That’s So Meta: 8 Ars Poetica Poems
Poets have been writing poems about poetry for more than two thousand years. Ars Poetica, the formal name for a poem written on the topic of poetry, translates from Latin to “The Art of Poetry.”
The form dates back to the time of the Roman Empire, when Horace, a Roman poet and philosopher who lived from 65-8 BCE. wrote the very first Ars Poetica. In his lengthy treatise, he shared advice with beginning poets about writing poetry, setting parameters for what he thought was the job of a poet, and even warned about the many dangers of publishing poems.
These questions raised by Horace all those years ago are still on the minds of poets today, who continue to explore the nature of poetry, its purpose, and the role of a poet in the world. There are as many answers to the questions about poetry as there are poets in the history of the world.
Ars Poetica is an exciting form, as these poems engage the poet in the search to voice their understanding of their own art, which is as different as the poems themselves. Reading Ars Poetica is an invitation into the mind of the poet—an offer to understand how the poet sees their art form and their job as a poet.
Reading Ars Poetica pushes me to evaluate and articulate my views on the fundamentals of my craft. Each of these 8 Ars Poetica offer something a little different in considering The Art of Poetry. They are by no means an exhaustive list of the form, as poets have long found themselves drawn to considering their own art and examples of this form abound.
1) “What He Thought” by Heather McHugh
In “What He Thought,” McHugh chronicles the speaker’s visit to Italy with other “Poets from America.” Throughout the piece, the speaker observes commonalities between the cohort of American travelers and their Italian counterparts. She plays with a self-deprecating tone as she places the poets in neat categories: “the academic, the apologist,/the arrogant, the amorous, / the brazen and the glib.”
As we get to the heart of the poem, the question, “What’s poetry?” is raised among the poets.
McHugh’s speaker identifies herself as “glib one” and admits the answer she blurts out is “too easy.” Her depiction of this scene and the speaker’s own admission of her flawed answer implies that poets can sometimes feel overly confident about their knowledge of poetry—to the point of no longer being in awe of its power.
However, one Italian poet responds to the question by pointing to a statue of Giordano Bruno, an Italian poet who was executed for speaking out against the Catholic Church in 1600. The poet depicts Bruno's death, describing how his captors covered his mouth with an iron mask out of fear he might incite the crowd watching his violent death by fire.
The narrative concludes powerfully as the storyteller relates Bruno’s death to the question, explaining how Bruno died in silence:
“poetry is what
he thought, but did not say.”
The ending is a real gut punch, an unexpected and powerful distillation of the form. McHugh suggests that poetry, at its essence, is beyond even its central medium of words. Instead, poetry is the truth the words aspire to represent. The poem illustrates one thing Ars Poetica often does—offer a definition of poetry itself.
2) “Essay on Craft” by Ocean Vuong
Vuong’s poem is an image-rich journey through the creation experience, both the impulse to create and the experience of creating. It begins by explaining the ways the poet is drawn to writing a poem—to fill a gap that exists in language, to show its reader something novel, to essentially rescue a word “...stranded by its language.”
Like McHugh, Vuong points us to an understanding that poetry exists beyond words. A poet writes a poem because their vision is uniquely their own, while also being inexplicable:
“Because no one else
was coming — & I ran
out of reasons.”
Vuong’s “Essay on Craft” then moves through the experience of creating a poem using ash and fire. In the speaker’s account of creating, it becomes clear that the poet/sculptor is building a bodily form, a human form. In this analogy, Vuong defines a poem as both creator and creation, arguing perhaps that a poem reflects some truth about what it means to be human back to its readers.
3) “Notebook, 1981” by Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles’s “Notebook, 1981,” is a prose poem that offers yet another definition of poetry and another look at the creative process of a poet.
Myles’s speaker reminisces about a time gone by, when, perhaps, writing poetry came easier: “as if I was only alive, thirsty, timeless, young enough, to do this one more time, to dare to have nothing so much to lose.”
The speaker explains, “...because I had no other way to call that mind, I called it poetry…” The freedom of youth, the urgency of finding meaning are an origin in the speaker’s identity as a poet when the poet understood a calling to the art of poetry, and made a clear choice to pursue it.
4) “Why I Am Not a Painter” by Frank O’Hara
This classic, often anthologized, poem by Frank O’Hara has always been one of my favorites. In it, O’Hara considers the Art of Poetry using metaphor—specifically, he compares the work of a poet and a painter.
He mentions the Abstract Expressionist painter, Mike Goldberg, a friend of O’Hara in 1950s New York City. In the poem, the speaker visits Goldberg’s studio multiple times over the course of many days, all the while watching Goldberg’s work on painting in progress.
At one point, the speaker notes, “You have SARDINES in it” to which Goldberg replies, “Yes, it needed something there.” The poem begins to unfurl at this moment where O’Hara considers the creation art, and shows us that he values the artist’s instincts over formulaic logic.
The artist, according to O’Hara, does not always have a clear reason behind a given artistic choice. On a later visit to Goldberg’s studio, the speaker sees that the painting no longer has SARDINES in it, and the painter explains that he removed the image because “It was too much.”
As the poem progresses, O’Hara moves from Goldberg’s painting into the poetic process, especially as the speaker is writing a poem, then a series of poems, inspired by the color orange:
“...I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES…”
Just as Goldberg edited out the sardines from his painting, O’Hara’s poem within a poem has not even used the word “orange.”
The power in this poem is in how it examines the mind of the artist, how that in some ways, the artist (or poet) is like an iceberg. We as readers get to see what is visible above the water—the finished product of their creation—but under the surface lies so much more that we cannot see or know about how the creation came into being.
5) “In Brazil” by Tracy K. Smith
“In Brazil” is an Ars Poetica that explores what it means to be a poet in the world. Smith opens the poem, “Poets swagger up and down the shore” showing readers that the subject of the poem is “poets” in a broad sense, as a category of human.
Throughout the poem, the speaker idealizes the poet’s way of living in the world, describing how they approach life and how they experience the world, self-possessed and audacious. Poets live life on their own terms, Smith posits,
“..until a dark form takes shape
On the ceiling overhead…”
This is the arrival of the poem, a moment, Smith implies, that pulls the poet out of their carefree life and demands immediate attention.
While the poet had such agency in the preceding lines, the poem is the one that is really calling the shots. It compels the poet’s full focus as it forces the poet out of bed.
Writing poems, Smith shows the reader, is not optional for the poet. Poems have a way of showing up uninvited and insisting to be written.
6) “Workshop” by Billy Collins
In “Workshop,” Collins plays with the language of the poetry workshop. The poem’s speaker discusses the strengths and weaknesses of an unseen poem’s images and logic.
The phrase “Maybe it’s just me” repeats throughout the poem, illustrating the beginning poet-speaker’s lack of confidence in interpreting the poem.
Collins uses gentle humor to explore discourse of the poetry workshop, which anyone who has ever been in a workshop will immediately recognize. In the second stanza, he jokes:
“And I like the first couple of stanzas,
the way they establish this mode of self-pointing
that runs through the whole poem
and tells us that words are food thrown down
on the ground for other words to eat.
I can almost taste the tail of the snake
in its own mouth,
if you know what I mean.”
Of course, the poem itself operates in the “mode of self pointing.”
Most of the brilliance of this poem lies in the way that it so deftly captures the language of the workshop, while at the same time examining the way a poem is put together, and—more importantly—the way a reader finds the way through a poem.
7) “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying” by Noor Hindi
To say the title of Hindi’s Ars Poetica, “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying” is attention-grabbing is an understatement.
A Palestinian-American poet, Hindi explores the politics of identity, comparing her speaker to other poets outside the Palestinian diaspora:
“I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.
It’s so beautiful, the moon.”
Hindi, like Smith, asserts that the role of the poet is to respond to the urgency of the most salient truth they see, while critiquing the luxury “those poets who care about the moon” experience by being able to write about the beauty of the moon because they are able to turn away from the violence the speaker sees and cannot look beyond.
As a witness to the violence inflicted on her people, Hindi’s speaker is compelled to write about it at the expense of focusing her poetic attention on something more beautiful.
8) “Duplex” by Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown’s “Duplex” emerges from Brown’s long standing contemplation of received forms, specifically the sonnet. In an interview with Poetry Magazine, he explains the parameters for a Duplex, “Write a ghazal that is also a sonnet that is also a blues poem.”
Brown’s “Duplex”—its title shared with that of the form itself—opens with the declaration, “A poem is a gesture toward home.” Then the poem moves on to consider how the memories and experiences of a poet appear in a poem:
“Memory makes demands darker than my own.”
But the poet is more than memories. The poet is one who transcends the darkness of memory:
“None of the beaten end up how we began.
A poem is a gesture toward home.”
This final couplet explains the way a poem must go beyond the recounting of memory. The poem must contextualize and make meaning of memory, and point readers to consider a larger truth.
…
As these 8 Ars Poetica show us, there are many ways to understand poetry and our work as poets. There is no single answer to these questions, and as the form’s many examples imply, asking the question, ‘what is poetry?” is just as important as finding your own answer.
This article was published on January 29, 2024. Written by:
