Cards for Bards
How to Write Poetry Using the Tarot
In this post:
In honor of National Poetry Month, I’m sharing a chapter on writing poetry using the tarot from my new book, Mystic Storyteller: A Writer’s Guide to Using the Tarot for Creative Inspiration.
Intuit a Haiku is a practice activity also pulled from the book.
I’ve included an example card selection and a poem intuited from the spread.
Order your copy of Mystic Storyteller.
My introduction to poetry was early on, when I was a toddler. Gran stocked my shelves with Mother Goose, Dr. Seuss, and classic French and British nursery rhymes like Frère Jacques, Old King Cole, and Humpty Dumpty. Rhyming stories that danced from my grandmother’s lacquered lips sparked a buzzing blissfulness in my belly. The experience was joy I could hear with my ears, see with my imagination, and feel with my heart.
Writing poetry, on the other hand, felt like an initiation, as if I were being invited to harness all that joy and cast spells onto my wide-ruled pages.
The schoolyear was 1984-85, and I was in the third grade. Our teacher would read to us after lunch, and one day she selected a new book we hadn’t yet seen. From where I was sitting, I could tell that the book’s jacket was pearly white with thin black line drawings and chunky slanted font. The book featured a spine much thicker than the spectrum of adapted American classics the teacher had traditionally chosen from our reading shelf.
“I have a treat for you,” the teacher declared, “a new book of poetry...”
“Poetry?” a boy in the class interjected. The classroom trembled with soft snickering.
“Yes, poetry,” she answered, matter-of-factly, resting the book on her lap and smoothing its cover with her palms. “Because that’s our next writing lesson: poetry.”
The class looked around at one another, many students with expressions twisted in confusion, others sighing with dread. A few of us, however, clung to the edges of our seats and desks, our brows hiked so high in anticipation that our foreheads must’ve stretched an entire inch.
“This book is called ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends,’ by Shel Silverstein.”
Other students may have nodded off in digestive drowsiness, but I sat wide awake, my eyes glazed over and my imagination cranking through the poems’ scenes like a View-Master. A snail that lived in your nose and bit off your finger if you picked boogers, a girl who ate an entire whale, and a deserted home overrun with ferns and birds and bats and gnomes.
That day in third grade was the moment I fell in love with poetry.
While rhyming limericks and acrostic poems with lines that spelled out the seasons came easy for me to write, the style of poetry I most enjoyed proved more challenging: haiku.
Discovering that some of the wildest, most thrilling stories could be told in only three lines blew my seven-year-old mind. The challenge of choosing and arranging words that added up to only five, seven, and five syllables, respectively, became a storytelling task at which I excelled.
During one assignment, in particular, our class was paired together in teams and instructed to write and illustrate a haiku. Once we were finished, we would have to stand in front of the classroom, one of our pair holding our drawings while the other read our poem aloud. I was partnered with a girl named Brooke, who was an artist like me but who was painfully shy. We agreed that she would sketch and present our illustration, and I would write and read our haiku. Sadly, although I can see the illustration in my mind, I don’t have it to share with you; however, I do remember our haiku.
Since the third grade, I’ve written and saved enough poetry to publish several collections. When I started working with the tarot many years ago, poetry seemed an obvious exercise in creativity, and when I learned that the cards had been originally used as a poetry game (See Chapter 5 of Mystic Storyteller, A Brief History of Tarot), I began pulling cards and using them to inspire poems.
Haiku came easily, as three-card spreads provided convenient containers that encouraged syllable arrangement. Combine that structure with inspirational illustrations and the poetry felt like it was writing itself.
If you are a poet, the practice activity that follows is sure to help you learn to seek inspiration in the cards. On the other hand, if you’ve never attempted poetry or you haven’t felt successful writing it, you are encouraged to give the activity a try. Who knows? You might find you’re a bard with the cards after all.
Practice Activity: Intuit a Haiku
As mentioned earlier, haiku is an unrhymed short-form poetry written across three lines. The words in the first line contain five syllables, the second line has seven syllables, and the third line concludes with five. These simple poems are meant to convey a larger picture with fewer words. In this activity, you can use your tarot cards for both structure and inspiration when writing haiku.
What you need for this activity:
Your favorite tarot deck – Click here to get your copy of Mystic Storyteller Tarot.
Your favorite tools for notetaking.
Your intuition and imagination.
Instructions:
Shuffle your tarot deck until you are satisfied that the cards are ready, and then cut the deck into three piles.
Turn over the card from the top of each pile.
For Card 1, use your imagination and what you’ve learned about the tarot and its symbolism to intuit a 5-syllable phrase inspired by the card’s illustration.
For Card 2, intuit a 7-syllable phrase that is related to the first one. Don’t worry about your thoughts rhyming, as haiku doesn’t have to rhyme.
Repeat for Card 3, intuiting another 5-syllable phrase that relates to the story unfolding across the lines.
Here’s an example:
When I engaged in this activity, I drew the following cards: Temperance, Ten of Wands, and Seven of Cups.
Considering each card’s illustration and symbolism, and applying the rules of haiku, here’s the poem that came to mind:
Did you count out the syllables on your fingers, too? They’re all there: 5-7-5. And together, the three lines tell a story about little ol’ me.
Here’s the story:
Ever the Sagittarian, I’m adventurous and I love to travel... however, I’m a “collector” and I need to have as many baubles and doodads and whatnots around me to help ignite inspiration. This means I don’t travel light, and as you might imagine, my home is a maximalist’s haven.
See? The haiku conveyed that entire story about me in only 17 syllables.
Here’s how the haiku connects to the story:
Temperance – This card represents Sagittarius in the zodiac (See Chapter 23 – Astrology and the Tarot).
Ten of Wands – Wands are symbolic of passion and spirit, and the figure clearly looks encumbered with all those pencils.
Seven of Cups – Cups are the suit that represents heart and this fellow clearly has a collection of cups to rival a magpie’s.
Alternative Version
Shake off the haiku rules, pull as many cards as you wish, and write a poem of any style.
What poem did you intuit from the cards?
Did you use the activity to write a haiku or another type of poem? I’d love to hear it! If you are called to share, please do so in a comment.
Get your copy of MYSTIC STORYTELLER
Mystic Storyteller is a book and companion tarot deck for writers who want to enhance their creativity, elevate storytelling, develop fiction plots and scenes, and so much more.
About Mandy
Amanda "Mandy" Hughes is an author and instructional designer who uses the tarot to inspire storytelling. Her book Mystic Storyteller: A Writer’s Guide to Using the Tarot for Creative Inspiration and companion tarot deck are helping her peers do exactly that. She also writes fiction under pen name A. Lee Hughes. Mandy lives in Georgia with her husband and four sons, two of whom are furrier than the others (but not by much). Visit her website at www.haintbluecreative.com and find her on Substack @HaintBlueCreative.
Queen Wands, Death, 4 Pentacles
A black cat who dreams
voyages into the rift.
Holding fast, she sits