#Ars Poetica

[apoemaday]

Ars Poetica

by Stephen Dunn

I’d come to understand restraint is worthless unless something’s about to spill or burst,

and that the Commandments understand us perfectly, a large NO for the desirability of everything

vengeful, delicious, out of reach. I wanted to write ten things that contained as much.

Maybe from the beginning the issue was how to live in a world so extravagant

it had a sky, in bodies so breakable we had to pray.

I welcomed, though, our celestial freedom, our promiscuous flights all returning to earth.

Yet what could awe us now? The feeling dies and then the word.

Restraint. Extravagance. I liked how one could unshackle the other, that they might become indivisible.

Astaire’s restraint was a kind of extravagance, while Ginger Rogers danced backwards in high heels and continued to smile!

She had such grace it was unfair we couldn’t take our eyes off him, but the beautiful is always unfair.

I found myself imagining him gone wild, gyrating, leaping, his life suddenly uncontainable.

Oh, even as he thrashed, I could tell he was feeling for limits, and what he could bear.

[razorsadness]

Ars Poetica

When I am stuck, I walk outside, I breathe, I name the color of the light then walk back in, I start to write. Sometimes just passing through a doorway, just naming something is enough—or I go for a walk. I drink coffee in a public place. What is left to say to the page of the air? An abuela at the bus stop wears a sentence like a boa. I watch the sky: even the clouds are hieroglyphics. & life is work & worry, overtime & bills, silence & music, groceries & dreams. I want to put it all in my poems: All the ordinary that should kill me. All the ordinary things we are. I want to sing. To sing for the average dead: Not those who died young or spectacular, but by diabetes, or my friend Tim by heart attack at 53. Lynn by stroke at 56. All the ordinary folks with fatty livers at the local diner. Who will remember them? Who will write their odes & elegies? Some days the writing is not the writing: it is getting the laundry done, or sitting in a dark room, or feeding the kids lunch, or napping with the dog. A few daily words attach themselves & not today, but tomorrow, or the next they will fall off you & become sentences when you are thinking of what to make the kids for dinner, that ache in your wrist from the weather. Or years of piece work. A poem is a kind of piece work. Remnants of letters we stitch together with bloody thread, crushed coke cans, green plantains, kids banging garbage can lids. Donut shop junkies drinking coffee black with a dozen sugars, a dog growls on a chain as I walk in the light rain—can you hear me whistle a scratched LP of all the world’s lovely & unloved things? Or did I ever tell you this story: During the Question & Answer at the fancy university, the old poet confessed. “I have written all I wish to in this life.” The professor— who had introduced her reading (with real affection, if not exuberant over-praise, being as he was her ex-student from decades ago, looked genuinely bereft.) “But” he stammered. “But you cannot be serious. What would we do without your poems? What will you do if you are not writing?” The old poet touched her exuberant gray curls, then said, “I will eat pie."

—Sean Thomas Dougherty, from Cultural Daily (June 2023)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

— CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ, from “Ars Poetica?,” trans. Czesław Miłosz

 & Lillian Vallee.

[babylon-crashing]

numskull

To suck. To feed. To gnaw on a deranged teat. It's been years since I've felt that panic. Oh dear. I guess it can't be helped. How strange just how consent comes in comics. Graphic grubby, voracious and somehow safe. No matter the kink. No matter the hunger. Pity poor passions, the one door I know that the gods speak through. I still remember all their voices. What else will dementia grind down until I'm ravenous? roughshod? stripped of bliss? A hungry ghost that nothing will fill? Desires numskulled by trauma? Numb. Skull. Panic. The urge to be gnawed to the bone. The urge to do the gnawing.

[uhambii]

Poetry arrives like a seed, foreign,

tucked into your pocket when you weren’t looking—

a stowaway from some distant garden.

You don’t know its name,

you don’t know its bloom,

and when you plant it, you’re not even sure

if it will grow in your soil.

But you water it anyway, a quiet ritual,

like speaking to someone who’s still a stranger,

not yet a friend. Each line is a sip of light,

each verse, a touch of rain.

It’s slow work,

but there’s joy in the waiting,

the slow unfurling of leaf and stem,

the way a poem reaches out in a language

it doesn’t know how to speak—yet.

And with time, it starts to show itself:

veins running through green,

the roots deepening underground,

tendrils reaching out as if trying

to pull something closer.

The more you tend to it, the clearer it becomes,

but always with mystery, the way a shadow

clings to the underside of a leaf.

Not everything is meant to be named,

not every bud blooms in daylight.

A good poem is like this:

it grows in the spaces you don’t control.

It asks for care, but it doesn't beg for understanding.

A poem should be a living thing,

its beauty not in perfection

but in the wildness it retains.

A poem should surprise you—

with how familiar it feels,

but yet unknown.

And why should poetry matter?

Because it teaches us to wait,

to listen to something other than ourselves,

to believe that there are things worth tending,

even if we don’t always know

what they will become.

Poetry reminds us:

we, too, are seeds—

we, too, need water and light,

and we, too, grow best

when given room

to be wild.

- Ambii

[movietonight]

M*A*S*H // Ars Poetica - Archibald MacLeish

[subtextures]

writing

such arrogance, this trope

where we bend a new world

to our image, our doubts

and failings, our belief

we are somehow unique

against which all other

must be compared wholly

is too simple a path

to follow with devotion

who are we to demand

our vision, no matter

how myopic, provide

a luminous clarity

for all who are not us

as if we were small gods

caught up in a turf war

where any loss in faith

begins a slow decline

that in and of itself

becomes a corollary

tangental to love:

so we cower in fear

the mind’s splinter slices

along old wounds to bleed

like stigmata, easy

to hold close, as our days

fall away to soft ash

(July 3, 2024)

[fallinginreversefanblog]

The very essence of the hater bullying videos, what we, fans know already for a long time, but these pathetic fools still think they're in control of their actions LMFAAOO 🤣🤣🤣

“Fuck ronnie radke”

Next tweet

“In honor of our 15th anniversary of our sophomore album we are playing it in full at sonic temple on the borders books stage at 11:30am”

EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

[amalgamationink]

NAPOWRIMO24 #13: ars poetica

[flipchild]

[inzertbackups]

Welcome to my

What is this anyway.... It's not a blog.... Just random mementos of beauty and silliness and the human experience.

I do post stuff sometimes only adults should see, so MINORS! DON'T! JUST DON'T!

If you've been trapped on this site long enough maybe you knew me as inzertbreaks in the past.

I'm a hard-headed tolerant with great loathing for intolerance.

My cats (Yoda and Mamut)

GPOY (nsfw in some cases)

Locally sourced intimacy (def nsfw)

Proudly partnered in life and crime with: @seioboforsure

[razorsadness]

"Poetry is the supreme killjoy"

Translated from the Spanish

Poetry is the supreme killjoy The awkward guest sitting in the corner Observing others, the one who can't get into it, who bores easily, thinks she'd rather be home The one who'll take a drink right from your hand and always bums smokes The first one to dance and then end up crying The one who steals kisses from boys and girls, the one who slurs her words and can't walk straight, the one who's spun Who gets kicked out and comes back Happy, more excited now The last to leave when the party's over The first to arrive when the party's over The broken cup, the puddled floor, the vomit on the leather sofa, the cigarette burn on the tablecloth and on arms, the one-night stand, the hangover, the hickey, the regret, the new love, the morning-after pill, your three kids, the mortgaged apartment, the hustle, the bank debt, the used car, the stability, the confidence in growing older, the midlife crisis, the end of love, the chill old age, your burial. Poetry is all the parties.

—Tilsa Otta, translated from the Spanish by Farid Matuk (Poetry Magazine, December 2023)

[polishpoems]

Desperately looking for a translation of "Odys" by Leopold Staff, please tell me it exists at all 🥲

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25777998

if you don't have institutional access, you can read up to 100 articles on jstor for free (monthly) so just make an account to get the full piece. the translation you're looking for is on page 94 (3rd of the actual file). i'm not sure if it's the full poem though? so let me know (and also let us know again if you have trouble with accessing it in the first place!)

[babylon-crashing]

retch

The gods had ceased singing. My verse had cooled,

then dried up. Nightmares, livid with love, came

with puke and drool, as if I'd somehow fooled

Temperance. As if self-restraint and shame

only bedeviled others. And today? ¬

Six years have passed. The bloat has left my face.

¬ Scars on my liver. ¬ Scars on my wordplay. ¬

Lifetime of scars, self-loathing and disgrace;

cuz' who dies clean? Pffft. Thomas? Poe? Sexton?

Saints of excess. ¬ Today? This day. ¬ Call this

a small price to pay. ¬ Of these fifty-four

years six were spent sober. Without swollen,

flushed flesh. Without the gods, “taking the piss.”

¬ Without retch. ¬ Without fucking up hardcore.

note.

Today, 2/18/2024, marks my 6th year anniversary of entering Recovery. As they say, one day at a time.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Emil Nolde - Sea with Violet Clouds and Three Yellow Sailboats, 1946

* * * * 

As Milosz said in Ars Poetica,

… And yet the world is  different from what it seems to be and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings. People therefore preserve silent integrity, thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors. The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will. What I’m saying here is not, I agree, poetry, as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, under unbearable duress and only with the hope That good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

—Excerpt from Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems (1931-2001) Harper-Collins 2001

[Ars Poetica Parabola, by Lee van Laer]

[cruisingxdystopia]