Rev. of "Arcana: The Tarot Poetry Anthology. Edited by Marjorie Jensen. Introduction by Mary K. Greer. Seattle, WA: Minor Arcana Press, 2015. 146 pp. ISBN-13 978-0-9912596-2-5." Mythprint: Quarterly Bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society 53.1 (Spring 2016): 9-10.
Arcana: The Tarot Poetry Anthology is a collection of seventy-eight poems based on Tarot divided into three sections: Majors, Minors, and Spreads. Tarot was invented in the fifteenth century as a set of twenty-two trumps added to the familiar fifty-six-card four-suited gaming deck. The Marseilles-style variants of the trump images subsequently became the convention; eventually such decks were found useful for fortune-telling, with the cards laid out in spreads or patterns that related each to a particular aspect of a situation or query. In the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, occult applications, which use the cards as a map of psychic or spiritual realms comparable to cabbala and astrology, were discovered, and the trump cards labeled the "major arcana" and the suits the "minor arcana." In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Tarot cards have come to be understood as expressions of archetypes and re-visioned in relation to a wide array of established mythic traditions and personal experiences.
Many of the poems in Arcana are based on variants of the conventional Marseilles-style deck or the ever-popular Rider-Waite Tarot (1909), but some obviously refer to less familiar card compositions. Many also rely on ekphrasis—the translation of visual art into literary form—as famously exemplified in John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819).
O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought […]
In like manner, Rosalie Morales Kearns writes (ekphrastically) of the Tarot Fool that he marches to the edge of the cliff, whistling and grinning. Like the other poets represented in this anthology (and Keats long before them), Kearns knows well the Narnian lesson that a star is more than the "huge ball of flaming gas" that it is made of (C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 1952). Just so, ekphrasis involves more than descriptively cataloguing the parts of an image: as an archetype, the whole of a Tarot card is greater than the sum of its visual parts. Kearns develops her Tarot Fool as that fool in Psalm 14:1 who declares there is no God, but adds that this declaration is "said in my heart"; and while "the nuns glared," she toyed "with the mystery" by picking a card from her deck because "Who can argue with the heart?" This poetic amplification begins with a visual description of the card figure, makes the figure into a character by lending her a bible-based utterance, elaborates and contextualizes this character as a young girl in a religious school, and transitions seamlessly to the practice of cartomancy as an expression of the heart. The Fool/protagonist/reader-of-the-poem thus all begin with/as the Tarot Fool and end practicing cartomancy as part of a truth that, like all archetypal realities, cannot be denied.
Similarly effective approaches to the cards are evident in Rachel Pollack's Fortune's Lover (2009), which was unquestionably an inspiration for Arcana. The poems in this collection also bring the descriptive aspects of Tarot to life with reference to myth, memory, and experience. Fortune's Lover was published as part of A Midsummer Night Press's series of "works inspired by mythology, folklore, and fairy tales." Marjorie Jensen, the Arcana editor, acknowledges Pollack and some of her other literary mentors, as well as the mythopoeic tradition in general, when she writes of the Tarot Moon card:
On Midsummer's Night, she descends, dances,
celestial inklings still seen in her brow--
Kearns and Pollack's poems on the Fool and Moon respectively are part of the Majors section of this fascinating volume; both the Majors and Minors sections are dedicated to individual cards and it is these poems that are most obviously mythopoeic. Those in the final section titled "Spreads" are less consistently identifiable as such, but all add depth to the poem-reader's immersion in the Tarotist's practice of relating archetypal card images to experience and visa versa. This is definitely a collection that students of mythopoeic literature should take note of: if the visual status of Tarot has caused them to pass it by, they are very fortunate that the Arcana poets were not hindered by the same limits of imagination.
——Emily E. Auger
Arcana: The Tarot Poetry Anthology is a collection of seventy-eight poems based on Tarot divided into three sections: Majors, Minors, and Spreads. Tarot was invented in the fifteenth century as a set of twenty-two trumps added to the familiar fifty-six-card four-suited gaming deck. The Marseilles-style variants of the trump images subsequently became the convention; eventually such decks were found useful for fortune-telling, with the cards laid out in spreads or patterns that related each to a particular aspect of a situation or query. In the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, occult applications, which use the cards as a map of psychic or spiritual realms comparable to cabbala and astrology, were discovered, and the trump cards labeled the "major arcana" and the suits the "minor arcana." In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Tarot cards have come to be understood as expressions of archetypes and re-visioned in relation to a wide array of established mythic traditions and personal experiences.
Many of the poems in Arcana are based on variants of the conventional Marseilles-style deck or the ever-popular Rider-Waite Tarot (1909), but some obviously refer to less familiar card compositions. Many also rely on ekphrasis—the translation of visual art into literary form—as famously exemplified in John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819).
O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought […]
In like manner, Rosalie Morales Kearns writes (ekphrastically) of the Tarot Fool that he marches to the edge of the cliff, whistling and grinning. Like the other poets represented in this anthology (and Keats long before them), Kearns knows well the Narnian lesson that a star is more than the "huge ball of flaming gas" that it is made of (C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 1952). Just so, ekphrasis involves more than descriptively cataloguing the parts of an image: as an archetype, the whole of a Tarot card is greater than the sum of its visual parts. Kearns develops her Tarot Fool as that fool in Psalm 14:1 who declares there is no God, but adds that this declaration is "said in my heart"; and while "the nuns glared," she toyed "with the mystery" by picking a card from her deck because "Who can argue with the heart?" This poetic amplification begins with a visual description of the card figure, makes the figure into a character by lending her a bible-based utterance, elaborates and contextualizes this character as a young girl in a religious school, and transitions seamlessly to the practice of cartomancy as an expression of the heart. The Fool/protagonist/reader-of-the-poem thus all begin with/as the Tarot Fool and end practicing cartomancy as part of a truth that, like all archetypal realities, cannot be denied.
Similarly effective approaches to the cards are evident in Rachel Pollack's Fortune's Lover (2009), which was unquestionably an inspiration for Arcana. The poems in this collection also bring the descriptive aspects of Tarot to life with reference to myth, memory, and experience. Fortune's Lover was published as part of A Midsummer Night Press's series of "works inspired by mythology, folklore, and fairy tales." Marjorie Jensen, the Arcana editor, acknowledges Pollack and some of her other literary mentors, as well as the mythopoeic tradition in general, when she writes of the Tarot Moon card:
On Midsummer's Night, she descends, dances,
celestial inklings still seen in her brow--
Kearns and Pollack's poems on the Fool and Moon respectively are part of the Majors section of this fascinating volume; both the Majors and Minors sections are dedicated to individual cards and it is these poems that are most obviously mythopoeic. Those in the final section titled "Spreads" are less consistently identifiable as such, but all add depth to the poem-reader's immersion in the Tarotist's practice of relating archetypal card images to experience and visa versa. This is definitely a collection that students of mythopoeic literature should take note of: if the visual status of Tarot has caused them to pass it by, they are very fortunate that the Arcana poets were not hindered by the same limits of imagination.
——Emily E. Auger