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Astrological Profiles

David Lehman reveals all about his "Astrological Profiles"

ShelleyAstrological Profiles: a Genre

Back in 2008, when the blog of the Best American Poetry was new, and the Internet itself still seemed a novelty, the editors of the blog – quickly getting used to daily deadlines – were hungry for content and welcoming to all manner of caprice.  That’s when I began writing astrological profiles, or astro-files as I came to think of them. Astrology had long appealed to me as a mnemonic device, a way to remember birthdays, and an ironically self-conscious icebreaker with a surprising connection to great classic myths, like the twin boys of Gemini or the girl who eluded a god by diving into a pool and turning into the fish of Pisces.

          Ever since then I have spent the occasional evening studying the horoscope of someone who interests me. I began with Dostoevsky, Graham Greene, Marlene Dietrich, and Keats. At some point it occurred to me that I was constructing a private mythology.  The connections between and among the persons I wrote about increasingly suggested patterns to me. Was it mere coincidence that Louis Armstrong [whose chart is below, right] and Percy Bysshe Shelley share a birthday [left] or that Marlene Dietrich died on the day Robespierre was born? The off-beat profile as a form appeals to me, and I wrote a few spurious astrological studies that friends seemed to like.

Astrology is supposed to be flakey, and for a writer, that means liberty of content as well as a highly specific vocabulary.  I use the astrological terms on the cheeky assumption that the horoscope -- like the “haruspicate or scry,” “sortilege, or tea leaves,” playing cards, numerology, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the “preconscious terrors” of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's “The Dry Salvages” -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only “usual pastimes and drugs” but the means of poetic exploration. There is also, in astrology, an embrace of the anachronistic as a sort of gamble against scientific odds. I overheard two college kids talk about astrology. The girl was into it, the boy no. “It’s bogus science,” he said. “Yes, but it’s fun, like horse-racing,” she said. There’s a reason that tabloids devote pages to horoscopes.

Even sophisticates admit to the guilty pleasure. The poet Louis MacNeice, an important figure in the W. H. Auden circle, thought enough of the subject to write Astrology (1964), an introduction. Why did James Joyce insist that Ulysses be published on his fortieth birthday, February 2, 1922? Could it be that 02 /02/ 22 was too rare an occurrence for him, an Irish author (Aquarius with Capricorn rising) bedazzled with the occult, to overlook?

Or consider the writer Suzi Wong, who was well into her adulthood when she learned that she was not born on June 2nd, as she had thought and as false documents showed, but in April. She was heartbroken: “No longer a Gemini? I couldn’t believe it!” Wong grew up in the 1960s. “After years of blowing out birthday candles on June 2nd, I thoroughly bought into the zodiac icon of the Gemini twins,” she reports. “In my teens, I read the daily horoscope for Geminis before making plans and decisions. I believed everything I read about the typical Gemini: witty, charming, spontaneous, lively. Geminis are supposed to be good artists, linguists, diplomats, and journalists; while I was none of the above, I’d had several careers employing the typical Gemini’s skills in communication, relatability, and diplomacy. I thrived on multi-tasking, spinning projects and full plates mid-air with the Gemini’s renowned ambidexterity. I even instinctively loved opals and agates, the precious stones assigned to Geminis by astrological tradition. I couldn’t fathom the idea of identifying with the personality traits of an Aries or Taurus or wearing diamonds or emeralds, the gems associated with April babies.”[1] In the subtitle of her essay, Wong describes herself as “a fake Gemini.” As a true Gemini I sympathize with her plight.

Once you have a form and a conceit that can unify the enterprise, you’re in business if, like me, you’re a writer, addicted to writing, and looking for a way to indulge your curiosity while entertaining the discriminating reader. If in the profile I had a form, in astrology I had the conceit that licensed me to spend quality time with a mythic circle of actors and singers, philosophers and poets, each leading to the next, as Hamlet (“Denmark’s a prison”) led to Kierkegaard, who led to Kafka.

Louis ArmstrongThe mythology of William Butler Yeats (a June Gemini with Virgo rising and Libra as his Black Moon Lilith sign) has fascinated me since I read his poetry in college. It is nothing if not eccentric, having to do with phases of the moon, history conceived as a “gyre,” and figures from Celtic mythology (Aengus, Red Hanrahan, Cuchulain) and English folk songs (Crazy Jane). Yet his mythic heroes and heroines serve his poetry as well as Dante’s more orthodox vision of the cosmos serves his. The same is true of James Merrill’s Ouija board trilogy, The Changing Light at Sandover. At first glance Merrill’s project may have seemed outlandish. The poem, we are told, is the record of a thousand and one evenings at the Ouija board; he can’t be serious, can he? But consider that Merrill (a March Pisces) has, of all modern American poets, the greatest formal ability – the greatest command of form, rhyme, meter, and poetic convention at the service of a theme. Doesn’t it make sense, then, to introduce a discrepancy between content and occasion, between the exacting calculations of poetic form and the element of chance introduced by the eccentric method employed to produce content?

If it is possible to love Dante’s Inferno without subscribing to the dogma undergirding it, surely, then, a communion of belief unadorned by irony should not serve as a major criterion of a work of art. Lord Byron, in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, mounts the Romantic defense of astrology – and of the stars as metaphors:

Lord ByronYe stars! which are the poetry of heaven!

If in your bright leaves we would read the fate

Of men and empires ‘tis to be forgiven

That in our aspirations to be great,

Our destinies o'erleap their mortal state

And claim a kindred with you; for ye are

A beauty and a mystery, and create

In us such love and reverence from afar,

That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star.

 Of the heroes and heroines I have written about, one was a drunkard, one a braggart, one a recluse, one a sadist; one had a lifelong identity crisis, one smoked weed every day; two died of overdoses, two of consumption, two in tragic accidents; one hanged herself; one was killed in a duel; one died of war wounds exacerbated by a killer flu; one felt guilty from the start and transgressed to justify the feeling; one faced a firing squad, survived and became a compulsive gambler; one was a chain-smoking depressive whose favorite reading was Superman comics; one was mocked unceasingly by the leading periodical of the day. The one who was guillotined I wouldn’t count as a hero. That leaves five, and I doubt I’d have to search hard to find fatal flaws in at least three of them.

On the other hand, you can present these twenty-five individuals as among the most fortunate, the most beautiful, most fascinating, most unusual, most glamorous marvels in a young man’s mind recollected years after they first beguiled him. 

[1] Suzi Wong, “Daughter of a Paper Son: True Confessions of a Fake Gemini,” The Georgia Review, Summer 2024, p. 321. https://thegeorgiareview.com/posts/daughter-of-a-paper-son-true-confessions-of-a-fake-gemini/


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from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman

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