Two Poems by Marly Youmans

Illustration © Helen Nicholson

The Riddle

The mystery of making things

From words is how the needed element

Seems like a metal jot that springs

To a magnetic hand—a sacrament

  Or symbol, grace

  Of earthly place

That answers to a need: that lends, that brings.

As Aengus, wanderer, is drawn

To a far lake and finds along the shore

A girl in the guise of a swan,

A radiance of form he’d chased before

As flying gleam

Within a dream,

But now their fairy story meets its dawn.

As when my mother wept for curls,

For the little coffin like an iced cake

—The child arrayed in silks and pearls—

When all her mother-woe was flooding ache,

Then came this word:

Then flew a bird

To nestle by the one who could not wake.

These are the wonders of the word

That wants to gather like a bud to make

A floating bloom, or chirp and churr

A morning or a mourning song for sake

Of woman’s grief

Or man’s relief,

For bliss and rue: yoke-mated, blended, blurred.

The Horse Angel

Heaven and earth are like two hands that touch,

Clapping together when a thunderbolt

Rives the air and melts the sand to glass.

I traveled weeks to see a famous horse,

A snow-white thing born from Medusa’s blood:

The beast with wings, joiner of earth and sky.

At our beginning, unseen fingers split

The heavens from the earth, and ever since

We’ve loved the rising smoke, the falling star.

And so I longed to glimpse this Pegasus,

Cleaver of soil and rock, maker of springs

Where the singing muses like to gather.

Tarsus in Cilicia was the region

Where, looking up, I raced with hand outstretched 

To catch a feather tumbling from the clouds.

My forty days of travel snared no more,

For Pegasus was now a horse of stars,

His bright-winged shape a bonfire in the night.

And yet the feather was a joy to me,

A graceful message from the earth and sky

That said two hands still separate and join.

Marly Youmans

Marly Youmans is the award-winning author of fifteen books of poetry and fiction. Her latest collection of poetry is The Book of the Red King, a sequence centered around the figures of a transforming Fool, the Red King, and Precious Wentletrap (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2019.) Her just-out novel is Charis in the World of Wonders, a book of adventure and romance in a time of war and witch-panic in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (San Francisco: Ignatius Press.) Other recent books include Thaliad, The Throne of Psyche, Maze of Blood, Glimmerglass, and A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. 

The stanza form of The Riddle is borrowed from George Herbert.

This is a response to Serendipity & Synchronicity, our first Spiritus Mundi theme.

dream (america) by Rebecca Tamás

Illustration © Helen Nicholson

in the strange glaring light

I knew this was america 

though a part I’d never been to

or the precinct of a familiar city

that I’d never seen

the glow of the place

was a green halo

and I felt my desire to

exist become so hot

that I nearly fainted and fell

onto the tarmac

nothing was happening

each silver street gave itself up

each tree lined boulevard glinted

with an ashy sheen

each bodega had an open door—

silent

but smelling of rosemary oil and incense

french fries making signs in pools of gasolene

escaped tropical birds perching on church

billboards

just moving along the road

just breathing

brimmed with an impossible kind

of meaning

that I couldn’t spell

something to do with orange juice

and being permitted to be alone forever

I took a fur coat off a washing line

and wrapped it around me

I knew america was cruel

and I knew that I would live

with extremity like a virus

I knew that my very living

would be a punishment for others

Rebecca Tamás

Rebecca Tamás is the editor, with Sarah Shin, of 'Spells: Occult Poetry for the 21st Century', published by Ignota Books. Her first full length collection of poetry, 'WITCH', came out from Penned in the Margins in 2019. It was a Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation, a Guardian, Telegraph, Irish Times and White Review 'Book of the Year,' and a Paris Review Staff Pick. She is a former winner of the Manchester Poetry Prize, and the recipient of a Fenton Arts Trust Early Career Residency. Rebecca currently works as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University, where she co-convenes The York Centre for Writing Poetry Series. She is represented by Emma Paterson, at Aitken and Alexander.

This is a response to Serendipity & Synchronicity, our first Spiritus Mundi theme.

Our current theme | Cartomancy

The World, an original card from the Tarot of Marseilles by Jean Dodal, 1701-1715

Cartomancy is telling the future via a deck of cards. These can be tarot, oracle cards, or quite simply, a deck of playing cards. Here we’re thinking about the cards as a method for tapping into our creativity and finding stories to tell and ideas and feelings to express.

Every suit in a tarot deck tells a story about human existence. There is the fiery wands suit, the journey of passion and motivation; the watery cups, which explores our introspective, emotional side; earthly pentacles, which speak of the material world; airy swords, which consider the intellect. Within each there are stories of trials and tribulations, momentary victories, periods of peace and tumultuous times. In the major and minor arcana we also find symbols and archetypes.

Much of the occult symbolism was given to the Rider-Waite-Smith deck by Arthur Waite and illustrator Pamela Colman Smith, both members of the 19th century magical order, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The tarot is rich in imagery, borrowed from the Western Occult and Kabbalah. Besides this understanding of tarot as something that can be learnt and memorised, there are also the images themselves, and our intuitive reactions to them.

Many creatives have used the tarot to guide their work. Shirley Jackson’s novel Hangsaman draws on the archetype of The Hanged Man, which can indicate spiritual transformation. In Italo Calvino’s novel The Castle of Crossed Destinies, the characters recount their tales via tarot cards. 

But your approach needn’t be so explicit. We are open to how you use the cards to inform your work. The tarot can simply be a tool to prompt a mundane story about the everyday. Alternatively, your response might be full of magical imagery. Let the cards be your doors to ideas. Weave together the stories of the characters whose lives you follow through the cards. Ask the cards what happens next. Home in on symbols and, perhaps, come to know the cards better. If you don’t have a tarot deck, you can download an app like Golden Thread Tarot or purchase one from Treadwell’s or Little Red Tarot.

You may respond to this theme with short fiction, creative non-fiction, or poetry (maximum three poems).

How to submit

We accept submissions via email. Please send your work to cunningfolkmagazine@gmail.com. We ask that you include Spiritus Mundi in the subject line, followed by your name and the genre of the work you are submitting. Your work should be provided as an attachment, not pasted into the body of your email. It needn’t be occult-themed, though we do love work that draws on the occult, mythology, folklore and magic; more importantly, its creation must in some way respond to the theme. All submissions should be accompanied by an artist bio of no more than 100 words. Unfortunately, we are currently unable to offer a fee for submissions. We are fully volunteer-run. The deadline for the current theme is 15 September 2020.

*Please note, we’ll be sharing responses to our first theme, Serendipity and Synchronicity, in August.

Introducing Spiritus Mundi

Anonymous, Camille Flammarion, L'Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire (Paris, 1888)

Where do ideas come from? You may understand creativity as something that comes from within—for writers like Cormac McCarthy, ideas can be plucked from the unconscious mind. Alternatively, you may view it as something external to you, just as Virgil and Homer invoked a muse to help channel creative forces. Either way, the creative occult could help take the pressure off the self-conscious creator, and enable us to push past blocks and find flow. 

Creatives have long sought inspiration through occult methods. We are launching a themed submissions window for occult-inspired work. To name it, we borrow the term Spiritus Mundi, or world-spirit. Employed by Cornelius Agrippa and later by the poet WB Yeats, Spiritus Mundi denotes the realm from which all creative and magical inspiration can be drawn. There have been countless others writers who channelled the creative occult, from Sylvia Plath to William Burroughs; artists, such as Kandinsky and Ithell Colquhoun.

We’re now considering submissions. Every two months we will post a new theme or occult method to inspire your own creativity. When possible, we will pair prompts and submission windows with a Zoom workshop, available to a certain tier of Patreon supporters. 

Our first theme is Serendipity and Synchronicity

In his essay “Chance Traveller”, Haruki Murakami, recalls a number of strange albeit real coincidences he has experienced that no one ever believes. The events weave together and seem too improbable, too coincidental to not be planned by him, or divine intervention. After one wondrous tale involving jazz music, he says: “Was the god of jazz hovering in the sky above Boston, giving me a wink and a smile and saying, “Yo, you dig it?” Explaining to the reader his thoughts on these synchronicities, he says this: “Don’t misunderstand me—I’m not the sort of person who’s into occult phenomena … I’m not saying I don’t believe in any of these. No problem with me if they really do exist. I’m just personally not interested. Still, a significant number of strange, out-of-left-field kinds of things have coloured my otherwise humdrum life.”

Murakami’s fiction, too, seems planned. And yet he says it’s not. He writes to find out what will happen next. The events pool together naturally, in the right order, and seem predetermined. It brings to mind the Felix Felicis potion, from the Harry Potter series. Everything Harry does upon drinking it seems to bring about a successful outcome, even if he sets out unsure what it is he wants. For writers and artists, looking for patterns in daily life can be helpful. It provides limitations when we’re overwhelmed by choices. It enables us to create narrative structure, to form connections, to distil and anchor our ideas and feelings to specific moments. Perhaps it’s a particular image or motif that keeps recurring. A word, or string of words, you keep seeing in advertisements, street signs, in books and newspapers. Once you’ve found it, perhaps you’ve found a thread to follow. Sometimes these threads lead nowhere, though you enjoy the ride. Sometimes they act like omens, portending a seemingly inevitable outcome. Other times, they might lead you, your characters, or practice, closer to where you, they or it want to be.

You may respond to this theme through artwork, poetry (maximum three poems), creative non-fiction or short fiction (up to 4000 words in length). We will publish selected submissions online.

How to submit

We accept submissions via email. Please send your work to cunningfolkmagazine@gmail.com. We ask that you include Spiritus Mundi in the subject line, followed by your name and the genre of the work you are submitting. Your work should be provided as an attachment, not pasted into the body of your email. It needn’t be occult-themed, though we do love work that draws on the occult, mythology, folklore and magic; more importantly, its creation must in some way respond to the theme. All submissions should be accompanied by an artist bio of no more than 100 words. Unfortunately, we are currently unable to offer a fee for submissions. We are fully volunteer-run. We will therefore only respond to submissions we wish to publish. The deadline for the current theme is 30 June 2020.