title: Doom scroll &amp; Manifesting the divine: an examination of contemporary occult poetry
title: Manifesting the divine: an examination of contemporary occult poetry
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Paparo, Stefano
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: occult imagery
subject: contemporary poetry
subject: literary modalities
subject: Rebecca Tamás
subject: CA Conrad
subject: creative writing

description: Doom Scroll is a darkly humorous collection of poems composed over the course of four years. This collection comprises written poetry, concrete poetry, erasure, and collage, and draws much of its inspiration from the realm of nightmare and personal, intimate relationships. These poems champion the surreal, the freakish, the spectral, and the grotesque, and they moreover wrestle with loss, despair, familial bonds, and matters of love. These poems are riddled with the paraphernalia of domesticity, outer space, and death. They are self-aware. From the quiet, calm, familiar Earthscapes of poems like ‘Under the Elm at the Old Burying Point’ and ‘Carlotta, Carlotta’, to the wild, perverse, disturbed ‘dreamscapes’ of poems like ‘Descartes Is Eating The Living’ and ‘On A Road With No End’, Doom Scroll explores the strangeness of ‘being’ and challenges the limitations of rationality. What I aimed for with many of these poems was that they might capture the danger, the misery, and the madness of human experience, of navigating not only external reality but the realm of thought and dream, offering the reader no remedy for the ills of the world, no lifeline, and no refuge from nightmare. Poems like ‘Doom Scroll’, ‘Impossibly Dark and Insane’, the series of ‘Here’ poems, and the series of ‘City of Altars’ poems lean into the chaos. My broad intention was that these poems would bear witness to the effects of societal decay, of primordial fear and grief, but resist the impulse to comfort the reader. These poems similarly explore liminal spaces as a synthesis of antiquity and modernity, the magical and mundane, and which situates them in places outside of time. Though several poems in Doom Scroll draw on conventional occult imagery or vocabulary, like ‘Witch’, ‘A Tiny Spell’, ‘American Spirit’, and the series of ‘City of Altars’ poems, these poems are primarily concerned with matters beyond the scope of conventional and contemporary occult values. That is, these poems do not attempt to claim the ‘divine’ as it pertains to self-discovery or promoting a magical worldview, nor do they uphold eco-conscious, feminist, or otherwise antipatriarchal values. What I aimed for with these poems, broadly, was that they might engage the occult as an exploration of strange or hidden realities, yet eschew the didactic approach often present in contemporary occult poetry. The accompanying essay, ‘Manifesting the Divine: An Examination of Contemporary Occult Poetry’, examines the dogmatic principles and literary modalities of occult poetry in Rebecca Tamás’ debut poetry collection WITCH, CA Conrad’s poetry collection Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, and the poetry anthology Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry (edited by Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás). The aim of this essay is not to define or redefine ‘occult poetry’, but rather to explore evolving definitions and modalities of occult poetry in a few representative texts. Moreover, this essay explores my own work in conversation with Spells, WITCH, and Ecodeviance, and investigates the broader influence of the ‘occult’ in my creative process.