Cool observation: detached and depersonalized viewpoints and characters, usually informal, sometimes unfinished. Of course, he hadn’t done anything of the sort, and he eventually convinced the man of this – and helped him recover. But, later on, I would witness events that I could only describe with the word “magic.” Modernist poetry is said to cover the years 1890 to 1920 and includes Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Wyndham Lewis among many others. In reality the themes of Modernism cover a period of more than one hundred years, ending in the late twentieth century. Broadly speaking the features of modernist poetry include, in varying degrees:

And like a spell, a poem is born of intent and uses specific ingredients. Poetry is shadow work, a way of mining the depths. And through that act, it is a torch of illumination. On the contrary, I’d rather say that there are times when we have to keep our reason in line. I daresay that the state of Negative Capability, where imagination rules, is in fact where a good deal of scientific discovery begins. In the old expression, reason is a good servant but a bad master, and its powers are limited: no work of art was ever reasoned into existence, for example. David Hume was right: reason is (and should be) the slave of the passions, not their governor. Or as William James put it: “In the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favour of the same conclusion.” Jacco Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites: The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts and Translation in Egyptian Ritual (100– 300 CE), Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 153 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2005); Edward O. D. Love, Code-Switching with the Gods: The Bilingual (Old Coptic-Greek) Spells of PGM IV (P. Bibliothèque Nationale Supplément Grec. 574) and Their Linguistic, Religious, and Socio-Cultural Context in Late Roman Egypt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016); Ljuba Bortolani, Magical Hymns from Roman Egypt: A Study of Greek and Egyptian Traditions of Divinity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Athanassia Zografou, Papyrus Magiques Grecs: Le Mot et Le Rite. Autour Des Rites Sacrificiels, Παράρτημα‎ 85 (Ioannina, Greece: Panepistimio Ioanninon, 2013). Of course the answer is both. It then lies with us, the readers, to cast these spell of each poem with our own intention, again and again, as we conjure and unify with the world we seek. The man had stopped by our Guru’s tent for tea the previous day, and had felt weird that night, as if he’d lost his energy. To put it another way, he had lost his mojo – and he believed it was because of my Guru’s magic.Chess at Baden-Baden, 1925 Duncan Chambers Winner, Hamish Canham Prize 2018. Members' Poems - Elegant

I find it endlessly fascinating, and I call that world “imaginary” not to disparage or belittle it. Imagination is one of our highest faculties, and wherever it appears, however it “bodies forth / The forms of things unknown” (Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), I want to treat it with respect. At its most intense it becomes a kind of perception, as in William Blake’s notion of “Twofold Vision”, by which he means what we see when we look “not with but through the eye”: the state of mind in which we can “see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower”. Other poets describe something similar: in Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” he recalls a time “when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream.” Thomas Traherne’s vision of “orient and immortal wheat” in the everyday corn comes from the same apprehension. The label of magic appears in a variety of evidence from the ancient Greek world, but the different kinds of evidence provide different kinds of self-labelling and labelling of others. Works of the literary imagination, from early epic to late novels, provide some of the richest and most detailed descriptions; these depictions, however, are not meant to be portrayals of the real world, but rather of the way magic works in the imagination. Other texts, such as histories or law court speeches, provide a more accurate depiction of how the label was applied in the real world, but they tend to be more limited in their details. The material evidence, including not only epigraphic and papyrological texts but also artistic representations in various materials, provide a more direct witness to what the ancient Greeks were actually doing, especially for the self-labelling of magic, but such evidence is always scattered, fragmentary, and difficult to interpret.

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My name is Legion: for we are many’ Ramona Herdman Winner, Hamish Canham Prize 2017. Members' Poems - Getting Out And of course she’s not alone. Countless thousands of thoughtful and intelligent people have had experiences of a kind that they call religious. James paid them the compliment of taking these experiences seriously, and produced a classic of psychological insight. But could there be a Varieties of Magical Experience? Could the mental universe that produced witch bottles and sigil, and grimoires, and the whole idea of magic itself, be rich enough to sustain an examination of that sort? Italian poet and scholar Dante Alighieri is best known for his masterpiece La Commedia (known in English as The Divine Comedy), which is universally considered one of world literature’s greatest poems. Divided into three sections— Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso— The Divine Comedy presents an encyclopedic overview of the mores, attitudes, beliefs, philosophies, aspirations, and material aspects of the medieval world. What kinds of things do you think of when you think of magic? Do you believe in magic? What communities or culture consider magic to be real or important? What purpose does that serve? 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.

What is poetry? A short piece of imaginative writing, of a personal nature and laid out in lines is the usual answer. Will that do? And like an incantation or a mantra, we can read a poem anytime to evoke the energy we programmed to it. It will always be there, encapsulated at the moment we created it. It can transport us, infuse us, remind us. Write a poetry spell with a certain number of lines or stanzasIf we are the soil, the poetry is the rose that blooms. And the magic — that’s what brings it to the surface. As a discourse describing non-normative religious activity, magic thus exists in the ancient Greek world even before the term magikē or its cognates comes into use. Such magic before magic appears in the literature of the Greeks before the Persian war, and the discourse of magic as a way of labelling extraordinary ritual performance or activity goes beyond the uses of any one of the terms that are used to describe it.

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? Poetry is magic. And poems are spells. The spirituality of poetry is clear — but it’s not always obvious; like many paths and practices (especially witchcraft, folk magic, or other spiritual paths), poetry is a way toward self-reclamation, finding autonomy, understanding yourself and the world, and getting in touch with the divine, mysterious force within us — creativity. Lisa Marie Basile (she/her) is a poet, essayist, editor, and chronic illness awareness advocate living in New York City. She's the founder and creative director of Luna Luna Magazine and its online community, and the creator of Ritual Poetica, a curiosity project dedicated to exploring the intersection of writing, creativity, healing, & sacredness.The status or social location of a ritual performer may depend on who is authorizing the performance, so that an established oracular institution such as Delphi, Dodona, or Claros might bid an inquirer consult an independent ritual practitioner, just as the Athenian Assembly might authorize an individual diviner such as Lampon or Hierocles. Such exalted social location deriving from official authorization, however, may not prevent a comic such as Aristophanes from depicting the ritualist as a disreputable charlatan of marginal social location (cp. Clouds. 332; Birds. 987–988, Peace 1043–1047, 1084, along with IG I 2 39 [IG I 3 40] lines 65–69). The word Tantra in this context literally means “scripture,” thought it is most often used to refer broadly to a group of texts and traditions. But he was referring to the use of a specific variety of text – one that allows the practitioner to attain magical or supernatural powers. In fact, when I lived amongst the Shaivite Sadhus of Varanasi, I most commonly heard the word “Tantra” used to mean, essentially, “Magic.”