Today, we challenge you to write your own ars poetica, giving the reader some insight into what keeps you writing poetry, or what you think poetry should do.
Someone is always leaving in my poems, a door half-open, a coat still on its hook. The story begins to eat itself; the way a good peach does, from the inside out. I put bruised next to Tuesday. Give them a moment. Sometimes they hold. Painting without brushes, I drag the wrong words across the sentence until something bleeds through—a cardinal at the birdbath that means my mother. I don’t say that. I let the bird be red. Landscape: the road wet from last night. Portrait: a man carrying grief the way you carry groceries too far from the car. Abstract: a blue room rearranging itself. A poem holds what prose keeps dropping: the peach, the bruise, the moment before you bite.
Prompt Inspiration
Via NaPoWriMo
The Latin phrase ars poetica means “the art of poetry.” It’s been a tradition going all the way back to Horace for poets to write poems that lay out – whether explicitly or obliquely – some statement about why the poet writes, or what they think poetry is. Here’s a very recent example, another that I had to study in school, and a very long, witty ars poetica by Alexander Pope.
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