Tag: Poetry

For Beltane: Charge of the Mortal Body

For Beltane: Charge of the Mortal Body

Posted on by diana

Happy Walpurgis Eve/Beltane to those who celebrate. To those who don’t, a brief translation: Hooray hooray first of May – outdoor fucking (consensual only please) starts today!

As seems to be something of a tradition between me and the Lord & Lady on Beltane  ((we’ll get to my muddled theologies later)) the calm quiet voice proffered some poetry. Normally it’s erotica you could read without sixth graders giggling. This year what came to me as I waited for my ritual bath to cool was an addition to the charges, along with my mind being taken along specific paths about how I answered the calling I had to Wicca because it was a religion that allows for change. This was accompanied by visions of several people digging in their heels over that that I am to ignore.

This is being released as Creative Commons: Attribution – Diana Rajchel 2014

I will likely revise this a few times myself. The gods are excellent at raw vision. The editing is our job.

To make it more Pagan humanist/Pagan natural friendly I suggest striking the lines “parented by the God and Goddess” and replacing it with “lineaged from nature” or “rooted from nature and seeded in the stuff of the Earth.”

So, Happy Beltane. I give you to use in your own rituals and discussions of why sex – and the refusal of sex – are to be kept holy as celebratory acts:

Charge of the Mortal Body

I am birthed by nature itself, parented by the God and Goddess and gifted to my ancestors with only one promise: continuity. I am here for seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months, years: so long as I dwell upon Mother Earth I am granted the gifts of the mortal being. I am sovereign to consent and deny; I may worship or not; I may partake of mortal doings or withdraw from them. These are the gifts of free will that nature has provided. Because I am aware of my place in nature and conscious that I have an ancestry I also bear the charge of knowledge: that my fellows are sovereign to consent and deny, to worship or not, to partake or withdraw. The gifts of pain and pleasure live in my body and are mine to give willingly or to keep for myself. All other bodies I encounter are sovereign, their pleasure and pain to be shared willingly and honorably or not at all. All mortals are the deliverance of only one promise: continuity of life. In all else, whether child, man, woman, or beyond gender, they are sovereign. I honor this in the mortal bodies I encounter as I honor that I am here with only one promise to deliver: that so long as I am here, I represent the continuity of life.

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My Pagan-based problem with poetry

My Pagan-based problem with poetry

Posted on by diana
Doreen Valiente, 1962
Doreen Valiente, 1962 (Photo credit: carbonated)

There’s this line of thought among contemporary poets that poetry should not rhyme. That’s an old-fashioned thing that only shows a new poet’s lack of exposure to what’s out there. The reasons are good: poetry is meant to push boundaries. It’s likely the single best way to understand language and comment on all aspects of culture and shaking off constraints/trying out new constraints is sometimes the only way to find our way to the concepts new and old that merit exploration. Language is culture and culture is language, etc. etc.

I’ve been hanging out with poets lately. (Those who knew me in my “poetry for the inner sociopath” days have reason to find this very surprising.) It’s a really solid workshop full of really solid writers – the type that I actually listen to.

Unfortunately, I have a rather large cultural conflict with the anti-rhyming sentiment. The argument put forth is that rhyming isn’t part of contemporary communication for poets. Pop singers are sort of looked at askance in this respect. (No one mentions Jewel, or Dessa, or even Billy Joel when such pronouncements are made.) Therein lies my own cultural conflict: modern Pagans – even Reconstructionist Pagans – do you rhyme. Most of us have ancient poetry and modern spell writing as core to our personal practices.

Among the non-Pagan poets, rhyming is an archaism.

Among Pagans, rhyming without sounding twee is a modern concern.

Aleistar Crowley started it – even though he was mostly awful – but Doreen Valiente was the one who made it actually launch. We rely on the somatic signals brought on by well crafted rhyming. While we often say a spell is better done in rhyme and outright doggerel is just fine (thank you Scott Cunningham?) it’s been my own experience that a badly written spell is badly spoken and thus not as successful. A well written rhyming spell is infinitely more successful, particularly when crafted with numerology written into the meter, word and letter choice. Most of the time, when it sounds good it already fits those formulas without additional tweaking.

I don’t see myself bringing rhyming spells to my poetry workshop anytime soon. It’s a mixed group and as far as I know I am the only regular Pagan that attends (others have come and gone – most of whom, while lovely, were not people I was on the same page with.) There’s already been expressed discomfort about topics that are exotic to other members that are just part of my every day life.

Still, it’s a strange conundrum. Maybe non-Pagans don’t rhyme their poetry – but I am Pagan and I do. I rely on it.

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The ancestors: a vignette

The ancestors: a vignette

Posted on by diana

Connecting genes, helix, labryinth
crawled out, crawled back again up the spiral to source –
we are pooled from the same saltwater
that passes through our bodies on its way to the sky.

The call, it came from my lips somehow:
“You are ALL my ancestors!”

From the ocean-salty blood,
the dirt of  bones
a voice responded:
“Oh thank God. We have so much love to give you.”

The skies opened up,
the ancestors poured love on me
blood unto my body,
unto the earth,
into the roots that sustain

– Diana Rajchel

Old notebooks

Old notebooks

Posted on by diana


One of my odd side projects involve digging through stacks and stacks of old notebooks casually scribbled in over the years. Thanks to blogging, nowadays much of my scribbling involves post-it notes and magazines, but back in graduate school I tore up entire notebooks attempting to make my “higher education” writing tolerable to myself. I haven’t really written much in the way of poetry in years – it takes a certain slightly otherworldly mindset, and to accomplish what I need to accomplish at this point in my life takes some very “here and now” mentality. Since I’m giving myself a week-long break from the intense work of book proposal editing and book revision, I’m going through notebooks and transcribing. I have an eye on freeing up space, and also on generating scrap for some papermaking projects I plan to try this winter. Continue reading “Old notebooks”

Writer’s workshop and networking

Writer’s workshop and networking

Posted on by diana

Woman_with_Underwood_typewriter

I’m trying to stay involved and keep doing healthy things while dealing with grief. Some days are bad – usually the days I skip my morning pages. Others are fine, mostly, but then I flag and need my meds. I’ve managed to loosely maintain a workout schedule, and to keep up with my Examiner posts (although now I really need to start getting to museums) and to attend writer’s workshops, etc. I had to miss the last three workshop weeks because of the hospice and funeral situation, and coming back to it the group had shrunk considerably – evidently there’s some schism between the poets and the prose writers. The poets enjoyed the bulk of accommodation before, but more long-form writers necessitated a change. A ruling party never likes it when cultural shifts cause them to lose dominance.

My last experience with a writing workshop was in grad school, and despite my best attempts to get people involved in them later, most people were not understanding the concept of presenting mostly finished work to other writers who would then, hopefully gently, point out any holes. This was graduate school, so even in the better workshops there was an aspect of mean-spirited competition, especially in the poetry workshops in which I was forced to participate.

Thankfully, my current workshop is nothing like that. In a way my workshop experience reflects my experience with graduate school: there was some strange dividing line between poets and prose writers, and as a rule prose writers seemed to me more affable and open to change, more willing to adjust. I think it’s because longer writing means much longer rewrites. While it may be possible to execute a perfect poem in one or two drafts, those of us who write prose have to accept sooner that our children aren’t perfect and do what we can to make them good. I’ve also found that writing and studying poetry makes me a better prose writer, so I sincerely hope a few of the poets come back. Given the down market for poetry outside of greeting cards, I can understand being reactive – they’ve culturally had their backs against the wall for awhile.

I hope the situation resolves itself and we bring in some poets who are game to a slightly different system. I also think there should be a spoken word night where we read excerpts of our works to family and friends with cookies and stuff.

Additional reading:
Evaluating non-paying markets
About feedback and criticism

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