Which came first — the poet or the esotericist? It’s hard to call. They spring from the same state of mind, the same set of thought processes, footworn paths carved into a wildland of neurons.
Personally, I was writing plenty of pseudo-poetic garbage for over a decade before I made spellwork of it.
But eventually I honed my process. Usually, I will feel something abstract so utterly that it punches a hole through me & I boil it down into a statement — I try to make it witty, quippy, whatever. Alone it means nothing. I’d be a fool for even thinking it conveyed any portion of the vast emotional profundity I am experiencing. & so I burn it, I bury it. I chew it up and swallow it with stanza after stanza of sensory images, things I can see, feel, taste, touch, smell – natural things.
Bitches love birds.
Bitches love a summer skyline.
Bitches love artist renderings of telescopic data from NASA.
(In case you’re wondering, I’m bitches.)
I do my best to line these images up in a way that pulls my reader just a little bit further toward me, toward the devastation of my initial internal revelation. I try to pace it & edit the language into something eloquent, something more playful & beautiful. & then I drop the statement & hope it hits my reader’s brain with at least 1/50th of the payload it originally had on me.
It’s spellcraft, it’s art, it’s imperfect but if I was any good at being precise, I’d have a different & undoubtedly better paying job.
But being a poet, creating these little rituals, & seeing my own wonder & beauty & devastation in my visions of the world around me has effectively trained me to tinker in & think about metaphysics.
There are few laws more foundational to the perennial canon of esoterica than the mental centerpiece of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus: “As above so below.” Poets are inextricably trained to see these relationships in the world. We deal in simile & metaphor. I will read whole volumes of astrophysics just to find some black hole behavior that reminds me of falling in love, I will study stars & determine how lonely they feel.
& sure, there are hard scientific facts & then there is wild speculation & personification. But done correctly, the process recreates the universe as a mirror, it offers a brief glimpse at the eternity behind the monkey brain.
It’s not just spectacular for the writer, but the reader as well – reading & fully understanding a good poem can unlock things in you internally.
For my money, the ultimate experience of divine poetry will always be William Blake. Blake’s prophetic works are deeply connected with his unique understanding of universal law & the deep part creativity plays within it. But Blake can also be kinda dense & has an entire mythos. I own whole books examining specific lines of his work.
So for brevity’s sake, let’s instead v briefly discuss a sonnet by Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Because these lines always fucked me up:
“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed…”
Hopkins was a man of deep faith who would eventually become a priest. He had a Romantic’s eye for seeing the divine in the natural world & to him the Divine was undoubtedly the Christian God. His work was somewhat out of sync with his contemporaries, but his vision was timeless.
The lines I pulled are from a sonnet having a frank discussion with said God over the plight of mortal man, asking where is His comfort during the pangs of death? Where is He among the overlying threat of creation? & in that the poet identifies the comforter, the antagonist, & perhaps God himself as residing within in the mind. The mind as natural as the mountains outside, just as treacherous & beautiful – & death is simply a failed footstep upon either.
Hopkins work always particularly moved me because I grew up in an Evangelical church & nature certainly was treated as an afterthought to creation, a dead thing to have dominion over. Reading Hopkins poems in itself was a comfort, an expression divine love & empathy with nature, with humanity as part of the natural world.
It is the poet’s attention as the needle, consciousness guiding the stitches. The resulting art is ideal made manifest, the universe expressing itself.
Notes in Esoteric Creativity is a monthly column discussing the conjunction of creative practices & esoterica from a wide-angle perennial view of metaphysics & spirituality.
LE Francis (she/her) is a recovering arts writer living in the rainshadow of the Washington Cascades. She is the co-EIC of Sage Cigarettes Magazine. She is a Pushcart-nominated poet & her debut chapbook THIS SPELL OF SONG & STAR is available through Bottlecap Press. She plays bass in the indie/prog band Hands Above Stars. Find her online at nocturnical.com.
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