When you want someone to look at your tarot cards, you ask for a reading. Diviners can read tea leaves, coffee grounds, wine sediments, your palm, your head, and the iris of your eye. If you’re a Diviner, in order to practice pyromancy, the art of divination by flame, you will light a candle, a hearth, a barbecue pit. You can throw salt in the fire, you can burn plants or bones or the bottom of a turtle shell. As they burn, you will look deeply into the flames; you will note the shapes the smoke makes as it curls up blackish or white; you might even be drawn through the fire into oracular vision: the king will die, your client will live, or love, lose money or gain. As a Diviner, you’re trained to read pattern and shape.
The OED tells us that the act of reading is synonymous with acts of discernment and decision: to guess and to consider, to discover, foretell, reckon and advise. To divine is to “make out or interpret by supernatural or magical insight (what is hidden, obscure, or unintelligible to ordinary faculties).” This sounds a lot like what happens when you read, and write, poetry.
What, then, is the difference between spacing out and receiving vision? Between lying on your back, staring at clouds, and the art of nephomancy? To divine, and to write poetry, requires paradoxical action: to will to receive, to seek without agenda, to engage accidents of composition as guides. If to stare at clouds is to loosen thought, to read them requires seeing them in order to know… what? Well, that shall be revealed, you hope: in the meantime, you must practice focused non-focus. Focused non-focus is at the heart of shuffling tarot cards in order to build a spread; of throwing coins or yarrow stalks to build an I Ching hexagram; of picking words out of a bag to build a poem. You’re asking a question, asking the operations of chance to suggest an answer.
