The Tower, The Hanged Man, Death

I’m not too proud to admit that week 3 completely threw me off my rails.

Those who follow me or Treadwell’s on Instagram will note that, during week 3, I was writing in conversation with The Tower, The Hanged Man, and Death.

Writing around these cards resurrected experiences and selves I thought were well buried. In all three new poems, I remain at Offham Marsh, the locus for Temperance in Week 2. This time, however, rather than marvelling at the wonder of water, I reflect on the first full freeze of January.

The Tower is the card that concerns me most – I think every reader has one. Its general meaning relates to disaster, upheaval, and turmoil. It can also be read as a prison. The Hanged Man, conversely, is more serene, and is associated with insight, wisdom, and clarity. While Death is often a card that many recoil from, it actually relates to transformation, which (depending on the context, as with all tarot) is not in itself a bad thing.

I’m finding it hard to do justice, while writing in frank prose, to the themes and history that my poetry resurrected as I worked through this week’s cards.

Trauma, self-loathing, and heartbreak are not pretty topics. They are also not even remotely unique subject matters; in fact they’re striking in their commonality and their applicability to almost every reader, which is a stark and depressing fact. Nevertheless, they insist on being heard.

While conversing with The Tower, The Hanged Man, and Death, I acknowledged that the parts of me that were frozen by shame, that I have disassociated from, and that I might have always kept buried had this practice not forced me into acknowledgement. A frozen Offham Marsh was an excellent metaphor through which to explore this experience:

“the body holds ice best // through silence. Mouth seals over // tongue unable to taste // the shape of an adequate language”

However, in acknowledging the injustices we enact on ourselves through shame, we are also given the opportunity to correct wrongs. In Death, another self, one that is referred through the collection as “monster” – first introduced in The Sun – takes a stance against this self-cruelty:

“with all of her incongruent limbs// their ugly misshapeness, with// arm // paw // hoof // pulls // her own body // back…”

and there, then, despite how upsetting, is the opportunity for this experience to be transformative.

I was (and still am) exhausted by the resurrection and acceptance of the parts of myself that I have disallowed for such a long time. For that reason, this is a sparse blog entry; I am aware that I have barely explained the content of these poems, but I think the poetry will have to do that work instead. I don’t have any more juice for this topic left in the tank!

However, what was left once the creative process had ended was a deeply significant feeling of something having shifted, psychologically. This collection is clearly being driven by themes of self-integration. Writing through this process gave me insights into why many people see poetry as spell work.

The true power and purpose behind poetry is not publication, it is transformation, integration, and healing. Despite the upheaval of this week, and the tears and pain of it, I have benefitted from this craft and this challenge in ways that I did not anticipate when beginning this residency. I have also benefitted creatively from the insight of what it means to make work that is a journey – not just through narratives, but also through landscapes, and through the self. The three poems function as a trio – while they can be read as separate entities, they don’t really function as effectively as they do when read together. In this, there is a wonderful parallel with life experience itself, and the contextual importance of analysis of any kind.

The wonderful thing about journeys is that they are necessarily about movement. In short, they do not allow you to stay frozen. I’ve thawed out just enough to write this, and I hope that the completed pieces will finally make it out there one day, if for no other function than as a confessional that might be helpful for others who want to come unstuck.