In the late sixties and early seventies hippies and other people were taking up paranormal ways of enquiring into the workings of the universe. Maybe they thought that real science had led to the H-bomb. Maybe, given that you were supposed to turn on, tune in and drop out, they were too mellow to tackle any rigorous systems of thought. In later times it would be lackadaisical middle class housewives and guys at gyms that got excited about crystals, pyramids and chai. In the late sixties and early seventies the poets and would-be poets got into palm-reading, astrological signs—and the tarot deck.
At that time the hardest working and most serious young poet in central Canada was thirty-year-old Margaret Atwood. She is now and was then, logical, analytical—sensible. In secret she wore bright red babydoll jammies, but in her books and in her public addresses, she was a scientist’s daughter who knew how to develop an argument or show you an example. But she liked all kinds of knowledge; or I should say that she liked knowledge about all kinds of things. So people I knew went to her for their astrological charts. They showed her the palms of their hands and got the news about their past, present and likely future. And they sat down with her to have a tarot reading done for them. They may have been reminded that when she went to grad school, Ms Atwood specialized in Rider Haggard and other late Victorian spook writers. She knew every Frankenstein movie ever made.
Still, one had the sense that Peggy did not totally believe in all that divination. In her famous Nova Scotia monotone she would tell you your tarot details, pull her head back a little, and make a closed-mouth smile. So you just did not know, did you?
So a few lucky people I know had their tarots read by both Margaret Atwood and Robin Blaser. Blaser was the youngest in a trio of poets (the others being Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer) who were largely responsible for the so-called San Francisco Renaissance of the late fifties and early sixties. San Francisco is, of course, an alternative to the eastern American cities, and the San Francisco poets were usually homosexual or Buddhist or Albigensians, or all of the above. Robert Duncan became the guru of a bunch of Vancouver poets, Blaser moved to Vancouver in the sixties, and Spicer was supposed to, but died before he could. They taught us that the stories about the Holy Grail were as much our world as the history we’d been vouchsafed at school.
There was lots of divination going on in Vancouver in the sixties. While city planners in Toronto built a “Village” for guitar players to perform in, and Montreal fashionistas made fortunes designing hippy wear, the young people in Vancouver got high, lived in tents, and wrapped their tarot packs in silk. The I ching became a popular divining tool, and a rivalry grew up between those who used sticks and those who favoured the Oriental coins. The poets were more likely to carry around their Kenkyusha, the Japanese-English dictionary, and tell fortunes based on the example sentences found therein. Victor Coleman, the hip Toronto poet who spent time on the west coast, took Kenkyusha back to Ontario with him.
If you check any disinterested reference to poetry and the tarot, you will encounter a lot of airhead stuff, really bad gossamer verse by amateurs who consider themselves mystics. But in the sixties and seventies there was a lot of serious stuff. Spicer had learned the tarot as part of his youthful education, and mentioned the cards in his works, writing in 1958 his plan for a book on the tarot. When it was published in Boundary 2 in 1974, we were reminded by Spicer that the cards were there to help us bring the invisible into visible world, not by reason alone but with the help of chance and nonsense, two things I was to look for in my tarot book. Spicer said that the cards as laid out worked the way a poem does, that an individual card has “no meaning in itself but only in relation to the cards around it and its position in the layout—exact analogy to words in a poem.”
Everywhere I looked I saw good tarot books of poetry. In 1958 Robin Blaser published Cups. I knew that Victor Coleman was working with the tarot and other chance operations in his book America, which would come out in 1972. Frank Davey was working on King of Swords (1972) and then Arcana (1973). I didn’t know it at the time, but Italo Calvino was at work on The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) one of the greatest Oulipian texts, in which a number of people marooned high in an alpine blizzard tell their stories via tarot layouts. Their stories cross, of course, because certain cards show up in more than one reading.
So poets with tarot packs were all around me before I wrote my poem in Montreal from July 5, 1969 to Feb. 8, 1970. I thought that they all knew a lot more than I did about those arcane cards. I was a puritan lad, after all, so I decided that I would be the first innocent tarot poet. I would simply respond to the images on the faces of the cards, refusing to do any research, trying not to guess. Looking at this decision in one way, you might say that I was trying to keep my brain from becoming an impediment to the occult’s maneuvers. Well, I was the same fellow who was denying the agency of the subconscious.
In our apartment in Montréal there were allegedly 7.5 rooms. We gave up trying to figure out which of the alcoves was half a room, ands managed to last four years in that place. The apartment was one room wide, which meant that the 7.5 stretched northward (or eastward, as it is called in Montreal) from the second-storey window looking over Grosvenor Avenue just above Sherbrooke, to a mess of bushes or trees behind the building. I can’t remember whether there was a back alley between us and Roslyn Avenue. The second room from the end was the kitchen, and then a step down from that was my study, as we called it. That is where I wrote the 38 sections that make up Geneve. 38, because that is the number of cards that make up the major arcana plus the pages, knights, queens and kings of the four suits in the tarot pack. The major arcana are sometimes called the “trump” cards, and I don’t know whether you know that “trump” is a shortening of the word “triumph.” Anyway, I put the other 40 cards away somewhere, shuffled my 38, wrapped them in a silk handkerchief, and put the thinner pack face down in the top right drawer of my desk in that little room I hoped to make an everywhere.
Then over seven months I drew those 38 cards, more than one a week, and wrote. Innocently, I told myself, I wrote, so that on each page a reader can see the details of the card in question, the bushes under a horse’s hoofs, a chariot drawn in two directions. The question arises—how innocent was I? Well, I was certainly inexpert. I had a wife who had researched the tarot deck and knew all its history and psychological implications. I had friends who were tempted to lead their lives according to it. But in the poems, all you can see really are my suspicions. On the first page, about the Knight of Wands, the poem asks, “What, is that me he holds, not horse,/ but tree, I’ve so often calld myself?” Though I continued my proposition: “(I make no assumptions/ about their meanings, they/ are such strangers to me; seeing them,/ I will tell what they look like,” I keep offering hints at a sort of half-instinctual, half-learned knowledge, even to the edge of tolerance, as when in the poem about the Page of Pentacles I use four words that rime with “Bowering,” one of them twice.
I suppose that one does organize one’s observations of the tarot narrative according to the things that are going on in one’s thoughts and emotions, and if one has such a thing as the unconscious, one’s unconscious. While I was compiling the pages of Geneve my marriage was undergoing its most difficult period. My love life was bifurcated, you might say, and there was a strong drama going on this side of the cards. Yes, there was another young woman. But still today I look into the poem and see references to women and I can’t say that this one refers to her, that to the other. Maybe, given the divining that was going on, I was seeing my version of the female principle or something that evasive or focused.
I have said that I approached the tarot pack in as much ignorance as possible, what you might call a distancing method, or an alienating one. Further to that, the deck I was using was French in its words—L’imperatrice, Roi de baton. It was a language I heard all about me every day, there in Montreal, but no, the other young woman was not French Canadian. She was from Switzerland. That was not the reason for calling the poem Geneve, though. She was from Zurich. The deck of cards I was lifting one by one was printed in Geneva. I used to tell myself that I was dealing with the Geneva Pack, but I figured it was probably the Marseilles Pack, though I later checked, and it seemed not to be.
And now these decades later I am beset by a (excuse me) mystery. If you have a copy of the hardback Geneve with the dust cover still on it, you really have a poster of sorts. The dust cover is folded double, so that if you take it off the book and keep on unfolding it you will have a picture of a tarot spiral. On the oriental carpet of the upstairs room at Coach House Press, the cards are laid out in that spiral according to the order in which the poems were written. Being forgetful, I left the deck in its silk square at Coach House for years. Once, on a visit from Vancouver, where I then lived, I spotted the wrapped deck on a bookshelf, and retrieved it. I have noticed it from time to time over the years. The other day, after I’d spent a while looking for it and then spotted it (no silk) on a bookshelf in my study, I checked the pictures it against the poems. Something was amiss. I checked the cards against the dust jacket, then I checked the poems against the dust jacket. The poems matched the dust jacket. The cards were the famous Rider-Waite pack, in English. The pack was familiar—I had been glancing it for a long time. But these were not the cards I was looking into when I wrote the poem.
Maybe the other pack with the French words is around here somewhere. Maybe all those years ago I snaffled Victor Coleman’s deck instead of mine—oh, and let me admit now that I think that the deck I have been calling mine was perhaps really my wife’s. Maybe magic is afoot.
There is more I could tell you about the composing of this poem, but I think that I will mention just one more thing. As the pile of face-down cards got shallower, I began to get nervous, because I knew that some key cards had not yet showed up. Among them were Judgement, the Wheel of Fortune, Justice—and Death. I was somewhat edgy because I thought that maybe the cards did have something to tell me. But I was even more worried that readers would think that I had stacked the deck for dramatic purposes.
Sure enough, the string (or spiral) ran out this way: The Wheel of Fortune, The Fool, The World, The Queen of Swords, The Page of Cups, Justice, Death. Now I was really edgy (see above).
But it was not until this week, forty years later, that I experienced a sliver of suspicion. Could someone who lived in that long apartment with me have found the cards that were left to face, and ordered them to her liking?
WHY THE HOUSE OF GOD
should be struck by lightning.
He does it himself, acting at times
like a poet, to kill
what he makes
in order to make,
those bodies
falling from disaster
are actors as well,
to be moved
to gravity & death. We should all
be ready to feel our weight.
Making a marriage, too,
as Paul had it emblem of
a God’s creation
& binding
made not too strong
that it can not be
shattered by the
luminious arrows of heaven we inhabit
with our rarest minds.
The falling bricks
catch that light
& scatter it
into new configurations
half random, but toucht
with art.
HE’S A LONELY MAN
with a long face
& his robes
ungainly
so far from his youth
he might have been
one of the warriors
this hermit, hidden away
save the light
of his lantern
I see him by.
His heaviness belies
the long thin face,
he carries as I do,
as I guess I’m part
Of the looking now, wanting to say “we”
earlier, “we see him”
—that
must be the secret purpose of his hermitage.
“As if to shame me for my fear”
that I cant rest my mind’s hand
on this simple walking stick,
that I demand the sun
at times more dim
than his
candle encased
in bronze & glass.
THE JUDGEMENT, YES, but why
this early or
why this late?
I’d always wanted it
at all points, an energy
toucht & touching back,
afraid to be naked as I was.
Naked as these forms rising from the earth
are.
The wingd child with
horn to his mouth
is not enough, is not
knowing enough.
Who’s the judge? Who’s to
sound the horn? Does this stranger
know the key I’ve always playd in?
Three of these people look at each other.
The fourth looks upward
None of them is I.
No one knew which way I was looking.
& now, not even I.
George Bowering is a veteran poet and novelist who lives on the west coast. His most recent book of fiction was the story collection The Box, from New Star in 2009. In Spring 2010 Talonbooks published his long long poetry book My Darling Nellie Grey. He lived in Montreal 1967-1971.
George Bowering, M.A.
Acclaimed for his modesty.
