ARS POETICA IN FIVE
EASY PIECES:

ON FLASHLIGHTS, BEARS, AND



DISREGARDING YOUR OWN ADVICE

by Chloe Martinez

I

Suppose some painter had the bright idea
Of sticking a human head on a horse’s neck
And covering human nether limbs up with
Assorted feathers so that a beautiful
Woman uptop was an ugly fish below,
And you were invited in to take a look,
How could you possibly manage to keep a straight face?

THIS IS HOW the 1st-century BCE Roman poet Horace starts the epistle now known as Ars Poetica, or The Art of Poetry (I quote David Ferry’s great 2012 translation throughout this essay). He’s telling us what not to do, warning us against breaking the rules and looking foolish—but he’s also presenting us with a bird-fish-horse-woman poem and daring us not to laugh.

Horace’s Ars Poetica is often described as a didactic text, and it contains lots of good advice for poets: choose your materials with care, go easy on the flowery asides, write about the things you truly care about. It’s also a very funny long poem in which Horace frequently does the exact thing he’s telling us not to do—does it while he’s telling us not to do it. Here’s another example:

There are works that begin in genuine nobleness
And therefore make large genuine promises
Yet sometimes they’re stuck about with shining purple
Patches that catch the eye: for example, a pause
To tell you all about Diana’s grove,
Or “the stream that winds yet hastens through the fields,”
Or to have you admire the far-off scenic Rhine
Or the rainbow you can see when the storm is over.
There are places for things like these, but often not
In the places where they occur.

 
Yes, he’s just spent ten lines telling us not to meander unnecessarily. The Ars Poetica itself isn’t brief, either, clocking in at 476 lines. In it, Horace discusses how poets, including himself, often fail (“the line comes out spineless as a worm”); endorses making shit up (“you can invent new words / The Cethegi in their loincloths never heard of, / And you’ll get away with it, as long as you do it / Circumspectly…”); and produces a nice “no discovery for the writer” statement centuries ahead of Robert Frost (“If you / Desire to hear me weep, you must truly grieve…”). It’s a smart, sly, heartfelt thing. So first of all: go read it! But please, please get the Ferry translation; there’s an old prose one that’s more easily found online, but you must not succumb to “more easily found online.” Horace would definitely have included this advice, had he known.

II

Horace’s poem is considered the first of what has become a poetic tradition—I’d call it not exactly a form, not exactly a genre, but something. A Thing Poets Do. Horace wrote a poem about poetry, and when we write poems about poetry, or when we realize the poem we’ve written is about poetry, we might call it ars poetica too. But a modern ars poetica is related to that earlier one by topic, not by function. Horace is delivering a lesson: how to write poetry that doesn’t suck. There’s a little bit of the manifesto in there too (“Poetry wants to instruct or else to delight; / or, better still, to delight and instruct at once.”). Your average 21st-century American poet, on the other hand, is not going to give out advice with line breaks; they’re going to write an essay, or teach a class, or do a podcast or something. So how are we using this term now, and what is happening when we engage with the idea of the ars poetica?

As one does, I turned to Twitter with this question. When I asked poets about their own definitions of the term, I got some broad and inclusive answers (“any poem about poetry, poetics, process…”) and some concise ones (“poems about poems”). Some responses spoke to the responder’s own personal poetics, enacting rather than defining the term—but that’s a kind of definition too. The Academy of American Poets defines it as “a poem examining the role of poets themselves as subjects, their relationships to the poem, and the act of writing.” This definition points to the way the term is used today, which is quite different from what Horace was up to. Ars poetica has departed significantly from its origin—a poem that stated its intention to explain the art of poetry, and then delivered on that promise. Though there is a tradition of poets writing ars poetica that try, like Horace, to say what poetry ought to be (Pope, Verlaine, McLeish), the contemporary ars poetica usually does something quite different, using ars poetica not as a lesson but as a lens—a way of focusing attention that gives a poem multiple layers of meaning.

If you look at the poems that engage with this idea today, they take two main approaches. There are the poems that use the term as a title and thus a framing device, implying that the poem is about poetry, and sometimes saying so directly as well. Then there are the poems that don’t overtly make poetics their subject, but that make brief, surprising turns (often towards the end of the poem) towards a consideration of what poetry is or what it means to write it. I’d like to look at a few examples of both types to see what they accomplish by engaging in this tradition, and why this seemingly fussy or “meta” concept continues to move me, both as a reader and as a writer of poems.

III

I have never been drawn to “Ars Poetica” as a poem title; it announces its intention so loudly, and also seems to close itself off to so many readers—because let’s face it, it’s gibberish to anyone but poets. And yet so many poets have pulled this trick off beautifully. What it seems to do is allow for a kind of manifesto speech that isn’t declarative and shouty, but instead leans on metaphor and associative logic. In doing so, such poems argue and enact a personal poetics with urgency, but avoid being didactic. (Now I’m going to choose examples that are easily found online—very well then I contradict myself, as Whitman says.)  

This prose poem by José Olivarez uses the term as title to connect the work of the poet with the work of migration and survival, and the experience of the poet with that of the family and larger community. The poem’s statements thus speak explicitly about both migration and poetry, but implicitly insist that there can be no separation between the two. They also claim contradiction and multiplicity: “I was born mid-migration. I’ve made my home in that motion… My work: to write poems that make my people feel safe, seen, or otherwise loved. My work: to make my enemies feel afraid, angry, or otherwise ignored.” Rita Dove uses the term to situate the poem as “a ghost town / on the larger map of wills,” and the poet as a hawk soaring above it, “a traveling x-marks-the-spot.” Hers is a stark, tender poetics of finding a way in a barren place, and of seeing what others don’t notice.

This one, by Eleanor Wilner, unfolds and unfurls, shifting between mythic and historical registers and using a series of striking images to build a picture of the poet as witness, both burdened by the violence of the world and in love with its beauty. The first half of the poem spirals out through a single spectacular sentence, then drops us into the sky:
 

up there, hanging over the mythic 

fields of what recurs and recurs (though never the same,
and never to be reconciled) — what is that?

                                                         A hot air balloon filled

with passengers who paid to be raised
in a basket, to be up there looking down on
the ground where they live, a place shrunken now
beneath their gaze…

 
Like that of Dove, Wilner’s “Ars Poetica” shows us the poet as distant watcher, uplifted but also isolated by the need to make art. Aracelis Girmay’s gorgeous, tiny Ars Poetica poem does the reverse, putting the poet in the middle of things, but tiny and ephemeral as the goo-trail a snail leaves behind, “quiet record / of the foot’s silver prayer. / I lived once. / Thank you. / It was here.” Dana Levin, too, tacks the term above a short, imagistic poem to terrific effect, dramatizing the need to write poems as a kind of choking beauty: “Six monarch butterfly cocoons / clinging to the back of your throat—” What’s a poem? Who knows, but poets are these people, with fluttering insects in their throats and slime trails in their wakes. And this, too, seems like a feature of the contemporary ars poetica: it says less about what the poem should be, and more about what it means to be a poet.

IV

Some stunning poems take an ars poetica turn, or turns. Case in point, so many of Diane Seuss’ great Frank sonnets that I’ve lost count. Just for example, each of these six does it at least a little bit, and each a little differently. In one, the poem pulls up suddenly in the question, “how do I explain / this restless search for beauty or relief?” Another moves from “Poetry the only father” through a braided meditation on language and sex, to arrive (to climax, really) at the startling last line: “does language eclipse feeling, does it eclipse the eclipse.” It’s a poetics that undoes the traditional binary of intellect and embodiment, forcing us, like Yeats’ Crazy Jane, to “take the whole / body and soul.”

An ars poetica-style self-referentiality is sprinkled through Tommy Pico’s book-length poem Junk like candy (which is also sprinkled throughout). The poem accumulates meaning around the title word as Pico builds a poetics that includes all those meanings. Just for example, consider how the poem’s title plays out in these lines:

…Ignorance as a tool to

revive the feeling of doing something new Junk has to be the
poem of our time Pointless accumulation Clinging to a million

denials Why do you need an assault rifle? What if radioactive
bears Buying in bulk Afraid of forgetting that night in 2007

when Chantal shouted jamiroquai is holding this party
together!!!! Junk is the garbage ppl keep Didn’t they tell you

 I’m a meteorologist but for people What’s that called? Psychic?

In this section, “Junk has to be the / poem of our time” isn’t really an ars poetica turn—it’s more like an ars poetica ripple, one of many in the rushing current of the poem. It’s a statement of the poet’s ambition and also a jab at the junk-y, fearmongering world that the poem reflects. Pico keeps poking at the term, and thus at the poem itself: “Pointless accumulation,” “Buying in bulk” and “the garbage ppl keep” are phrases that turn back on the idea of junk, but also of the long poem, of what this particular long poem about junk might be trying to do. The materials of the poem are endlessly recycled, gaining and losing value and meaning, as the poem questions the idea of value itself. Pico is asking what poetry might be good for, and also what the role of the poet should be: “didn’t they tell you // I’m a meteorologist but for people What’s that called? Psychic?” Pico is a master of sarcasm, of double meanings and wordplay; the moments in which Pico admits he’s writing a poem build a further layer of both seriousness and irony. The poem is junk, joke, a game—and also the poem is completely in earnest, and is teaching us a new way of reading.

The question of what the relationship might be between the artist and the world she draws from is often hovering behind an ars poetica turn. Both Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel” and Heather McHugh’s “What He Thought” startle us with violence before taking the turn to questions about poetry. In doing so, both poems place art and suffering in irreconcilable tension with one another. “Something for your poetry, no?” says Forché’s brutal Colonel, after dumping severed ears on the table before the dinner guests. The poem ends with those ears, some listening (to the conversation in the poem, but maybe to the poem itself) and some “pressed to the floor.” It’s those two final moves—the reference to poetry, and the ears metaphorically coming to life—that allow the poem to not only inhabit a terrifying space, but to also ask what it means to inhabit that space through poetry.

McHugh’s poem seems, at first, the more lighthearted of the two. “What He Thought” follows some poets who are doing “a job in Italy,” which seems to involve having long dinners with dignitaries and literary types. McHugh gently pokes fun at the poets, who are “full of our feeling / for ourselves (our sense of being / Poets from America),” and who listen to a tour guide as “the hired van hauled us past” the sights. But midway through the poem, someone at a dinner asks, “What’s poetry?” By the end of the poem, we are left with an image of the execution of Giordano Bruno and a meditation on his death by burning, silenced inside an iron mask: “poetry // is what he thought, but did not say.” As the poem moves from jocular travelogue to dark revelation, it points to poetry’s particular power to enter into the unspeakable. It also questions that power, as the dinner party, McHugh, and the poem itself fall silent at this final statement. Both these poems insist that art is inadequate in the face of violence. Both also admit that showing us suffering is one thing art must sometimes do.

V

There’s a third ars poetica thing I want to note, and that’s ars poetica as a mode or lens—an interpretive technique rather than an intentional form. My kids have one of those “invisible ink” pens—you know the kind? It has a writing end and a flashlight end, requiring you to guess your way through the writing, then switch on the flashlight and see how it turned out. I think of the ars poetica mode as something like that pen. Maybe you are reading a poem about birds. Maybe it also seems to be about love, or time, or mortality. Switch on that ars poetica flashlight: what if it’s also about poetry? The poem sometimes takes on a whole new color, an extra layer of light or shadow.

This can also be useful as a revision tactic. Maybe you’re writing a poem yourself, and maybe you’re not sure what it’s about. It seems to be about shopping, or bears, or being stuck in traffic. But shine the flashlight on it at some point. Maybe it’s also a little bit about poetry? Or maybe, when you think about that draft as containing some statement about why you’re doing this weird thing, writing a poem, you may begin to get a better handle on the more urgent thing behind the poem—the thing you need to communicate to yourself or to someone else, for which talking about bears is actually just a placeholder. I’m not saying you shouldn’t write the poem about bears; I’m saying, thinking about it through this lens may help you get closer to what the bears are really doing there.

I find it daunting to attempt an ars poetica on purpose—it’s not a useful way into writing, for me. But I keep it on my mental to-do list when revising to just check if there’s an ars poetica reading in what I’m working on, and if, having seen one, there might be places in the poem that could turn slightly towards those possibilities, to expand the poem’s facets of meaning. I would guess that none of the poets referenced above (except Horace) planned to write poems about poetry, but the ars poetica moments in each of the poems I’ve looked at here are crucial to their discoveries. When poets admit to making a poem, which is to say when they admit to a deep investment in not only the content but the form of the thing they are making, something surprising happens. By revealing artifice, a poet can find her larger motivations for writing—the unanswerable questions and concerns that draw us back, again and again, to the page.

* * *

In Horace’s time, poets and playwrights were one and the same. For this reason, he includes advice about plays in his poem. His advice is this:

Let your play be five acts long, no more, no less,
If you ever want it staged a second time.

 
It seems like good advice. So I’ll conclude. Here’s the end of Horace’s poem, in which he points out that most people think poets are crazy idiots, and wonders how they got into this racket:
 

What made him become a poet, anyway?
Maybe he pissed on the ashes of his father
Or did something else unholy someplace holy.
Whatever it was, he’s crazy, and, like a bear
Who’s broken out of his cage, he puts to flight
Everybody he meets by his horrible reading.
If he catches a man, he’ll read that man to death.
He’s a leech that won’t let go till he’s full of blood.

 
Horace ends his poem by poking fun at poets, poetry and himself. And that bear, slipped out of its cage, terrorizing us—isn’t that the ars poetica itself, the poem that disrupts the order of things, but gives us something real? This final statement can be read as a warning—to be a poet is to be at odds with the rest of the world, offbeat, off-kilter. And to write about poems in your poem, to admit to what you’re doing, is to draw further attention to that oddness. Horace says, Don’t do this! Of course, he’s already done it.

* * *  

Note:

This essay is indebted to the poets who started me on a recent ars poetica kick, and to those who joined me as the obsession has continued: Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, who organized two “Poems About Poetry”-themed readings as part of her Words Together, Worlds Apart reading series; the readers at those events, whose poems and conversation afterwards made me keep thinking about what ars poetica could do; and the poets who continued that conversation with me in a truly wonderful AWP panel (“Admit It, You're Writing a Poem: Ars Poetica and the Awkward Confession,” AWP22, Philadelphia): Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Diamond Forde, Matthew Olzmann and Han VanderHart. Thanks, too, to all who answered my random Twitter query. I’m grateful to be in community with you all.

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Chloe Martinez is a poet and scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works, 2021) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press, 2020). Her poems and translations have appeared in AGNI, Ploughshares, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College.