The Line Break

Ars Poeticas are poems with an ancient history, going back to the Roman poet Horace, that explain “the art of poetry.” They can do so in many ways. In contemporary poetry, the tend to describe something while also confessing to describing poetry: what poetry does, what the experience of reading poetry is like, what the experience of writing poetry, or the work of writing poetry, or the existence of poetry is like. In some ways, ars poeticas are like watching a film documentary on documentary making. It’s all so meta.

The below ars poetica by Aracelis Girmay describes poems as material evidence of living–an ephemeral trace of our lives, our slow movement–by using the image of a little snail and its trail. Notice that the language is that of a blessing, “may”:

Ars Poetica Aracelis Girmay

May the poems be
the little snail’s trail.

Everywhere I go,
every inch: quiet record

of the foot’s silver prayer.
             I lived once.
             Thank you. 
             It was here.

Here is another small poem by Jane Kenyon, which I think of as an Anti-Ars Poetica, as it is about considering the process of not writing:

Not Writing

A wasp rises to its papery
nest under the eaves
where it daubs

at the gray shape,
but seems unable
to enter its own house.

There is something about not being able to write that does feel like a wasp unable to enter its own house–that feels like you unable to enter your own house, that feels so ineffective. If writing feels like evidence that you have lived, as Girmay writes, then not writing can feel like disappearing, like fading, like uselessness. This is why so many of us journal, or have a daily writing practice, even if its just in our notes app or our daily planner, or on post-it notes on our fridge or desk–we need to check in with ourselves, to keep up an ordinary conversation of existence. Writing and self-expression are a basic human need–I might argue as basic as showering and eating and going for a walk, petting an animal.

Try your own hand at an Ars Poetica this week.

Everywhere I go,
every inch: quiet record

Thank you.