#ars poetica

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

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

 & Lillian Vallee.

#poem #purpose of poetry #Czeslaw Milosz #ars poetica

[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.

#retch #sonnet #ars poetica #poem #poetry #spilled ink #all the dead poets #I am an alcoholic #conversations with imaginary sisters

[ashtrayfloors]

"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)

#poetry #tilsa otta #translation #farid matuk #ars poetica #poetry magazine #this poem took me out when i first read it #it's so intense and perfect

[movietonight]

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

#Listen if I have to sit through a one hour seminar on the definition of poetry today I get to make one of the poems about mash #mash #m*a*s*h #Macks Musings #Archibald MacLeish #ars poetica #web weaving

[amalgamationink]

NAPOWRIMO24 #13: ars poetica

#prompt: create a word bank of 10 simple words. 5 sense nouns. 3 concrete nouns. 2 verbs. create rhymes for those words. write poem. #it doesn't have to be an actual rhyming poem but focus on SOUNDPLAY. #i made my partner give me the words without telling him what they were for so i couldn't cheat and come up with easy ones. #he gave me: doll. lemon. rose. clamour. hair. hat. desk. sunshine. skip. kiss. #this one is incoherent probably but i had SO MUCH FUN writing it i literally don't care if anyone else likes it bc I DO!!!! #napowrimo 2024 #napowrimo #spilled ink #writeblr #poetry on tumblr #poets on tumblr #poems on tumblr #poetry #poem #ars poetica #(technically. kind of.) #damien.txt #img desc in alt text

[flipchild]

Louise Glück, Snowdrops. My poem for January. Three days left to memorize it...! Started way late this month.

#ars poetica #mine =)

[elisaenglish]

En Écho au Lacrimosa Dies Illa

“We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art—we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.”

-Anaïs Nin, The New Woman-

My body is a broken thing on this flight to Paris, and the rain knows not of what to bring, to help my soul to bear...

#writing #quote #women writers #love #loss #death #meaning #all eternal things #love in a time of... #the places you have come to fear the most #the same deep water as you #laid bare #letters from the wasteland #inside of me #i grieve #ars poetica #when in france #melancholy skies #four years later #some anniversaries you never forget #probably should've been a poem #this is how it goes #elisa english #elisaenglish

[onmyliteraturebullshitagain]

"Poetry is what you find

in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God

in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.

Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,

and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)

is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?"

-- "Ars Poetica #100: I Believe" by Elizabeth Alexander

#quotes #poetry #ars poetica #are we not of interest to each other? #i love that line and sentiment so much #poems #elizabeth alexander

[rustbeltjessie]

an encounter with Art is an encounter with an Artist’s imagination— we know we are making contact with a Poem when we feel as though we are at the edge of the world; a place that is simultaneously familiar and strange; known and unknown.

and so we stand, sit, kneel, or crouch before it in all sad cry and gentle astonishment. why? because the world is so beautiful and we are so lonely. because the world is so terrifying and we love its strange miracle. regardless: when you encounter Art, you know: somehow, someone has milked the cosmos in secret, and what has survived is something going crazy with wings in your chest.

—Ars Poetica, from "the true life is elsewhere. we are not in the world."

#quotations #ars poetica #on art #recently read

[localcreativewriting]

Publication Project

Hi! I just finished a 15-week Poetry Workshop course at my college and I was tasked with creating a "Publication Project" to share my work, so please enjoy some poems I've written over the past 15 weeks compiled below!

#poetry #poem #poets on tumblr #writer #writers on tumblr #creative writing #sonnet #tercet #couplet #ars poetica #publishing #origami #emotional #reflecting #dad issues

[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]

#the sea #Emil Nolde #Sea #Violet Clouds #sailboats #clouds #poem #poetry #Lee van Laer #Ars Poetica #Parabola #Czeslaw Milosz

[babylon-crashing]

tía

“Surrealism is only shocking to those who are shocked by dreams,” André Breton.

Scads of old wounds, tía. Scads. El viento

muere/ en mi herida. “The wind dies/ in

my wound.” And in the blood, tía, its slow

flow, a queer smear. Horror under the skin.

Horror that keeps itching. Alejandra,

tía, I'll still be your your fag hag that keeps

you from the night that gnaws and, mendiga,

begs in your blood. Infernal stone that weeps.

Sugar crusts. The crunch and chew of language.

An itch. A witch. I cannot stop, auntie,

I call you all: Necromancer of words

and wounds. This scar? Where I pulled my innards

out. Where I washed my old wound in the sea

and used your name as its heinous bandage.

Notes.

If Federico Garcia Lorca would be my uncle, then please let Alejandra Pizarnik be my aunt. These two poets taught me more about the craft than anyone else. And yes, I use the term craft as in the dark Dionysian powers of the psyche and soul. Pizarnik wrote in fragments, as the language she used drove her insane. Artistically, she is sister to Paul Celan, who wrote in German and committed suicide by drowning in the Seine. Language as virus. Language as plague. The poem of hers I use is, “El viento muere en mi herida./ La noche mendiga mi sangre.”

#tía #sonnet #quote unquote #poem #poetry #conversations with imaginary sisters #Spanish poetry #alejandra pizarnik #ars poetica

[ashtrayfloors]

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)

#poetry #sean thomas dougherty #ars poetica #prose poetry #typography #recently read #i love this so much

[searchingnewme]

"És ha egy párkapcsolat nem tudja megadni nekem,

hogy megéljem minden énemet,

akkor egyedül leszek."

#vágyakésvalóság #ars poetica #ennyi #életem

[jojomills]

‘Ars Naturae’

Among the rocks and wild things

a beetle sings in victory.

Or maybe love-drunk revelry

of cacophonous frivolity.

Or maybe aimless misery

of a long-felt loneliness.

The truth of his jittery clicks and screeching hiss

is lost to the winding winds.

Twisted and stretched on raucous currents,

percolating through gossiping leaves.

The beetle, the bard,

can only spin his tales of strife and purpose,

without a hope of understanding.

Knowing that the knowing of his tone and tune

only begins with the timely seed

of an elemental impetuous.

A central nugget of pure expression,

the core of an impending supernova of thought,

where new sounds, and sights, and schemes,

are condensate of building heat behind a rupture,

where the old mixes and boils

in the essence of a brand new context,

becoming.

No thought ought not be spoke,

No song ought not be sung,

For every building block of triumphant architecture

begins in the mixing of stone, of sand, of water.

I speak in the stone,

I sing in the sand,

I stand in the waters of life and churn into bricks,

to found the legacy

of all the stars that burst forth

their bountiful pearls of experience falling unto me,

and all those caramelized treasures

feeding into the roots of my being.

The beetle wants to dance a jig

that tells of the times he demolished the bridges to his past.

The beetle wants to hiss and shriek

to lament the loves he can't ever realize.

The beetle wants to eat, and piss, and sleep.

If the mimicking birds should catch

those sanguine melodies,

their warbled echoes carry further,

further into the wilds.

Maybe those echoes might travel far

enough to find another beetle,

toiling in alien mud,

shaded by foreign twigs.

And maybe that beetle can hear the familiar dialect

hidden in the complexities

of a million strangers’ tongues.

And maybe that's enough to let the beetle know

she's not alone,

that her voice, too,

can carry far and wide.

If not, at least the sing-song birds,

and chanting wolves,

and other cawing beasts,

all would have another signal

for a new coda to their ever repeating symphony.

___

#poetry #nature #ars poetica #poeticstories

[flipchild]

#mine =) #ars poetica