The Songs of Hecate: Poetry and the Language of the Occult.

 In recent years, in the UK, and across Europe and the US, there has been a growing fascination with the occult, and especially with the figure of the witch, in all her variety, difference and infinite capacity. Much has already been written about contemporary Western culture’s renewed interest in witchcraft and the occult, from the appearance of ‘insta-witches’ to the rise of neo-pagan practice. But what I want to do in this talk is think about this ‘occult moment’ in relation to poetry. I want to explore this because these occult elements, to me, seem to offer something that speaks particularly to the nature of and difficulties of poetry itself – to what it might be possible to make language do, to what might be made possible through language. My particular occult interest is the witch – the witch as an explosively radical female figure, a site of resistance, a way out of silence and silencing. What she has made possible for me is a new relationship with poetic speaking, with the power of the word, and with what that power might make possible for liberatory, feminist thinking. These forms of thinking are what I will focus on within this talk.

Dr Rebecca Tamás currently works as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University, where she co-convenes The York Centre for Writing Poetry Series. She is an editor, with Sarah Shin, of the 2018 anthology Spells: Occult Poetry for the 21st Century (Ignota Press). Her first full length collection of poetry, 'WITCH', came out from Penned in the Margins in 2019, and was a ‘Paris Review Staff Pick,’ and a Guardian, Times, Telegraph and The White Review ‘Book of the Year’. Her essay collection 'Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman,' was published by Makina Books in October 2020, and was recently longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize.