Our Liminal Minds (Part I of III)
Writing from our own galactic outer rims.
When I was 15 I thought I might be a witch.
I’d often feel compelled by some unknown inner force to sit on the floor, a large sketchpad before me, and rock back and forth while writing poetry which seemed to come through me from someplace else.
Now that I’m 40, I understand I’m not a witch, just a fervent poet. Still, I’ve maintained a vibrant, ongoing curiosity about the mysterious source(s) of poetry. I’ve explored the mind’s ability to think on its feet and pull creations from “nothing”—improvising poetry and music live onstage; conducting musicians using only gestures and facial expressions; and developing methods of improvisatory storytelling, music-making, and drawing. I’ve documented the surreal ramblings and visions of the half-asleep mind (and I’m co-authoring a book about this!).
Most recently, I’ve been learning about the creative practices born of 19th–century Spiritualism1—spirit writing, automatic writing, and trance speech—and familiarizing myself with a few poets who’ve made work in that tradition.
My experiences with two decades of these explorations have helped nudge my creative practice out of unhelpful orbits around perfectionism and ideas of “failure” and into new orbits around patience, curiosity, and adventure. I’ve come to believe that writing from our liminal minds can help to exorcise our writing demons—self-consciousness, our berating self-critic, and “writer’s block".2
Below—part I of an initial 3-part series with which I’m launching this newsletter—I delve into spirit writing, automatic writing, and trance speech.
In part II, I explore their sisters, freewriting & improvisation.
And in part III, I share with you the strange and beguiling realms of hypnagogia & hypnopompia.
In each installment I’ll include writing exercises or prompts. I call these challenges, because I want to highlight the fact that being creative in new directions requires bravery—to be a rookie, to write “badly”, or even to believe in ourselves and our writing enough to make the attempt. And it takes courage to face the often comically large chasm between what we want to express, and what appears on the paper.
Yet this is all part of why I love writing poetry—I celebrate this always-uphill climb, the bar being raised each time, or in e.e. cummings’ words:
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.
– e.e. cummings, Introduction to Collected Poems (1938)
Inviting the Unknown
Spiritualism, “a system of belief or religious practice based on supposed communication with the spirits of the dead, especially through mediums,”3 took hold in mid-19th century America and Britain and enjoyed massive popularity well into the 20th century. Mediums (almost always women) led séances, spoke in spirits’ “voices,” and engaged in creative activities, like automatic writing.
We might see these women as frauds, taking advantage of grief-stricken believers. Or perhaps they really were mystics reaching across the divide between life and death. I am inclined to think they were authors, finding novel ways to creatively communicate their own ideas and stories at a time when outspoken, creative, bold women were often silenced, ridiculed, or institutionalized.
Their outpourings and zeal have left us with some incredibly rich, creative legacies—the practices of spirit writing, automatic writing, and trance speech.
Spirit Writing
For all good poets […] compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed.
– Plato, Ion, 380 B.C.E. (trans. Jowett)
The poems of Lucille Clifton (1936–2010) are luminescent, with a masterfully understated horror, empathy, and courage.
Marina Magloire highlights Clifton’s engagement with “spirit writing” in a fascinating 2020 article in the Paris Review. Through this practice—a type of written mediumship in which one may commune back and forth with spirits, or take dictation from them—Clifton gathered messages from deceased loved ones; ideas about death, reincarnation, and identity; and dire warnings about the fate of the planet.
Although these texts remain unpublished, I cannot help but feel its influence on her poetry.4 She often wrote persona poems, speaking in the voices of others—as in for example her poem Brothers, or a poem in the voice of a “Yeti poet,”5 or a profound poem in the voice of her husband as he describes his own death experience.
The title of her book Two-Headed Woman (1980) refers directly to her spirit-communing practice. As Magloire writes, “‘Two-headed woman' is a traditional African American term used to describe women gifted with access to the spirit world as well as to the material world.”
Clifton described a two-headed woman thusly6:
one face turned outward
one face
slowly swiveling in
Challenge: Spirit Writing
You can attempt a version of spirit writing whether you are a skeptic or a believer—the goal here is to expand your writing practice.
BELIEVER: Sit quietly and, through any safe means that feels right to you, open your mind to the messages of an unfamiliar but benevolent spirit. Perhaps this is a kind ancestor whom you never knew, or someone who lived in your house a century ago. Don’t choose anyone whom you—or anyone in your circles—knew personally.
SKEPTIC: Select an unfamiliar character, real or fictional, named or nameless, dead or alive. Some ideas for characters, if you’re stuck: a six-year-old child named Wilbra; a 100-year-old astronaut; a prehistoric person; a fish, tree or other non-human living thing.
BOTH: Write a first-person poem-monologue in this spirit or character’s “voice”. Imagine their thoughts, words, or messages. Try not to either compose or edit. Don’t worry about grammar or sense or form, or whether it makes for a good poem. You might write just a list of words that are tangentially associated (or not). It might be a list of exclamations, or perhaps a description of a place or a moment.
Try to not stop writing until you’re done—the goal here is to draw this writing from a source other than your conscious/planning/composing mind.
Alternatively, if the spirit/character approach isn’t jiving with you, try something more abstract: crystal-gazing or shell-hearing. Stare into a crystal (you can use anything crystal-like—common quartz, colored glass, etc) and describe—at length—what you see inside it. With shell-hearing, hold a seashell to your ear and write what you hear, in detail. Try not to be literal—the goal here is to access your wild, subterranean imagination. Sit with it a while in order to let your mind relax and begin to “see” or “hear” creative things. As above, try to not stop writing until you’re done.
People in my life kept dying, and each time they died I stood at this chasm, and the wall between the living and the dead collapsed.
– Alice Notley7
Open almost any of the recent collections of poetry by poet Alice Notley (b. 1945) and you’ll find dialogues, arguments, and monologues in different voices; choruses of identities. She’s endured the deaths of two consecutive husbands, and has developed a kind of seamless back-and-forth communion with the dead which pervades much of her writing.
And although she has posited8 that poetry may be sourced from spirits, she’s also expressed doubts about the voices she channels.
I’m never sure whether I’m really hearing other voices or am inhabiting my imagination. Sometimes I know for sure a dead person is talking to me, but not always. I am obviously walking some line between charlatanism and authenticity that is scary and satisfying.
– Notley9
To me, the point isn’t whether Clifton and Notley are accessing spirit voices or their own minds. The point is that when we relinquish even just a little of our conscious control, creative treasures from elsewhere have space to emerge.
Which is a good segue to psychoanalysis—at least, for the skeptics among you.
Automatic Writing
Cryptomnesia: The expression of long-forgotten memories that occurred without the subject’s conscious recognition.
- Massicotte, Trance Speakers10
If you have a casual understanding of psychoanalysis, you’ll probably be familiar with the idea of assigning insightful meaning to subconsciously begotten words—from dreams, or slips of the tongue. The psychoanalyst Karl Jung felt that “the communications of ‘spirits’ are statements about the unconscious psyche … they have this in common with dreams …” (Trance Speakers, 58). Early psychoanalysts generally saw spirit writing and trance speech as either the subconscious or super-distant memories bubbling to the surface and “talking”.
Automatic Writing (1930) by Dr. Anita Mühl is a ghastly book, containing rampant racism, sexism, and ableism. Still, I found myself thumbing through it because she posits that automatic writing is a method by which we might access our subconscious minds, essentially adding it to the repertoire of subconscious communiqués worthy of analysis.
Automatic writing is the act of generating texts whilst not paying attention. To help her patients attempt it, Mühl designed a nifty apparatus in which to hang one’s writing arm—a sling secured to a table by a cast iron clamp—along with an optional little screen for hiding what one’s own hand was doing.
Most examples she includes of automatic writing produced by her patients are tiresome, lengthy rhyming poems about fairies or nature. She explains that the remainder were simply too violent or unbecoming to share.
However, the point she made over and over was that in every instance, the writing produced by her patients was:
a) unusual when compared with the patients’ previously demonstrated abilities and creative inclinations, and
b) often (though not always) created without the patient consciously monitoring or— occasionally—even recalling its creation.
Challenge: Automatic Writing
Step 1: Get in the swing of the thing.
Doodle (draw) with one hand while carrying out another engaging activity, and try not to look at the paper. If you don’t feel comfortable doodling without looking, just scribble. The goal is to loosen yourself up, let go of a tad of conscious control, and invite messiness and nonsense in.
Step 2: Attempt to write.
Write on a heavy pad of paper with one hand while carrying out another activity, devoting zero or very minimal percentage of your attention to what your hand is doing. To make it even simpler, you can try writing without lifting the pen (though it might be harder to decipher later).
Examples of engaging activities include reading a book aloud or carrying on a conversation with someone.
If at first you don’t produce anything, be heartened by one of Dr. Mühl’s patients who, having made 11 separate attempts with zero success, successfully produced automatic writing on their 12th try.
The goal here is to play with dialing down your attention while instructing your hand to make the movements of writing, and to hold curiosity (rather than condemnation) about the results.
Trance Speech
Trance speech is speech generated while in a disassociated state, which in turn creates texts, if/when someone writes it down. In almost any séance worth its salt, it was common to behold a performance of trance speech.
Truly disassociated states are dangerous and their achievement should not be attempted. However, slight disassociation can produce interesting results. By this I mean the state we are in when we “stare into space”—we stop focusing our eyes; we may mutter to ourselves.
I once drove alone from Michigan to Wyoming and back, and spoke into a recorder as I gazed at the long, straight road ahead of me. I was not disassociated, just a bit dulled by the endless sameness. Over 40 pages of my transcribed mutterings were, over the next 10 years, eventually edited down into a poem, “song for ourselves.”
Challenge: Trance-ish (Dulled-Mind) Speech
Record yourself speaking while in a dulled-mind state, then transcribe it later.
You can use the voice memo app if you have a smartphone, or a small digital or cassette recorder. Try it on a long road trip (always being safe and only looking at screens when the vehicle is stopped), or the next time you’re on hold for an extended period. It can help if you’re feeling a little tired, bored, and dulled.
Next month in part II I’ll continue this exploration, delving into freewriting & improvisation practices. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear about any poetic forays & exploits you may have while tackling the challenges. You’re welcome to leave a comment, or send me a note!
This is a good moment to mention NaNoWriMo, an event which challenges you to write 50,000 words during the month of November (an average of 1666.6 per day!). I’ve been doing it off and on since 2002. Though I’ve never reached the word goal, boy howdy does it get me writing! It’s geared toward novelists but don’t let that stop you!
Definition from Oxford Languages via Google.
Many of Lucille Clifton’s books (and so much other literature) can be borrowed for free (in digital form in your browser) at the Internet Archive’s Open Library.
from The Book of Light (1993)
“in this garden,” from two-headed woman, (University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 23.
Shoshana Olidort, “Between the Living and the Dead: An Interview with Alice Notley,” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 25, 2016.
“Sometimes I think that there is no poetry written without the intervention of the dead. It’s their voices speaking to you that allow you to find words from nowhere; they are the muse.” (Olidort, “Between.”)
“Talk to the Dead: Ruth Lilly Prize winner Alice Notley on the voice and spirits of her poetry”, The Poetry Foundation, May 6, 2015.
Claudie Massicotte, Trance Speakers: Femininity and Authorship in Spiritual Séances, 1850-1930 (Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 56.
These were indeed challenging - I don't like to let my guard down or loosen my grip! But I think some interesting metaphors for my young life emerged when I imagined writing from the point of view of a historical figure - a Roman soldier of all things!