In the Cards: A Tarot and Poetry Workshop with Paula Cisewski
October 18 @ 5:30 pm
This event is presented in partnership with Porchlight Literary Arts Center and Iowa City Poetry
Image, insight, archetype. Your Tarot deck may provide guidance, but how can you also use the deck to generate or revise your poems? Paula Cisewski will give a brief introduction of Tarot for newcomers and provide examples of a couple spreads. You’ll read and discuss a few famously Tarot-inspired poems, and Cisewski will describe the process she’s been using the past couple years. After that, you’ll generate work using the cards. Please feel free to bring your own deck if you’ve got one! If not, that’s okay, too!
After the workshop, Cisewski will read from her latest book, The Becoming Game.
After the frightening results of the 2016 election, Paula Cisewski adopted a new writing practice and coping mechanism. She would invite a friend over for tea and a tarot reading. Later she would share with them the first draft of a poem inspired by the cards, the conversation, and whatever of the world had leaked in. The practice made space for meaningful communication in an uncertain time.” Precise, furious, political, controversial, paradoxical, provocative, confessional, intimate, friendly, honest, metric, exuberant, crazy, subdued poetry,” Grzegorz Kwiatowski wrote in praise of The Becoming Game. “Everything here contradicts and collides because this poetry contains many voices, many styles, many stories, but they all belong to one author.”
