Bibliomancy Ushers Out the Voices of Ronald Johnson, Cole Swensen, Tristan Tzara, Tommy Pico, Rosmarie Waldrop

Poet Matthew Kosinski writes for The Millions about bibliomancy, with reference to Ronald Johnson's ARK. "I was looking for a way to reanimate the text," he writes. "ARK is by no means a boring work, but it is an imposing one, a textual architecture thick with imagery, reference, incantation, and meditation, often collaged together fragmentarily. It is Whitmanic in its scope and joy, but this yawp endures for hundreds of pages." More:

…Bibliomancy was a way to foreground the sense of playfulness inherent to ARK that I had lost in marathon reading sessions. There’s a certain undeniable thrill to hopping from verse to verse according to the whims of the book and your blind finger. 

An excerpt from my Q&A session with ARK:

Q: I would like to know more about my future in general.

 

A:

Head deep
in neither
aether, nether

 

Q: I want a new job. What kind of work am I best suited for?

 

 

A:

f lux f lux f lux f
lux f lux f lux f l
ux f lux f lux f lu
x f lux f lux f lux
f lux f lux f lux f

 

Q: Where is my path taking me in life?

A:

into pool of being being
hommage floréal
ripple to what Ends ring going, gone

This being my first crack at divination, I stuck with your basic first-time-at-the-palm-reader’s set of questions. The answers, as you can see, arrived obliquely. Part of the fun of bibliomancy is hashing out the message for yourself. Ghosts wouldn’t be so connotatively rich if they made perfect sense. The occult, etymologically speaking, is that which is hidden.

Continue this journey, which eventually draws in Cole Swensen, Tristan Tzara, Tommy Pico, and Rosmarie Waldrop, at The Millions.