A Quote by Alice Notley

I'm not an expert in the deck at all. My interest lies somewhere near a sense that words are like tarot cards, and that a poem manipulates unpredictable depths with its words. . . . I like the tarot because it works like poetry and because you don't really have to 'believe in' anything. It's there to be used. The symbols are remarkably durable and beautiful; they float out to encompass all kinds of meanings.
I've had something sort of like angel cards where you pull out an angel card that turns out, like, grandmother was watching over me. And I believe, in some way, I haven't been brave enough to engage with tarot cards mostly because they always end on a bad note. I'm sure if I understood tarot cards more I wouldn't be as fearful.
You know, it was just another presentation of my work, and a funny one, because the cards are quite different from the normal Tarot deck, no?
Tarot cards likely originated in northern Italy during the late 14th or early 15th century. The oldest surviving set, known as the Visconti-Sforza deck, was created for the Duke of Milan's family around 1440. The cards were used to play a bridge-like game known as tarocchi, popular at the time among nobles and other leisure lovers.
Mystical groups such as the Theosophical Society and the Rosicrucians turned tarot into an American fad during the early 1900s. Many American tarot practitioners use a set of cards known as the Waite-Smith deck, created in 1909 by A.E. Waite, a British member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the artist Pamela Colman Smith.
Words are delicate instruments: How to use them so that, after having read the poem, the taste remaining is not of the words themselves, but of a thought, a situation, a parallel reality? If not used appropriately, words in poetry are like the ugly remains of food after eating. What I mean is that readers will reject words if they don't serve to shift attention from themselves to somewhere else.
I remember my mother had this deck of cards that her mother had given her and that she passed on to me. It was a gypsy tarot deck that I used to carry everywhere.
He should have known better because, early in his learnings under his brother Mahmoud, he had discovered that long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings, but short words were slippery, unpredictable changing their meanings without any pattern. Or so he seemed to grok. Short human words were never like a short Martian word - such as grok which forever meant exactly the same thing. Short human words were like trying to lift water with a knife. And this had been a very short word.
I looked up the Queen of Swords and I read the meaning. It was a tarot card. The description of the tarot card sounded to me like the description of a certain type of woman: She's strong, she's proud, she's intelligent and all these different things. I was like, that's how I want to be.
... mathematics is very much like poetry ... what makes a good poem -- a great poem -- is that there is a large amount of thought expressed in very few words. In this sense formulas like or are poems.
I don't really believe in palm readers and crystal balls and tarot cards, but I respond to the need for them.
The thing about tarot - maybe this to me is the difference between it and working with a psychic - to me it's clarifying the things that you already know. I don't feel like any tarot reading I've done or received was particularly surprising. They always speak to things that you kind of felt already.
I can read the Tarot cards and believe in ghosts.
I'm kind of a good girl - and I'm not. I'm a good girl because I really believe in love, integrity, and respect. I'm a bad girl because I like to tease. I know that I have sex appeal in my deck of cards. But I like to get people thinking. That's what the stories in my music do.
I really admire songwriters or any kind of writer, painter or artist that says, "I'm going to get up at 8 o'clock in the morning and spend this time to this time creating." I do that sometimes, but the songs I like the best come as gifts from somewhere. It's almost like you didn't do anything, like you can't take credit for it because you sat down and the melody and words came out.
I have my cards read every time I pass a tarot-reader booth. I would be so embarrassed to have one of those 900 numbers appear on my phone bill, because I don't know how I would explain it to my business manager. It would almost be like saying, 'Okay, I'm white trash.'
I have my cards read every time I pass a tarot-reader booth. I would be so embarrassed to have one of those 900 numbers appear on my phone bill, because I don't know how I would explain it to my business manager. It would almost be like saying, Okay, I'm white trash.
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