Poetry Magic 1

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Here are 15 of the best poems about magic, sourced from a variety of cultures, traditions, and poets, both ancient and modern. Included are poems about witchcraft, fairies, and enchanted woods, as well as the magic of love and the magic of awareness. If you enjoy these magic poems enough, perhaps you’ll consider practicing a little magic yourself. Maybe even by writing magical poetry. “Her Kind” by Anne Sexton Near the end of his life, Dante settled in Ravenna, Italy under the patronage of Guido da Polenta, where he died September 13 or 14, 1321. Although The Divine Comedy caused an immediate sensation during his life, Dante’s fame waned during the Italian Renaissance and was later revived in the 19th and 20th centuries. Many scholars have examined the structural unity of the poem, discussing the relationship between medieval symbolism and allegory within the poem’s three sections and exploring Dante’s narrative strategy. Others have marveled at the seemingly inexhaustible formal and semantic richness of Dante’s text. With its various enigmatic layers of philological and philosophical complexities, The Divine Comedy has received scrutiny by critics, literary theorists, linguists, and philosophers, who have cherished the immortal work precisely because it translates the harsh truth about the human condition into a poetics of timeless beauty. Rhythm in poetry comes from the stressed words or syllables which sound longer and unstressed words or syllables that sound shorter. Combining different variations of stressed and unstressed syllables, gives you ‘feet’, which are arranged within a line or sentence to form meters. The most popular meter is iambic pentameter. Used a lot by Shakespeare, this is a ten-syllable line, consisting of five feet, each with one stressed and one unstressed syllable. Poetry is creative and can be as serious or as fun as the writer wishes. In its simplest form, poetry is composed of verses or stanzas. The number of lines in a stanza will decide the type of poem that has been written. Modernist poetry All poems published in Poetry News are also eligible forthe Hamish Canham Prize each year. The latest winner of the Hamish Canham Prize is Tom Bailey. Poetry News Winter 2023 competition: ‘Broken Vessels’

Read Ilya Kaminsky’s “ We Lived Happily During the War,” which imagines America’s end. What kind of magic appears in these poems? What purpose does it serve? What is true about this story despite all that is fictional about it? These poems capture the experience of liminality, highness, and the dream state. As you write, you are channeling, translating, and creating a space of sacred connection. A spell is an active, dynamic thing — one that is created as it is cast. Every time you read the poem aloud afterward, it can call on that same energy.

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A convocation of pylons considers how to celebrate country-wide conversion to renewable energy Helen Overell When I seek new poems by others or return to my favorite works, I am looking for this same experience. In this way the act of poetry is at root, a form of radical worship. Through its creation the creator is also changed—elements of the spontaneous, which are a hallmark of effective poems—contribute to a transformative rawness, or honesty. This in turn cultivates a sense of possibility. Read Natalie Diaz’s “ No More Cake Here.” What kind of magic appears in these poems? What kind of party does Diaz imagine, and what purpose does it serve? What story does it tell about the speaker’s brother, and why might she have chosen to write a poem like this to tell that story? Since the objectives of magical practice are beyond the power of ordinary humans, the performer must somehow access extraordinary power to achieve such extraordinary results. The magician may call on a variety of non-human powers, ranging from the supreme lord of the universe through a number of gods who specialize in certain areas to the spirits of the restless dead. Often the power employed is not explicitly invoked, but the desired result is articulated in some kind of performative utterance—I bind so-and-so, his tongue and hands, ... etc. Although modern scholars have often taken the way that the divine power is invoked to mark the distinction between religion and magic, classifying supplications to the divine as religion and commands to divinities or straightforward performative utterances as magic, the ancient evidence shows that such a distinction was rarely significant. Many examples combine the forms, using supplicative subjunctives and direct imperatives in the same plea (e.g., DT 25.13-14, 16-18 = Gager 46), and the modern critique of magic as working automatically, ex opere operato, stems from later Christian theological debates, specifically Protestant critiques of Catholic ritualism. In the ancient evidence, it is the departure of the performance from the normal and familiar patterns that marks it as magical, what Malinowski refers to as the “coefficient of weirdness.” The strangeness of the performance may be analysed in terms of the rhetoric of its expression, the “poetics of the magic charm” as Versnel calls it, noting the use of devices such as metaphor and metonymy, repetition and emphasis, vivid imagery and poetic language. 15

November 2023, 6.30pm. Poetry & Magic – Celebrating Anita Seppilli. Private view of the exhibition. Martina Mazzotta will be in conversation with the artists Stephen Chambers, Marcelle Hanselaar, Theresa Mikuriya and Ana Maria Pacheco. For such stereotype appropriation, see Ian Moyer, “Thessalos of Tralles and Cultural Exchange,” in Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World, ed. Scott Noegel, Joel Walker, and Brannon Wheeler (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 39–56. Moyer draws on David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). Intellectualism: writing became less emotional, more analytical. Posing more questions than answering them. Our next members’ poems competition will be on the theme of ‘Broken Vessels’, proposed by our judge Naush Sabah. Naush is a writer, editor, critic, and educator based in the West Midlands. In 2019, she co-founded Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal where she is currently Editor and Publishing Director. November 2023, 6.30pm. Michael Phillips – Blake and Italy. Michael Phillips, master printmaker and leading expert on William Blake, will explore the influence of Italian art on Blake’s work.Henk S. Versnel, “Beyond Cursing: The Appeal to Justice in Judicial Prayers,” in Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion, ed. Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 60–106; and Versnel, “Some Reflections on the Relationship Magic-Religion” Numen 38, no. 2 (1991): 177–197. The language of binding indeed seems to characterize the magical curses, and the Greek term katadesmos—binding down—is used in the ancient sources to designate the magical curse tablets. In addition to verbs of binding, verbs of handing over or registering appear, as the target is consigned to the power of the divinity invoked. It is notable, however, that such language of transfer also appears in the public curses, whereas binding less often appears in such prayers for justice or community curses. If we are the soil, the poetry is the rose that blooms. And the magic — that’s what brings it to the surface. Powerful angels, just as this frog drips with blood and dries up, so also will the body of him, NN whom NN bore, because I adjure you, who are in command of fire, Maskelli Maskellō (add the rest, the usual). What words mean something to you? What words speak to your memories and personal power? Are there words that speak to your identity, your resistance, your body, your journey? Choose five of these words and write a 5-stanza poem using each of them, or write five poems (as a set to be read aloud together) utilizing each.When you speak them aloud, you can call on these qualities. Dream poetry

Individualism: seeing the world through the artist’s inner feelings and mental states, separate from religion, nature, science and society. The extreme self-consciousness creating a stream of consciousness.What is the dream’s message? Write that message into your poem. In this way, you are divining from the subconscious mind, mining the dreamscape, and channeling it from the ether into a physical thing to be explored and tapped into. Dedicate a whole section of your grimoire to dream poetry and you’ll watch the themes and messages unravel — allowing you to swim in a literary sea of the self. Herbal poetics By the way, don’t feel constrained or pressured by ideas of “good poetry,” or popular poetry. These are poems for you; they’re magic. They’re your essence. They’re not meant to be published or shared with the world. Write the poetry that speaks to you. In your voice. In whatever language you want to write in. The same Ephesia Grammata were reputed to have saved Croesus from burning on his pyre and to have enabled a wrestler who wore them to defeat all opponents—when the amulet was removed, he was thrown thirty times in a row (Eustathius on Odyssey XIX.247 2.201–2).