We (meaning us) are back with another Romantic Poets in the Wild. This week we are featuring poetry by Jodie Marley!
Jodie Marley (she/her) researches William Blake and his cultural legacy. Her current projects include a monograph exploring Blake’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception; her PhD (2022) focused on Blake and the Celtic Twilight. She has published articles in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, VALA: The Journal of the William Blake Society, and Good Horoscope. Her personal interests include poetry and dance.
Here is what Jodie had to say about the following poem, entitled “Consuming and consumed”:
This is a poem I hadn’t touched in years. I had it in mind when Adam sent out the call for poetry ‘inspired’ by Romanticism, and distilled something that was much more complicated. My process is very intuitive. I write reams and reams and return later to refine. It’s a constant stream of consciousness with images gleaned from everywhere. I think this comes from being a diarist for decades. I’m very used to spilling my experiences, my encounters with others, onto a page, and experimenting with what forms.
I remembered this piece as much more Blakean than it seems now. If it is Blakean, then it’s in the attitude rather than the form. It reminds me a bit of Blake and John Varley arguing over fortune telling. That said, it seems I have pinched some of Blake’s core motifs: flames, fire, furnaces, heart-gorges. There’s an adaptation of a Yeats line too, but I’ll leave that to you to find. Reading it back the poem also reminds me of the opening of one of my favourite films, Cléo de 5 à 7, where the protagonist has an awful reading. The cards appear in colour, the camera flicks up in black and white to two women interrupting each other, increasingly tearful. Ultimately, the protagonist accepts her gloomy fate. The film resumes in monochrome.
When I was editing, I saw Oothoon in the narrator, in her hunger and in her defiance of guilt, and her faith in her voice against all odds. Since writing this poem the first time, I’ve researched women Romantic prophets Dorothy Gott and Joanna Southcott, and I see them in here too. Again, I don’t think those were conscious inclusions.
Without giving too much of myself away, the poem details feelings of guilt, regret, thoughts about Catholicism and ‘seeing’ in the mediumship sense. I am the grandchild of Irish immigrants on all sides and inherited a French Tarot deck from my mother. My family is very Catholic but conversely very open to seeing spirits. I am, disappointingly, the only woman in my family not to have seen one, although I’ve had several ‘supernatural’ experiences that cannot be explained.
Consuming and consumed
Between two pillars,
a woman upstanding.
Cardamom on my tongue
sucks dry the urge to speak
I’m not the conduit
(this time).
Her moon face flickers inwards, eyes
tightly coiled and kohled
if the spirits swirl around us
why does her blood shoot back
from her fingertips
as I hold her cold, knotted hands?
‘You’ve no boundaries’, she says
as my sweat wells into her palms.
We were one when our eyes locked,
when my forearms unstuck
from laminated tablecloth
when she prophesied
as my face burned
it’ll be easy for me to leave him
my feet never touch the ground.
This seer, conversing daily with spirits,
catches in me a glimpse
of her once sullied reflection.
She tells me,
I am a holy woman
burdened by the withering flesh of men
I must bear with forgiveness,
as their memory dims
my spirit refines.
(this woman, sitting
between two wooden beams
at a round sticky table
is as Catholic in spirit
as my grandmother
hands burdened by guilt exchanged
burning between our palms)
If I am a holy woman
consumed by the flesh of men
why must I bear her and them both?
to repent this hungry heart of mine.
Eyelids flicker back
my hands rest on the table
by a pack of yellowed cards
I’m shaking –
the espresso or the ecstasy?
My feet never touched the ground,
it was easy for me to leave.
You can find Jodie on social media at the following places: @jodie_l_marley on X/Twitter; on Bluesky @jodielmarley; on Instagram @jodie.e.eternity. You can also reach her at jodie.l.marley@gmail.com.
We hope you enjoyed this one; I certainly did! Join us next time for poetry by Yu-Hung Tien.