. As the oldest of over 52 great-grandchildren, I cherished the moments when I had her full attention. When she told me stories, she’d also let me sip from her Igloo water jug. Those crunchy ice nuggets on those Kentucky summer days were a delicacy. A matriarch of multiple living generations, that water cooler was one of the few things she had completely to herself, and she was protective of it.
Black women, femmes, and those who embody feminine energy and/or those otherwise socialized at this nodal point are socially conditioned to believe that not only is it futile to pursue our dreams, but it’s also irresponsible to have needs that are more demanding than the needs of those around you. It is a dangerous thing to invest in nurturing an idea from dream to reality. The closer I get to manifesting a dream, the more resistance I feel from the systems that need me to play my part. The resistance forces me to be aware of the risks and the consequences involved in dreaming. How does one develop the courage to take the necessary risks to dream a world into existence?
I’ve been a devotee of Audre Lorde’s collection of work since undergrad. I was introduced to Audre Lorde by Dr. Kaila Story at the University of Louisville. Though I was not a student of Dr. Story (a regret I still have), the impact she had on her students made its way into the conversations my friends and I were having. I’ve reread Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches more times than I can count. Yet, it wasn’t until I sat down with the book and a deck of cards that I really understood the power of reading with intention. Suddenly, passages I’d read hundreds of times had taken on new meanings, and with new insight arrived new possibilities.
For almost a decade, I’ve studied the tarot card system through a decolonial lens. I’ve also studied alchemy, numerology, color theory, and occult magic in order to understand the symbolism of the Rider Waite-Smith deck. Tarot is no longer my primary form of divination, but I still use it for storywork and poetic dialogue, which is what this newsletter is named after.
Poetic Dialogue is a methodology and listening practice I developed through divining with black art to answer some of my more existential questions. I’ll continue to share more about the methodology later in this newsletter.
For this piece, I am in poetic dialogue with Audre Lorde’s essay, Poetry is Not A Luxury, and the AKAMARA Tarot deck, created by Lolu. Reading this piece while shuffling the deck opened a spring of memories of being fiercely loved, revered, and protected by the wisdom (foresight, insight, and hindsight) of black women, femmes, and those who embody feminine energy and qualities. I was reminded that I, too, was once a black woman and femme and that magic is always with me. I have access to a quality of care that is honestly unmatched by any other form of care I’ve received.
A form of this care is learning how to listen. I personally know how exhausting it is to be in a world that is desperate for solutions… so long as the solutions don’t come from a mouth that embodies both blackness and femininity at the same time. Also, as a transmasculine who feels deeply connected to their black girlhood while being socialized as a man, I feel I have a unique experience of having experienced both the impact of misogynoir and am now in a position where it’s expected of me to behave in triflin’ ways! The bar for secular masculinity may be on the ground, but my divine masculinity is not. I created Poetic Dialogue as a kind of barometer to make sure I stay listening well, as a way to hear what’s already been said. To not become seduced by the idea that I am here to save the world, birth a world, or build a world. Actually, I’m writing this from a liberated black future where everyone is materially, emotionally, and spiritually resourced, and our only task is to play and pursue pleasure. This world has been in existence; it’s nothing new! And it will continue to thrive long after we become something other than human.
In Poetic Dialogue, I use tarot and/or oracle cards to facilitate the conversation and provide prompts for how I explore black art. I begin by flipping cards, and from there, I am guided to choose a work of black art. I ask questions that resonate with where I’m at at the time of divination. This piece was written in April 2020 with edits for relevancy. The questions I’m asking here reflect the questions I was asking then. The result of this poetic dialogue gave me the courage I needed to make some really big decisions.
In conversation with my literary and artistic influences and ancestors, I am both querent and diviner. Not only does it deepen my own erotic knowing, but it also creates a holographic portal I use to time travel. Through this reading, I visited a time when I was around eight years old, sitting on the floor resting against my great-grandmama’s legs. During the General Hospital (“the stories” iykyk) commercial breaks, she told me a story about her she use to make fried green tomatoes with her mother, who was an enslaved woman in Hart County, Kentucky. I honor her practice of going back (sankofa) by going back to pieces of written and visual art that resonate in my spirit. In this way, I venerate my great-grandmother, my former selves, and the power of our love.
I began with the question:
Q: What perspective can I adopt that is most aligned with the world I’m becoming?
A: Omo Cutlass + 10 of Cane
Omo Cutlass (Page of Swords) is a charming and effective communicator who is curious about the world, while 10 of Cane (10 of Wands) is burdened by the responsibilities of real life. All of the people in my close circle are poets, artists, healers, and visionaries. Most of our conversations center around trying to balance what it means to inhabit a human body and everything that entails.
When I see the elemental combination of these two cards, I feel a tug from Audre Lorde’s essay, Poetry is Not A Luxury, in her anthology Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Lorde opens the essay, and this conversation, with the following statement:
“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has a direct bearing upon the product which we live and upon the changes which we can hope to bring about through those lives. It is with this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination…”
Q: Thank you for being in conversation with me. The gratitude runs deep, and I appreciate the generosity of this piece and what it has meant for my own creative process. The first question I have is what does the poetry of the body wish to illuminate?
A: Omo Calabash (Page of Cups)
“...the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt… These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each of us holds unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling.”
Q: As an artist who is working a 9-5 full-time job, how do I access that dark and ancient power within myself?
A: Onija Cane (Knight of Wands)
“A distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought, as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”
Q: I don't quite understand what you mean here, can you say more?
A: Omo Cowrie (Page of Pentacles)
“When we view living in the european mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious.”
Q: Ah. It makes sense to me now, that the distillation of experience is evolution, which cannot be measured by productivity. There is a felt qualitative difference between “true poetry” and “content creation.” Content is idea-based, and I liken that to what you’re describing as “european mode” or colonialism. One has to live into true poetry before one can think it, but that doesn’t mean that just because you thought it, you’ve lived it. There’s a divine order that doesn’t make logical sense, yet it makes all the sense.
As someone designed to inform, teach, and educate, I worry that my work will not be impactful unless I reduce it to content creation. How will I survive without compromising my integrity? What if my work isn’t useful or impactful?
A: Omo Cane (Page of Wands)
“As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose control over us… Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture for our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”
Q: Oof, thank you for this. I am worrying about the wrong thing here. The fear preventing me from taking certain leaps of faith diminish as I begin practicing what I preach. I think I’ve been waiting on permission to take this path. Why is it important that I pursue my dreams at this time? What is at stake if I don’t?
A: Iya Cowrie (Queen of Pentacles)
“Experience has taught us that action in the now is also necessary, always. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours?”
Q: I really see how I’m not the only one impacted, that my dream will feed generations to come. But what if I fail?
A: 4 of Calabash (4 of Cups)
“There are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom… For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.”
Q: Thank you, I needed to hear that there is nothing I will go through that hasn’t been experienced and overcome by my ancestors. How do I summon the courage you/they had? How do I make myself into a container for this abundance?
A: 3 of Calabash (3 of Cups)
“The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black Mother within each of us -- the poet -- whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free… For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive.”
“For women*, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. The farthest of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas.”
I stopped visiting my great-grandmother a couple of years before she passed away. I found myself preparing for her death by slowly detaching from her physical body. Additionally, I had come out as trans, and I could not face the possibility of being rejected by her. The few times I visited, though, she was just so happy to see me. She died in 2016. The presence of her absence didn’t hit me until 2020. I missed her immensely before she transitioned, and that void was solidified in its expansion when I learned of her passing. As I continued to develop my ancestral practice, I learned that relationships continue after someone passes away. Now, she is one of my fiercest ancestral protectors, and I provide family updates and offerings. Our lineage’s tradition of creating portals through storytelling carries on through me and the creatively wild imagination of my nephew. When I find myself at crossroads, I find her feet in the work of black writers, poets, and artists. I rest there.
I closed this session by providing offerings and prayers to Audre Lorde, the spirit of her work, my great-grandmother, Minnie Maxine, and all of my egungun for the love, support, protection, and healing offered.
*I see myself in the way Audre Lorde says “women.” As a black transmasculine non-binary person, I see the invisible intonation marks on her use of the word that harkens back to the tonal elements of our indigenous African languages. It’s not what she said. It’s how she said it that embraces me and my reality.