Divination at the Intersection of Story and Reader: Michele Battiste on her new book and Oracle deck set, The Elsewhere Oracle (Black Lawrence Press)
Michele Battiste is the author of four full length collections of poetry, including Waiting for the Wreck to Burn (Trio House Press), winner of the Louise Bogan Award for Artistic Merit and Excellence. She has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series and has received multiple grants and awards from multiple organizations, including the New York Foundation for the Arts, and AWP. Battiste works for The Nature Conservancy in Colorado, raising money to save the planet.
KW: The Elsewhere Oracle is quite different from the average poetry book: a box set shaped like a book; each poem based on an oracle card; and an oracle reading of the poem. Wow. Can you describe for us the genesis for this project? And how in the world did you convince a publisher, lost I imagine in cost analysis spreadsheets, to take on what must have been a project with a cost way beyond the simple paperback poetry book?
MB: When I started, I set out to write a traditional collection of poems with a traditional bound paperback in mind. True, I did want the poems to function oracularly, but I wasn’t thinking about putting together an actual deck. After writing several poems, I felt that each one needed interpretive text, like what you’d find in a guidebook, so I wrote an oracle to accompany each poem. I then saw the potential for a hybrid creation – a book of poems that doubles as an oracle deck—but to have a deck, you need art, and I’m no artist. But I couldn’t let the idea go. My friend Priscilla Gonzalez agreed to create artwork for the first few poems. It was wild to see the poems and oracles visually represented, to see the beginnings of a deck. But she couldn’t commit to 50 pieces, so I started exploring digital archives of artwork in the public domain. That was the most amazing rabbit hole I ever went down! And the deck itself turned into a mini-catalogue of artwork mostly spanning the mid-19th century to the present.
Once I started experimenting beyond the poetry, I also started believing that the project probably wouldn’t find a press. I thought it was too literary for traditional deck publishers and too outside-the-box for traditional poetry publishers. I even printed a little prototype deck thinking that it would be one of a kind. But I wasn’t sad. I was having so much fun, and letting go of the idea of publishing freed me up to really enjoy the process, to explore museum archives and to take divination classes.
I was absolutely astounded when Diane Goettel at Black Lawrence Press accepted it. Diane had taken my first two books, so we had a productive history of working together. And she inherited a beautiful Tarot deck—Adrian Arias’s Tarot in Pandemic and Revolution—when BLP took on most of Nomadic Press’s list after they ceased operations. She had noticed how much attention Adrian’s deck received at book fairs and festivals, so she was open to publishing another deck, knowing that despite increased production costs, decks do well. At first, Diane proposed publishing the book on its own and the deck separately, in case some readers were interested in the book without the deck experience. But I believed they needed to be published together, that The Elsewhere Oracle was a cohesive project, not two parts that worked together. She listened. And she went to work investigating printers and book+deck package examples. She did all the leg work on that and—keeping costs in mind, especially what she thought readers would be comfortable paying—she found an amazing printer who created the gorgeous, boxed set. There have been challenges, of course. The printer in China and shipping (by boat) was significantly delayed, but I think it was worth the wait. And I think there are presses out there—even ones we would see as more traditional—willing to consider innovative presentations and hybrid forms beyond the book.
KW: Whether serendipity or fate, I was thinking about your book when I came upon this article in the New York Times, The Fool’s Guide to Major Life Decision by Makenna Goodman. Goodman exalts in banishing her therapist for a deck of tarot cards. Why?
If my sense of foreboding darkness could be explained cosmically, it didn’t have to feel so personal (Goodman).
I thought about how form in the lyric essay can act as safe harbor in writing what seems impossible to the grieving: if I write in form; if I write in the second or third person; if I create a new voice, a new persona, then I can, safely from afar, intuitively and psychically, explore what feels unspeakable, unknowable to me. The poet Richard Hugo believed this, too, back in 1979 publishing his ground-breaking book, The Triggering Town. And here you are with your own fictional town, the “Elsewhere” town.
I would think in writing this book that the very foundation of its creation—choosing the subjects of the cards, choosing the artwork for each card, choosing the card itself to begin the poem, choosing the character and the voice to speak to that card, writing the oracle in response—was a distancing form in itself. Why did you the poet need this form to create this book? Though the book is decidedly determined “a-personal,” you are obviously the guiding force who choses everything, and not just randomly. My proof? I’d be happy to argue that this oracle “reading” has its own arc toward reconciliation, moving between its opening poem, “The Factory,” and the language of apocalyptic chemicals and poison, and its last oracle poem, “The Sun,” awash in Edenic images: “lemon pith,” and “Peach swell,” and songbird.
‘Fess up, Michele!!’
MB: Ha! You’ve caught me! My goal of this book was not only to create distance from myself, but to eliminate the presence of self completely (or as completely as possible). My last book was definitely more of a gaze within—personal grief and mourning. This time, I wanted to write a book about the reader—not just a book where readers can see themselves or feel seen or can empathize with the characters—but a book actually about the reader. I initially experimented with—and then abandoned—formats that insist on reader participation, like the old “Choose your Own Adventure” stories or even Mad Libs. But while readers co-create narrative in those structures, it still isn’t about them. But divination. Divination is at the intersection of story and reader, a place where the line between them disappears. Where reading the cards or the signs is an act of creating meaning for the self.
So, I set out to write something like the Tarot’s major arcana, which is the narrative of the Fool’s Journey. I knew that for readers to be able to find themselves in The Elsewhere Oracle, I needed to create a narrative that functioned as a portal, a way to themselves. So, I imagined an abandoned mountain town where everything and everyone in it was a ghost, but the town wasn’t haunted by the ghosts. The ghosts were haunted by the reader, by the reader’s worries and desires and fears. And in that way, the “I” of the poet, the creator (i.e., me) is secondary. Of course, all of the poems, all of the interpretive oracles, come from my own experiences, thoughts, wisdoms, and foolish notions. I created a narrative with an arc, characters who have relationships with each other, tension between the history of the town and what’s been left behind, but all of that creation is behind a scrim, beyond the world of Elsewhere. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve turned a card for someone, read the poem and oracle (or even just summarized what the card symbolizes) and they say to me, “I’ll tell you what that means.” That’s amazing. That’s just what I wanted.
KW: I was taken by its beautiful book blurbs from authors like Selah Saterstrom and Hyejung Kook, all of whom, in some way or other, refer to your book as a “tool,” a “guide,” a “portal” for the reader into the hidden self. A self-help book, to put it more crudely, for the reader looking for “self-discovery” and “transformation.” That’s nothing new to poetry. You can just google “history of poetry” and find a flood of essays on poetry “instruction” and cultural tomes for the disenfranchised. Old Testament, the Torah come to mind. The red ochre handprints in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave. But your book seems to go further than the ordinary poetry book. After each poem, comes the two-part oracle: an analysis of the card and then a directive to the reader, to the “you,” on what he or she or they may or may not want to do. Does this go beyond the responsibility a poet should take for their readers? As poets, do any of us possess what is necessary in order to give anyone else any advice and not risk harm? Especially when we are the ones seeking, too, in the very writing of the poems, no matter how much we want to say that the self, our self, is not complicit in the work?
MB: Wow, that’s a great question. One that I’ve thought about a lot, especially during revision when friends and editors would ask questions about choices I made in the oracles. Ultimately, I do not think of oracles as directive or prescriptive. I think of them as disruptive. I think of them as an opportunity to entertain other possibilities, to question what we have accepted (or what we have be told). To think about the stories we tell ourselves that reinforce patterns of thought or beliefs about the world. The goal isn’t to say that those thought patterns or beliefs have to change, but to question if they are helpful, or if they are still true, or if they were ever true. What I wanted was to give the reader the freedom to explore and to question and wonder about not only what will be, but what is and what was. And I wanted to give them an opportunity to pause and to access other ways of knowing: somatic or unconscious or spiritual or ancestral. Poetry does that. It insists that we abandon what we know and be open to what could be. To suspend not just our disbelief, but our logical and conscious ways of making sense. And that’s what I wanted to do with the oracles. To be extensions of the poems. To be full of possibilities. There’s a lot of “maybe” and “perhaps” in the oracles, the offering of options. And in the end, that is what I hope I offer readers. The space to choose.
KW: Four books, including Elsewhere, readings, book launches, your “regular” and wonderful job at the Nature Conservancy . . . what’s coming next for you?
MB: A novel! I used to write both fiction and poetry before I started my MFA and focused on poetry. And I have always been passionate about storytelling. I love writing linked, narrative poems, and I feel like tendrils of my writing have always reached toward fiction, and lately, toward world creation. Elsewhere is, at its foundation, an invented world. In my last book of poems, I wrote a linked series about an invented town called Ruination, its unnamed neighboring town, and the river that separated them. After I finished Elsewhere, my mind kept returning to Ruination, to the many stories it held beyond the short series of poems. And so I started writing about it again, this time in longform fiction. And it’s a mess! And I love the mess! And once again I think that this project may not see the light of day, but I don’t care. I’m having a blast writing it.
