Writing Lessons from the Strength Tarot Card (Part 2)
Chen Chen’s poem “A Spell to Find Family” aligns with the Strength card in obvious ways: there’s a lion, courage, and generosity in this poem. But there’s nothing obvious about the poem itself, and this is part of what makes it brilliant. How did Chen Chen pull off this balance of what Roman Jakobson refers to as poetic versus communicative language to achieve productive ambiguity, rather than obscurity, vagueness, or confusion? How did they find the courage to write through a potentially painful subject such as finding queer kin? Read on to find out!
In The Discovery of Poetry, Frances Mayes identifies various drivers of poetry such as sound, image, and idea. Idea is the hardest to work with because often you end up banging your reader over the head with your intended “message.” Poetry is more often about the experience of the poem itself, rather than the experience to which the poem refers.
If you approach a poem as a discovery you make through deploying techniques like sound and image, it’s likely going to be more surprising than if you write the poem in order to explain an idea. As the poet James Galvin once told me, “My ear is smarter than my brain.”
Let sound lead and you’ll arrive at more exciting places than you would have with your rational mind. You’ll also have more fun, and it may be one of the best ways you can take care of yourself when writing about trauma.
I see Chen Chen’s daring use of sound and image as courageous because they are trusting their reader to do the work to co-create the poem, rather than have it spoon-fed to them. They trust their reader to experience the poem, rather than fully understand it. In an interview on The Poetry Vlog, Chen Chen seems to favor practicing craft as a way to access courage rather than the idea of writing as self-expression.