Return to Weimar and Poetry

13 more days and I will return to University. I'm very excited, I can't wait. I wish I was there already. There is only so much of hanging out in the same cafe and messing around that a guy can take and I believe I have reached my limit. Alright, I'll miss my friends and my cafe. But I'll have friends waiting for me back at Waterloo, as well as a start to the Weimar Mage game. My vacation from that is over and I think I have found a stress free way of developing the entire consiliuum. Tarot Cards.

The Mage: the Awakening sourebook, Keys to the Supernal Tarot, give advise on how to create a character through randomly drawing Tarot cards. I think this could be a really good idea, as it saves me the time to come up with a concept to start with. I can just draw five cards from a Tarot deck, and I happen to own a Rider-Waite Tarot deck, and then work out the character from what I've got. It's a brilliantly simply way to develop this and I don't have to worry about getting my hair in a bunch. I'm also thinking about using Tarot cards to develop plot, and giving all the PCs and in-character reading, I can use the images in that for further plot devices with the character. Also, I figure that if I'm going to do a Mage game right, which is part of the reason I'm running this, I'm going to need some ancient magical, religious or philosophical background to draw symbolism from. Tarot is already built into the game. I was going to work in Kabbalah, but the rules for replacing that as the Magical system seem a bit complcated and I want to work through what the Sephirot actually mean.

I'm also reading, or trying to read, quite alot of poetry. I'm looking into Arthur Rimbaud again, and he's quite a fine poet. I don't speak his native language, but I'm reading the Wyatt Mason translation and I think that's pretty good. I'm a bit worried about reading poets in translation, because I worry that I'm not actually reading the poet, but the translator. Strangelly, I don't have this problem when I read Bolano or Dostoyevsky. Poetry is different. Poetry is about the words. Still, I like Bolano's language, even if I'm not reading Bolano in his native language. The words are still good and I like how they feel. Maybe I'm reading Rimbaud after all.

I'm also reading the poetry of Ezra Pound, because Ezra Pound is supposed to be a very important poet. For some reason I'm starting with the Cantos, which is supposed to be a major piece of 20th century poetry and Pound's greatest written work, which he wrote for most of his life. I'm not sure what I think of Pound, but the entire world of poetry is still very new to me. The only poet I can say I really like is Allen Ginsberg, and I sometimes wonder if I have simply decided to like him. I also like Gerard Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot. I guess I like more poets then I think. I guess that because of all this, I'm trying to become a poet. Once University starts, I plan on writing a good deal of poetry and read as much poetry as I can.

The idea of becoming a poet probubly came from listening to Indeefeed: Performance Poetry. As such, I'm inspired by slam poetry and I think most of the poetry I write now comes from a slam aesthetic. I feel poetry, at least modern poetry, is meant to be an oral tradition. I'm thinking of doing a thing on youtube, where I would read my poetry for videos. So far the only think I can think of for putting up are my poems "Anarchy Baby" and my only published short story, which I think I might go over. I didn't edit it the first time, and I think that I could do better with it. I have an account set up, but I need to figure out where I can get a camera to film the readings and then put them on the youtube. Thankfully, I have a cousin who's in the computer world and he will be with me on my floor. When I have something up I'll probubly put it up on my blog.

Well, I'm talking with a friend. I better go.