New Journal, New Form: Check out the cadralor!

I’m happy to say, dear Reader, that after a five-year hiatus, I have resumed revising and sending out poems! The first fruit of those labors is my poem We Begin at the End in the latest issue of a new journal called Gleam. This journal is completely dedicated to a new form they’re calling the cadralor. It’s an interesting and expansive form, focused on images and intuitive structure instead of meter or anything you can count, other than the required five stanzas. Last night I had the pleasure of hearing many of the poets in the issue read their work, as well as reading mine to them. 

A poetry reading on Zoom is an odd yet oddly beautiful experience. The one I attended last night included people from at least three U.S. time zones and someone from the U.K. There were no audible sighs from the audience after particularly affecting lines, like we would have heard if we were all in a room together — but instead, people quoted those lines in the chat, or made other comments about what spoke to them in each poet’s work. 

I owe thanks for the discovery of this new journal and poetic form to the poet Kris Ringman, whose gorgeous poem, When I am dead, will you make runes with my body? was in Gleam’s inaugural issue. You can also see and/or listen to her reading it on YouTube. 

In early drafts, my poem was an ekphrastic work based on the 10 cards in the Gaian Tarot. Poet and tarot reader Carolyn Cushing had shared that 10s in the tarot can symbolize what comes after a culmination, the end that slides into a beginning again. For a while, I revised and reworked it as a four-stanza poem, but to make it into a cadralor, I added another stanza based on a 10 from a different deck. This is the third stanza that comes in the middle, where the poem transitions from an act of learning and mourning to a growing sense of obligation and connection. Taking on the challenge of writing a cadralor, which pushed me to add a fifth stanza, was key to this poem finally coming together.

Inspiration in the form of Tarot art