A candle is lit. I pick up the book, heavy with wear and time. I balance its spine upon my altar and release the casing. She splits at her seam. Pages flutter open, reaching and cascading until resounding wings collapse.  With eyes closed,  Jupiter’s finger spirals around the ancient leaf. Slowly, a halt. My eyes open. I peer down at the words just above my fingernail. A message is revealed…

Divination is the intuitive art of connecting to spirit. This practice is used by many to decipher messages and gain spiritual insight. There are many ways to practice divination. It all depends on which method feels right for the practitioner. Some examples of divination include cartomancy (using tarot or oracle cards), scrying (looking for images and signs in reflective surfaces), and bibliomancy (also known as Schictomancy, Libromancy, and Sortes).  “The word bibliomancy comes from biblio, meaning ‘of or relating to a book or books,’ and mancy, which translates to ‘divination by means of’” (Tuttle). With this practice, the querent closes their eyes and randomly selects a page in a book. Keeping the eyes shut, while relying on intuition, the index finger is used to select a spot on the page randomly. Once the finger stops, the eyes can open. What falls underneath is a specific message from spirit or the subconscious.

Bibliomancy dates back to ancient Rome, where Sortes (small tablets made of wood) were used to predict one’s future. Upon these tablets were written lines from celebrated poets such as Homer and Virgil. The tablets were cast in an urn filled with water. Whichever verses turned up were messages to the person seeking the advice (Tuttle). Printed religious texts, like the bible, led to the rise of Bibliomancy during the 1500s (Snyder). ​This practice continued into the 1700s, among Catholics, Protestants, and the Eastern Orthodox, as a tool for personal and collective decision-making (Jean-Francois du Resnel du Bellay). In the Jewish religion, the Torah was used, in Islamic religions, the Qur’an or The Book of Omens, and in East Asian traditions, the I Ching.

With the rise in spiritualism from the 1800s to the 1900s, divination tools expanded and became more prominent. Ouija boards, tarot cards, and bibliomancy turned into parlor games. Not only were they used to pass the time with friends, but they were also used as a tool to open up the creative unconscious and provide artists and writers with creative inspiration. Even today, the activity is widely practiced.

United States Poet Laureate from 2008-2010, Kay Ryan, dabbled in both bibliomancy and cartomancy. I was introduced to Kay Ryan in the early 2000s during my undergrad experience at Roger Williams University. Her poems were clever, quick, and witty. She would sneak in rhymes here and there, and often include paradox. If you were to ask Kay Ryan if she ever practiced divination or tarot, she would most likely laugh and say no. However,  as a hopeless occult-romantic, I want to believe.

Ryan was born on September 21, 1945 (Virgo/Libra) and was raised in the San Joaquin Valley in CA. Her father was a ranch worker turned oil-well driller, and her mother was a teacher from Nevada (Teicher). Ryan attended Antelope Valley Community College, where her teacher introduced her to Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Donne, and, inadvertently, Emily Dickinson (The Reluctant Poet Laureate). At first, Ryan was apprehensive about writing. “I did want to be a writer…but I didn’t want to expose the depths that you have to expose. I was the class clown and I wanted to stay a funny person” (Teicher). Just before her 30^th birthday, in 1976, while on a four-thousand-mile bike trip, Ryan had “almost the only metaphysical experience of my life. I was permeable—everything could go through me and I could go through everything”(Teicher). In her interview with Sarah Fay, Ryan discussed that it was this bike trip that sparked her sudden desire for writing. She kept a journal with her at all times and would write daily. When she reached Colorado’s Hoosier Pass, she felt her mind sharpen “like a laser beam”. It was then that she decided that writing gave her “pleasure like nothing else” (Paris Review).

Upon returning from her bicentennial, Ryan’s creativity was set aflame. She began a daily writing ritual. Anxious to master her craft, Ryan purchased a tarot deck and designed an exercise consisting of shuffling the cards each day, turning one over, and writing a poem. Looking back, she says the experience “gave me range and gave me habit. I had to write about love, death, force, whatever was on that particular card.” (Teicher). Some of the cards she pulled consisted of The Lovers or The Death card, and The Wheel of Fortune (Greer). This helped her tackle subjects she wouldn’t normally write about. The ritual “made me do things I didn’t want to do” (Teicher).  According to Ryan:

I’d bought a tarot deck—this was the seventies—a standard one with a little accompanying book that explained how to read the cards, lay them out, shuffle them—all those things. But I’m not a student and was totally impatient with learning anything about the cards. I thought they were just interesting to look at. But I did use the book’s shuffling method, which was very elaborate, and in the morning, I’d turn one card over, and whatever that card was, I would write a poem about it. The card might be Love, or it might be Death. My game, or project, was to write as many poems as there were cards in the deck. But since I couldn’t control which cards came up, I’d write some over and over again, and some I’d never see. That gave me range. I always understood that to write poetry was to be totally exposed. But in the seventies, I only had models of ripping off your clothes, and I couldn’t do that. My brain could be naked, but I didn’t want to be naked. Nor was I interested in the heart or love. The tarot helped me see that I could write about anything—even love, if required—and retain the illusion of not being exposed. If one is writing well, one is totally exposed. But at the same time, one has to feel thoroughly masked or protected (Paris Review).

Ryan didn't realize that writing poetry was going to be her life's work, but she wanted to establish a routine. At thirty years old, she felt she was starting late in the game. She had never taken a creative writing class, nor wanted to. Using the tarot deck was a writing exercise. There was no major curiosity in perfecting her psychic abilities, and she had no interest in learning what each card meant. She simply thought the art was beautiful and would inspire her to write. “…whatever card came up, I would write about that card…I didn't know what it meant. It might be Death. It might be The Hierophant…it might be the Wheel of Fortune or the Seven of Wands, but I set myself the project of writing what I would consider a poem” (Ryan, HCC EduTube). The exercise provided her with range and the tools to write about anything.

As for her use of Bibliomancy, Ryan found inspiration in the famous book collection, Ripley’s Believe It or Not!. She owned a beautiful old hardback from the 1930s that she purchased from a San Francisco used bookstore. The exercise consisted of opening the book to a random page and choosing one of the stories, “like a potato found in Idaho looks like the profile of Abraham Lincoln” (Ryan). After coming up with multitudes of poems, she asked herself if she should be a writer. A voice answered with a question, “Do you like it?”. The answer led to a bright future for Kay Ryan. She decided to attend UCLA for her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. Ryan was hired at Marin College and taught Freshman Composition. When speaking on community colleges, one can hear how passionate Ryan is about the quality and importance of state-funded colleges. “There’s no glamour attached to attending one or being an instructor in one, but the quality of education and the commitment to education in community college is remarkable” (The Reluctant Poet Laureate).

In 1983, her wife and friends helped her to self-publish her first collection of poems, Dragon Act to Dragon Ends. In 1984, her first small-press book was published, titled “Strangely Marked Metal”. When asked about her writing process, she replied, “I have no idea where it’s really going to go…I have some ambition. But I have to hope that ambition will be ambushed” (The Reluctant Poet Laureate). The witty poet was never afraid to use her dry sense of humor.

It wouldn’t be until 2008 that Ryan would begin to receive the notoriety she deserved. She was invited to be appointed the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Surprisingly, Ryan did not want to take the position. She did so out of love for her wife, Carol Adair. The reason she took the second term was because of her wife’s passing, “I have to do something” (The Reluctant Poet Laureate). Kay Ryan went down in history as the first openly queer United States Poet Laureate from 2008-2010.

Ryan’s poetry journey all began with a spiritual challenge: a trek across America on a bike. She discovered her life’s purpose while journaling and practicing simple writing exercises, including cartomancy and bibliomancy. That’s the beauty of using magical practices in poetry. You don’t need to be a high-level magician or a psychic witch to use these tools. They are used in many creative writing classes worldwide. I enjoy using bibliomancy with my writing students. I bring in a stack of books, have the students pick one at random, and then we begin the exercise. I encourage any writer to try out one of these exercises. You might be surprised by the magic you create. As for Kay Ryan, she has managed to remain out of the spotlight. Some even refer to her as the modern Dickinson, and have nicknamed her The Myth. With no social media presence and a few published poems here and there, Kay Ryan remains the most popular, elusive poet of today.

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References

Greer, Mary K. Poets Kay Ryan, Alice Notley & Tarot.

Jean-Francois du Resnel du Bellay, 79.

Kay Ryan Reading at HCC. EduTube. <https://edutube.hccs.edu/mediaPoet+Kay+Ryan/0_82v3wfut>.

Kay Ryan: An Interview with Grace Cavalieri. The American Poetry Review. July/August. 2009.

O’Rourke, John. “2011 Pulitzer Winner for Poetry Reads Tonight” Lowell Lecture: Kay Ryan, cited for “iconoclastic and joyful mind”. April 25, 2011.

Snyder, John A. “Confessions of a Wakefiend: Bibliomantic Readings in ‘Finnegan’s Wake’”. James Joyce Quarterly, Spring 2004, Vol. 41, No. 3 Spring 2004) Published by University of Tulsa.

The Art of Poetry No. 94 Interview in the Paris Review. Interviewed by Sarah Fay. Issue 187, Winter 2008.

Teicher, Craig Morgan. Pedaling up Parnassus. Publishers Weekly. 2006.

Thomas, Louisa. The Reluctant Poet Laureate.

Trachtenberg, Joshua. Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion. New

York: Behrman’s Jewish Book House,1939. 216.

Tuttle, Susan Ilke. “The Art of Divination with Books” Enchanted Living. 2024.

Kay Ryan’s bibliomancy poems:

The Mock Ruin (Flamingo Watching -1994)

A Plain Ordinary Steel Needle Can Float on Pure Water (Elephant Rocks 1996)

Matrigupta  (Say Uncle 2000)

Kay Ryan’s most recent poems can be read at Poets.org from a 2024 publication in Revel Literary Magazine.