REVIEW: Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics by Selah Saterstrom
Saterstom, in her collection Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics sculpts the breakthrough dynamics on divinatory poetics posing writing as a crossroad between poetry’s interpersonal chronicles and the art of prediction. Saterstom defines the thread of divination as being “That stream…wherever you are, all of the time, in every grand place, and in every suffering pit.” The crossroad between intuitive channels and poetry offer “Narrative orchestrations … [that] collaborate with uncertainty [and] work in varied ways through the live wires tucked within a reader… This is also true of some writers.”
The collection is as rich for a “fork tongued” reader as it is for a writer and personally, as an divination obsessed writer, I acclaim to be a swept away by Saterstom’s pioneering, progressive instruction. She poses the relationship of divinitory’s “syntactical logics” and as a space of liminal boundaries, “the border between inside and out.” A space of immersion in which writing’s mesmerism exists: “In this place I wrote with water; in this place, an extinguished match; here, blood and cheap perfume, here, nothing.” Saterstrom furthers her expository framework through a deeper lyrical engagement. The collection begins with an essay, offering a backdrop upon the writer’s paradigm, addressing divination itself as a vehicle not just for writing, but as a way of seeing. The remainder of the collection loosens theory, pulling up its sleeves to enact the material of poetry: Saterstrom’s unique invocation announces itself in the devil and in the angel, and in the spiritual arc between experience and imagination.
Under this influence: I want to travel north into the star’s diminutive half space; am willing to mouth the slate blue sky’s lily chirping contrails between word-swamps as empathy as I observe the birch’s wince of sunburnt skin. I want the monk’s small snuff box to be pressed into my palm. My compass evaporates, and a specter’s aural cerulean: bachelor-button blossoms in the lungs are a sip of summer. I gave you fear. I gave rift. You gave prediction. Handwriting drives the brain’s engine, deepens a primal respect for what may seem misaligned. It is the body that houses the imagination. Perception. Receptivity. Numen.
Divination is Saterstom’s gift for the unseen. “Nuanced with a legacy of butchery… where much is sounding and is also unsounded,” Saterstorm defines: “This is the site from which I want to consider narrative. It is what I mean when I say ‘divinitory poetics.’”
In the collection’s section “Decade II: The Sorrowful Mysteries” (one subsection of six chapters), Saterstom supplies detailed instruction beyond an “ordinary” divination, and directs: “take a lemon to the grave of a dead child”…
“Leave it in exchange for a pinch of dirt from the dead
child’s grave. Place this dirt within a vial of Cleo May
perfume, use daily. And pray. When the sun eventually
rises, break a black hen’s egg on the ground outside your
front door.”
Indeed, “Language is an orphan’s path.”
It is the function of the body, the witchfinder’s pricking at the bullet wound. In the plagues of that century curses outweighed scars, scars outweighed charms. To procure the hidden, the battery-hens scratch the insect’s grit among barley. You arrived reading the medicinal. Uromancy. Remedy stripping the splintered hen house into a deck of cards.
Under the solace of writing/reading’s “spell,” no mystery is made more clear, and for one outside the realm of ritual, Saterstom’s eccentric recipe with rosary beads are meditative breaths between words.
This is why you need what you consider. I/you cannot ask why, when, there. There was none. When I know love I am not hidden. I drew The King of Pentacles, The Two of Wands, The Six of Pentacles…. She tells me to draw a good death, anatomy’s language — a cup of taro leaves. Tarot. I drew a mental association with taro.
“One thousand three hundred and sixty days two hundred and twenty-seven candles a pound of sugar and some money… a matchbox stuffed with hair….”
I stood in the cement-color foreground before the horses were led over the bridge.
In “Reflections on Graphite:” Saterstom, “On Writing From the Exclusion Zone,” deepens the connection between writing from a place “concerning the line” to “concerning the funnel,” and the role of graphite in this discourse.
“A line, plucked, throws up a quivering bouquet. A line lays next to another made of entirely different material. All around, the remains of previous lines. One hovers, its phantom paws touching all the surfaces.
What was written there? Dark clouds slide in and skip across the rubber surface of the sea. How many times can one be consumed? More than once inside the original.”
There is an origami which occurs in writing. Overlay upon overlay, a lifting and runnel. It all begins in graphite. Erasure. Marginalia. Memorialization. Crane.
We asked me write it down: like a private screening. Your dead father is a private screening. A series of memories projected again and again in echo. A blue gray sound.
In Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, the grey green shelter of the walls of the East Berlin hotel room remind me of the year I spent ‘going darker’ into the paint on the wall from ‘Fossil → →‘Triple Stonehedge’ → ending with ‘Anthracite.’ Even the footsteps following Paul Newman through the empty museum sound like a moss grey splash against the paintings: resolute landscapes framing cobalt foam. π, 3.14, pi. Where is that? The Alte Nationalgalerie. “It takes a scientist to pick a scientist’s brain.” I miss Paul. Miss cold air. I appreciate gray as a means by which only a scientist may understand. The tweed rummaging the sky brightens the blue of his eyes. Pie is the ratio of a circle to the circumference of its diameter. Walls at the Museum.
Eventually the spy was gassed in the oven to hide the noise of a pistol.
My favorite guest in the corner told me to stay. So rational a ghost. I hadn’t in silence yet found the knife with which she broke the skin.
How would Saterstom place my narrative?
“Inside the graphite mound, steaming remains in an array of contrary textures. Above the mound’s toothy opening, weather or angels. They indicate hidden activity. Within the mound’s cavernous chapels, the old passion plays slinging on a loop. Everything that has ever been. Is there as guts. Without regard to formal invention.
Outside, while standing on the mound’s slick slope, we admire its silver, handsome qualities. We do not recall that it was this medium that caught the people’s mouths in their final terror shapes.”
I let the dead animal come into me.
Acceptance or accusation. I would not hunger.
At the airport I ate ham. Unwittingly at first. I thought it was the flavor of smoke in the egg salad, a mustard. Is it worth writing this down? I’ve heard the scent of burning hair is the most horrid of smells. I tried not to think of the skin. Nor remnants catch between my teeth.
The same with pigeons smacking at different color seeds. Telegraph wires. Messengers.
False beliefs. Alongside Saterstrom I cast charms: a seafoam green pearl, a trochus shell, a two inch plastic bison, a nickel, a rusted bottle cap, a burlap string.
Water’ green mythic Eden; where you rest your head in brine’s Babylonian sleep, your body a bridge between earth and moon; a healing medicine; what you it was; and once held between your fingers, flipped into the fountain mid-afternoon; unerring; constellations set in orbit
In “The Tale of Brother and Sister” Saterstom writes:
“We do distract ourselves. With greased bits of tinsel. Spare a body? Some change, a cigarette, or our dreadful mother, Brother, can you spare her? A silver spider looks in. A space through which you looked as your words rose to heaven.Look at me,said a voice (Mother’s), I am dying. Toss a coin, a shiny, lucky one. Make-up. Pocketbooks. Hands gesticulating. Lifetime after lifetime, all of these goddamned hairstyles and champagne brunches.”
The scenario suggests different fortunes. Torresian crow nestlings have blue eyes (and shorter wings and tail) than the Eurasian blackbird; there is no dalliance in conversion.
Everyone misses their parents.
Death. I was amongst it. The clear resolution: a milagro of the sacred heart with the devil’s halo.
Sorcery balances the waves, you followed me into the white horses; my mother’s voice: my protection; crucifix-pocket knife; Van Van oil; ebb and undercurrent were static; to shore — you pressed me. My hand deep into the sand, not quite to the elbow, but into the burr-bite of a crab. I bled all the way up the trail to the house of windows with no walls. How can a dream be riddled with Dalai-esian-like cliche? But it was true, and it was beautiful. Redwood, glass, a hearth.
Rilke said that beauty is terrifying. As are angels. Perhaps divinatory poetics embrace the terror of beauty to settle the angels.
As when Sandstrom asks:
“Can a piece of writing be haunted? Haunted like an abandoned opera house or doll baby or a lonely highway?
It is 2:30 in the morning in Uppsala, Sweden. I ask the waitress, Inga, at this all-night place what she thinks. She tells me she believes a piece of writing can certainly be haunted. She recalls, as a girl, seeing her mother gathered around yellowed pages she kept in a locked chest, a last letter written by a brother far away in a war, shortly before he died. Every morning after her mother read the letter, without fail, when she took an egg to cook, upon cracking it, its yolk ran red.”
Bibliomancy. Gideon judged us at the cemetery where the orioles hid in the leaves of my cotton dress. Club-leaf wattle…
The club we used to go to ‘The Purple Room’ was like entering someone’s basement: linoleum tiles, popcorn, pigs-in-a-blanket offered as buffet in an aluminum foil roast pan. You unhinged self portrayal from the self portrait. Here I crack random images. Sortilege frame by frame. Time is a mise-en-scène: the lounge singer’s white velvet mini-dress, blue paper parasols in our blue daiquiris. The first time I sang karaoke, I sang “My Way,” and forced the man in the suit to sing with me.
Bell Wheel wherein each vesper: Therefore in the ringing I was a slash mark, the sun held open.
Rosary wherein each knot is memory: The merciless sun’s bead upon your back wouldn’t yield.
Sovereign wherein each open air: is absolute. Coin — O, penitent luck — you are the last ascension — you are wherewithal — the witch of the way came forward — O, hegemony. Card of Ibis. Card of Star. Twelve thousand years of continuous culture. Dhari (Warrior Headdress) wherein each feather tells a story: Where a girl and a sword forget the rattle-box measure of sky, twilight heron’s iodine-colored wings lift like fire. I wanted to understand the language. Any language; so that I might conjure the dead.
Love is one who fails to beat the king and queen. Love: the scientist from the middle eastern lake whose hypothesis is a parachute from the sun.
Saterstrom spares nothing, every omen stays omen, all fluctuations: pop culture, memories, trinkets are fodder to the writer’s subjugation. Note:
- In “The History of Eastern Europe, As Told by Scotland:”
“A boy approaches. He produces four pieces of coal from his pocket and places them on the table. This is what has been stolen for warmth. Later the old woman will attempt to steal more but will collect a dead bird instead.”
- Little House on the Prairie :
“I wish people still wore chalkboards around their necks. “And when,” he asked, “did they do that?” “In the old timey days,” she said, “like in Little House on the Prairie.” A television show he claimed to hate but once in a motel room in Michigan he let a tear after Albert burned down the barn and thus murdered a blind woman’s baby. What about the episode with the Irish innkeeper, the one about adultery? “I don’t recall that one,” he said.”
- From The Paintings of Matthias Grunewalsd, Saterstrom recounts an interaction with a ghost:
“There are a lot of stories about things that happened after my grand- father’s death.
Here is one story.
Shortly after his death, I went to nap in his bed. It was mid-afternoon and I was in the house alone. Several hours later, I woke from a deep sleep. The room was ice cold even though this was during the summer in Mississippi. I felt someone in the room: I could feel him staring at me, and I heard a rustling sound. I knew, too, that I was supposed to be alone in the house.
I remained as still as possible, pretending to sleep while also trying to sort out how to get away from the interloper. As I was resting on my side, back facing the unidentified person, I was directly facing one of my grandfather’s favorite paintings, a large portrait he had done of John the Baptist. In the painting John the Baptist looks like Grünewald’s self-portraits. In the intensity of that silence, the painting appeared swimmingly alive, as if it were breathing. After holding my position for what couldn’t have been more than a minute, out of a type of muscular necessity, I bolted upright and screamed, “WHAT DO YOU WANT!” Standing at the foot of the bed was my grandfather. He was just standing there.”
After an appendectomy, smashed on morphine and limited mobility from abdominal sutures, I woke to see a girl sitting on my hospital bed. Her eyes increasingly translucent, her hair long and wet. “What do you want?” I said in a loud (though flattened) urgency (my words here should also be in all caps). I always thought it was the morphine. Perhaps that’s the question ghosts require. What do you want? When I finally got hold of the nurse I was told that I was in the children’s ward of the hospital as all the beds from the surgery were full.
I don’t believe in possession. But I believe that the old Frenchman’s grazing cattle finally moved forward when he relayed the message to “shoo” in his mind.
Is that Telekinesis? Psychokinesis? Telegnosis? Controlled Influence? Or jiggery-pokery?
Reference points interlope. What do you want?
Love: the solution inside tomorrow. Time’s cryptic whitewashing. Saterstrom captures the want of a writer:
“Some of these vignettes have been written over so many times [Saterstrom’s essay written over 16 years] they remind me of graffiti-patina of the sort I’ve seen on ancient tombs: layers of inscription piled atop so that another language suggests. And so the pilgrim traces the deep cut of the word.”
Love’s tourniquet, a new dimension, I steadied the iris bouquet at my chest, the petals, a shield or a balm for my heart’s wound. The black blooms of lilac around the entrance were like hinges of a gate.
A spray of willows grew from your throat…
Why had I left.
His hand darkening; you remembered touch, the sound of snow.
Saterstrom reminds me:
“ …there is celebratory value within the heart of failure. In time, one must redefine failure altogether. …Divinatory poetics: the way we send postcards to our past, present, and future selves through the crackling medium of fragmentation and juxtaposition.”
Writing is letnomancy. Divination by secrets. One revelation after one association after one reading after one scratch. When I love I know I am not hiding.
Hagiomancy. In ceremony, the bell tower burned. Smoke the color of the black whelk shell. I lay down in linden, in iron trees, in elm wood.
