Poetry Tarot

I love these poetry tarot cards created by Susan Yount, up now at Escape Into Life in a new poems-about-poetry feature in the ongoing celebration of National Poetry Month in April. Walt Whitman is gorgeous as The Sun. And look how the golden orb transforms into the moon with Lucille Clifton as The Empress and a sort of halo around Federico Garcia Lorca as The High Priest.

More cards here, with captions. Just keep clicking "Older Posts" and eventually you'll find Charles Bukowski as the Devil. And so on. And Emily Dickinson as Death, of course, here.

With butterflies.

I've called this mini-anthology "Joy in Transgression" to honor Yount's duende process, from Lorca, her personal "high priest" in art, using the word "transgress" to mean "crossing a boundary," as well as the idea of "transgression" as disobedience or sin, as we poets are so often told not to write poems about poetry.

But we do! I hope you'll enjoy the poems. You can click on each poet's name to find more of her or his work at EIL. There's even a poem by me, a further transgression. But, hey, I was a contributing poet at Escape Into Life before I was an editor there, so I guess it's not so bad. But it does cross a boundary!

Hey, I think that's me in the background, leaning on my elbow.