Poetry Magic 1

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The label of magic appears in a variety of evidence from the ancient Greek world, but the different kinds of evidence provide different kinds of self-labelling and labelling of others. Works of the literary imagination, from early epic to late novels, provide some of the richest and most detailed descriptions; these depictions, however, are not meant to be portrayals of the real world, but rather of the way magic works in the imagination. Other texts, such as histories or law court speeches, provide a more accurate depiction of how the label was applied in the real world, but they tend to be more limited in their details. The material evidence, including not only epigraphic and papyrological texts but also artistic representations in various materials, provide a more direct witness to what the ancient Greeks were actually doing, especially for the self-labelling of magic, but such evidence is always scattered, fragmentary, and difficult to interpret. The argument of Seppilli’s Poesia e magia is briefly stated by the literary critic Thomas Greene: ‘the invocation as prayer lies in a middle position between magical rites, which were regarded as coercive, and poetic invocations which are not expected to produce the literal results they request’. In many languages, a word like ‘carmen’ was used first to mean charm before it came to mean poem. In other words, poetry evolved out of magic, and is related to prayer. The exhibition will celebrate Seppilli’s insight and approach by bringing together a series of objects and art works to create cross-cultural dialogues that will explore the relationship of poetry and magic. Experimentation: moving away from stereotypes into technical innovation, poems were seen to be a ruthless rejection of the past, a deviation from the usual reader expectations.

Our next members’ poems competition will be on the theme of ‘Broken Vessels’, proposed by our judge Naush Sabah. Naush is a writer, editor, critic, and educator based in the West Midlands. In 2019, she co-founded Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal where she is currently Editor and Publishing Director. The redemption of the self is a valid way of approaching the redemption of all. One should never utter the poem without concentration, but instead sanctify it, know it, and reflect.

Poems are not created by recipe, or by pouring content into a currently acceptable mould. Shape and content interact, in the final product and throughout the creation process, so that the poems will be continually asking what you are writing and why. The answers you give yourself will be illustrating your conceptions of poetry. Once again, those conception will develop – eventually to include experiences more viscerally part of you, since poems are not a painless juggling with words. The deadline for entries is Friday 27 October 2023; poems must be unpublished as of our spring Poetry News issue publication date at end December 2023. No doubt more could be said, but the starting poet may be feeling impatient. Theorists, like clever lawyers, can prove anything, and it is all too easy for an atrocious piece of writing to be defended by irrefutable standards. Are there not more practical ways of assessing poetry? The objectives of magical practice, as it appears in the evidence, can be as varied as the range of human wishes; anything for which someone might want extraordinary power may appear as the aim of magic. Although some scholars have imagined magic as primarily concerned with harmful effects for personal purposes (with a special category of “white” magic to account for the exceptions), it is not the ill will that marks magic in the ancient sources as much as the extraordinary nature of the performance or the abnormal social position of the performer. Above all, the discourse of magic applies in cases where the practice is seen as an extraordinarily efficacious means of obtaining the end, whatever that end might be. One point worth making is that aesthetics, together with theories of poetics and literary criticism, does not operate in a vacuum, but within a community of shared approaches and understandings. Typically, they are academia-based, and so written for fellow academics and their captive students. Their insights are important – indeed indispensable – for countering the half-truths that float around the poetry world, and for insisting that poetry maintain some depth and substance, but the young poet may wish initially to sidestep these abstruse matters and join another community, that of poetry itself. Poetry also has its beliefs and patterns of excellence. Its insights have to be acquired by participation – by writing and having that writing evaluated by fellow poets, by being able to appreciate a wide range of work, and by acquiring the crafts of literary composition.

Poetry may well be the art of the unsayable. A good poem lies somewhere beyond mere words: it is the intangible, an exultation in things vaguely apprehended, something which emerges out of its own form, and which cannot exist without that form. Any poem that can be completely understood or paraphrased is not a poem, therefore, but simply versified or emotive prose (though not the worse for that).The historiola, the recitation of a myth to illustrate the desired effect, represents the most elaborate form of such metaphors but rarely appears in Greek magic, in contrast to its more frequent use in Egyptian and other Mediterranean traditions. For an analysis of a notable exception and broader consideration of the historiola in the Greek evidence, see Sarah Iles Johnston, “Myth and the Getty Hexameters,” in The Getty Hexameters: Poetry, Magic, and Mystery in Ancient Selinous, ed. Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 121–156.