A broadly similar account of magic can be found in the work of anthropologist David Graeber, for whom magic was adjacent to politics. For Graeber, politics likewise operates with a mode of power that rests in its capacity to command conviction in its own existence and effectiveness. Magical power and political power are both in this respect circular. Graeber also called attention to observations that were widely distributed through anthropological texts while nonetheless being largely neglected by the anthropologists who had recorded them. For it wasn’t just anthropologists who tended to discount the veracity of their informants’ statements about magical powers; it was also those native informants themselves. In many of the societies studied by anthropologists, magic tended to be discussed in contradictory ways, with a mixture of sceptical disbelief and credulous fear. Anthropologists, in transcribing these conversations, tended to arrogate the scepticism to themselves while attributing fear to their interlocutors alone. But in truth both attitudes were on both sides.

This is an ambiguity not unlike the one Pilkington finds on display in his three poets. And it is remarkably similar to the conflicted stance that, as Graeber notes, people often take up towards those who hold power over them. You might have good reason to think your boss is full of shit; you might have equally good reason to be scared of them. You might think Trump is a phony – a pure confection of bile, kayfabe and hairspray. You might also think he’s dangerous. Far from being mutually exclusive, those two feelings actually underpin each other. For in such cases, Graeber writes,

we are probably just dealing… with the paradox of power, power being something which exists only if other people think it does; a paradox that I have also argued lies also at the core of magic, which always seems to be surrounded by an aura of fraud, showmanship, and chicanery. But one could argue it is not just the paradox of power. It is also the paradox of creativity.¹

The never not-fictive nature of political power not only inclines it toward magic, but opens both of those realms up to the possibility of radical creativity. Power invites scepticism because its operations are underwritten by shared and broadly accepted fictions – never fully shared, never wholly accepted. And in being fictional in this way, power is also vulnerable to the counterpower of other fictions that are no less real, poems included. Writing about Malagasy use of charms, Graeber observes that “they are engaging in an imaginative, poetic process to come to terms with a reality that they know they can never entirely understand. One of the qualities of this imaginative process is that it always tends to linger on the border between artistry and simple fraud.”² It is a borderlands I suspect many poets would find very familiar.

The ending of Percy Shelley’s poem ‘Ode to the West Wind’ provides an example of how all this plays out in poetic practice. In this poem, Shelley addresses the wind directly, calling on it, quite literally, to inspire him and, through him, to inspire revolution:

                                           Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit!...

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

“[B]y the incantation of this verse”: the line claims an effect in which the reciting of the line will have the effect it claims. Saying the line, you enact what it says, disseminating its call to action and fanning it into life. This could be seen as an example of the recursivity of the fictional performative in action. It is political magic, which works – which becomes a material force – when, as Karl Marx once said of theory, it seizes the masses. Which is to say it works when it works, circularly, but also to say that the conditions which determine whether or not it works cannot ever be fully abstracted from its working. Shelley no doubt knew he was not a real magician in the sense that, while he might call on the wind, he could never guarantee that it would answer. The wind would blow, or not, whether he called on it, or not. But the political winds of revolution are a different story. The bearing his words will have on revolution – a revolution still to come, perhaps – cannot be determined outside of the incantatory effects of those words themselves. His invocation of the wind is fictional, aesthetic, and only poetic. But its claims on revolution are for that very reason potentially all the more real.

Shelley was far from unusual as a Romantic poet in seeking to reanimate the traditional figure of the poet as magician. Such efforts were not a straightforward rejection of the Enlightenment view for which supernatural magic had been wholly discredited. It would be more accurate, I think, to see them instead as seeking a reanimation of magic precisely on the basis of that debunking. Magic, in other words, was newly empowered by being rendered aesthetic through the secularising process outlined by During. Romantic necromanticism worked better for being fictional. This may be why so many poets and theorists from this period identified poetry itself as a mode of magic. It was also why Coleridge, in a line quoted a number of times by Pilkington, famously described the appropriate attitude of aesthetic receptivity not as positive belief but as the willing suspension of disbelief. At least while the poem is working, we choose not to disbelieve in its workings, and via that choice we enable it to have effects that range far beyond the scope of our choosing. That, at any rate, is my rough account of the second side of the ambivalent relation to magic Pilkington describes his poets as taking up – one that I hope suggests at least something of the power poetry can rise to when it incorporates within itself an acknowledgement of the purely fictive nature of its powers. The magic of poetry is poetic, or it is magic: that is its ambivalence. The contradiction – it is just aesthetic play; it calls on spirits and they answer – is embedded in poetry’s generation of social power. The two sides, irreconcilable, remain also interconnected and even finally undecidable.

A few months ago, at the launch of the edited collection on Dhoompoo Lionel Fogarty, the poet himself read some of his poems. He was not quite the enrapturing performer I remembered from previous occasions: he seemed subdued; he had been, I was told, in poor health. But the last poem he read, titled ‘Signing my Death Lion and Hell,’ was a striking exception; this communicated the full out-of-body experience I had come to associate with a Dhoompoo Lionel Fogarty reading: the effect he tended to have of causing habitual parameters of time and space to drop away, revealing us to be encircled by some unimaginably stranger field of forces. These are the final lines of his poem:

No phony national word gave me life but death.
With my thousand words the dead woods are white dreams.
Whistle the dead calls at morning night and depart away my spirit.
Starless days are able to shine death, as rouse is use for me to die.
Let silence by the cry when I am gone,
Let dreams be forgotten when I am your death,
Listen it’s time for me as the writer to die.
Reside my other lives for the heart seeks no more.
Reflect my remain to the death of it all in all.

Just a few months after reading these words at the book launch in Melbourne, Dhoompoo Lionel Fogarty died. You might think that to prophesy one’s own death, as he did in this poem, is not necessarily so very remarkable. After all, death is one thing that any of us can foretell of ourselves with absolute certainty. But I felt, at the time, that he was doing something much stranger than just anticipating his death, and I feel it all the more strongly now that he is dead. His “coefficient of weirdness” was just so much greater. He was summoning his death and disempowering it at the same time. It was Black man’s magic; it was poetry. I felt, on the night, that I did not really understand what was happening, and I still feel unable to grasp it now. That understanding, if it is ever to come, requires stepping into poetry’s magic circle.