At dVerse Grace is hosting Meeting The Bar with an invitation to revisit the venerable tradition of the Ars Poetica, Latin for “the art of poetry.” Traditionally, an Ars Poetica is a poem about poetry itself: why we write, what poems do, how language works upon us, and what we hope our words might accomplish. From Horace to Archibald MacLeish and countless contemporary poets, writers have used the form to explore their relationship with the craft. An Ars Poetica often becomes a personal manifesto, a meditation, or a declaration of faith in poetry itself.
dVerse Poets – MTB – Ars Poetica Revisited
Image by AS Photography from Pixabay
P-ars-ing About
What a journey a poem is,
from the moment I open the shed
to the first slice of tilth
with sharp spade,
a turning of the soil
over and over in my mind,
last I saw a skeleton
I wondered how it was
that thoughts get lost
in so small a space
as if deliberately hiding
around corners,
then comes the mower
a shortening of verse
verging on the radicle,
so too the secateurs
here a phrase
there a word
a whole scansion pruned,
after a morning’s work
I look over the labours
sometimes noting the
fine lines,
while there are times
I admit, that the
mark is missed and
I rake over the soil again.
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