98. Ars poetica

Yesterday I posted (among other poems by Rita Dove) an ars poetica, and commented how much I enjoy these explorations of "the art of poetry." As the Poetry Foundation defines the genre, "Ars poetica . . . [refers] to a poem, treatise, or essay written by a poet about the nature, purpose, and craft of poetry itself. It acts as a 'poem about poetry,' exploring how and why poems are created, often offering advice on poetic style or defining the role of the poet." 

The term originated with the Roman poet Horace’s Epistula ad Pisones (c. 19 BC), a 476-line letter advising on poetic craft (conciseness, unity, and style). In it he wrote, "As is painting, so is poetry: some pieces will strike you more if you stand near, and some, if you are at a greater distance: one loves the dark; another, which is not afraid of the critic’s subtle judgment, chooses to be seen in the light; the one has pleased once the other will give pleasure if ten times repeated."

The term is also well known from Archibald MacLeish's poem, with its pithy final couplet:

Ars Poetica 

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

*

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

*

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean
But be.

But what brought me here today was stumbling (good ol' FB) on the following poem, which got me searching for more, a couple of which I present to you here. (There are many, many, many more.)

Mugged by Poetry

by Dorianne Laux

—for Tony Hoagland, who sent me a handmade chapbook made from old postcards called OMIGOD POETRY with a whale breaching off the coast of New Jersey and seven of his favorite poems by various authors typed up, taped on, and tied together with a broken shoelace.

Reading a good one can make me love the one who wrote it,
as well as the animal or element or planet or person
the poet wrote it for. I end up as I always do,
flat on my back like a drunk in the grass, loving the world.
Like right now, I'm reading a poem called "Summer"
by John Ashbery, whose poems I never much cared for,
and suddenly in the dead of winter, There is that sound
like the wind / Forgetting in the branches that means
something / Nobody can translate . . . I fall in love
with that line, can actually hear it (not the line
but the wind) and it's summer again and I forget
I don't like John Ashbery poems. So I light a cigarette
and read another by Zbigniew Herbert, a poet
I've always admired but haven't read enough of, called
"To Marcus Aurelius" that begins Good night Marcus
put out the light / and shut the book For overhead / is raised
a gold alarm of stars . . . First of all I suddenly love
anyone with the name Zbigniew. Second of all I love
anyone who speaks in all sincerity to the dead
and by doing so brings that personage back to life,
plunging a hand through the past to flip on the light.
The astral physics of it just floors me. Third of all
is that "gold alarm of stars . . ." By now I'm a goner,
and even though I have to get up tomorrow at 6 am
I forge ahead and read "God's Justice" by Anne Carson,
another whose poems I'm not overly fond of
but don't actively disdain. I keep reading one line
over and over, hovering above it like a speckled starling
spying on the dragonfly with turquoise dots all down its back
like Lauren Bacall. Like Lauren Bacall!! Well hell,
I could do this all night. I could be in love like this
for the rest of my life, with everything in the expanding
universe and whatever else might be beyond it
that we can't grind a lens big enough to see. I light up
another smoke, maybe the one that will kill me,
and go outside to listen to the moon scalding
the iced trees. What, I ask you, will become of me?

Ars Poetica

by José Olivarez

Migration is derived from the word “migrate,” which is a verb defined by Merriam-Webster as “to move from one country, place, or locality to another.” Plot twist: migration never ends. My parents moved from Jalisco, México to Chicago in 1987. They were dislocated from México by capitalism, and they arrived in Chicago just in time to be dislocated by capitalism. Question: is migration possible if there is no “other” land to arrive in. My work: to imagine. My family started migrating in 1987 and they never stopped. I was born mid-migration. I’ve made my home in that motion. Let me try again: I tried to become American, but America is toxic. I tried to become Mexican, but México is toxic. My work: to do more than reproduce the toxic stories I inherited and learned. In other words: just because it is art doesn’t mean it is inherently nonviolent. 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. My people: my people. My enemies: capitalism. Susan Sontag: “victims are interested in the representation of their own 
sufferings.” Remix: survivors are interested in the representation of their own survival. My work: survival. Question: Why poems? Answer:

Another, longer, prose example is "Manifesto, or Ars Poetica #2" by Krista Franklin.

Ars Poetica

by Joseph Millar (who happens to be Dorianne Laux's husband)

Your friends tell you the writing
is good but you’re not actually buying it—
so much idle conversation, you think,
overheard through a hotel window
by a cab driver half asleep in the sun
instead of an ode or a psalm—

and waiting near the ER for your wife
who has just broken her arm,
reading a translation of Hafez or Tagore
can make you feel godless and small
since you’re not Neil Young or François Villon
though on such a day or night as this
you hear the footsteps along the sidewalk
and here comes the old shadow again
like the promise of late-season rain
which you hope will keep falling
into the earth, its rivers and deserts,
its alleys and streets
and the wild and wastrel ocean.

Essay on Craft

by Ocean Vuong (whose reading you can listen to here)

Because the butterfly’s yellow wing
flickering in black mud
was a word
stranded by its language.
Because no one else
was coming — & I ran
out of reasons.
So I gathered fistfuls
of  ash, dark as ink,
hammered them
into marrow, into
a skull thick
enough to keep
the gentle curse
of  dreams. Yes, I aimed
for mercy — 
but came only close
as building a cage
around the heart. Shutters
over the eyes. Yes,
I gave it hands
despite knowing
that to stretch that clay slab
into five blades of light,
I would go
too far. Because I, too,
needed a place
to hold me. So I dipped
my fingers back
into the fire, pried open
the lower face
until the wound widened
into a throat,
until every leaf shook silver
with that god
-awful scream
& I was done.
& it was human.

Finally, I refer you to a Ploughshares article that briefly explores three contemporary ars poeticas: Dana Levin's "Ars Poetica (cocoons)," Terrance Hayes's "Ars Poetica with Bacon," and Dorothea Lasky's "Ars Poetica." Frank O'Hara's "Why I Am Not a Painter" is another, slant example of an ars poetica.

Poetry Foundation has a "learning prompt" on the genre, which includes the following questions:

Why do you write? Who do you write for?
What do you write about?
What does writing do for you? What do you want writing to do for other people?
What do you find limiting about writing?
What does not show up in your poems or in “traditional poetry” that you wish did?
Where have you been? Where are you going?
What’s a story people should know about you?
What do you want?
What did you used to think? What do you think now?
What or who do you love? What or who do you detest?

Answer those, and you can write your own! 

97. Rita Dove, poet

I know the name Rita Dove, but I don't know her work. But as FB does so well (or so annoyingly, depending on the subject), yesterday for some reason it served Rita Dove up in my stream. It was a photo from 1977 of her and her then-thirty-year-old husband Fred, on Padre Island, Texas, posted on the occasion of Fred's 79th birthday. And because I looked more closely at that entry, Rita showed up again later in my feed, with a reference to a NYT essay by Roger Rosenblatt, a "love letter to old ladies." 

Now, Rita Dove is only 73, which I don't think qualifies just yet as an "old lady." But I'm glad he included her, because that essay caused me to seek her out. Here's what he says about her:

My friend the sublime poet Rita Dove wrote lyrical poems as a young woman. They were innocent explorations of wonder. In her later poems she has become a sassy, punning old lady in the know. A recent book, “Playlist for the Apocalypse,” shows her in control of all she sees. I did a reading with her a couple of years ago. I was floored by her quiet self-assurance — like an orchestra conductor, in command of all the instruments in the world.

Rita Dove was the first African American Poet Laureate of the United States (1993–95) and won the Pulitzer Prize for her third collection, Thomas and Beulah (1986). She is now vice president for literature at the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, where she has taught since 1989. Her honors and activities go on and on; you can read more about her here.

So here are just a few of her poems, including a prose poem. I am already looking forward to reading more. The first one is from Playlist for the Apocalypse (2021).

Prose in a Small Space

It’s supposed to be prose if it runs on and on, isn’t it?  All those words, too many to fall into rank and file, stumbling bareassed drunk onto the field reporting for duty, yessir, spilling out as shamelessly as the glut from a megabillion dollar chemical facility, just the amount of glittering effluvium it takes to transport a little girl across a room, beige carpet thick under her oxfords, curtains blowzy with spring — is that the scent of daffodils drifting in?

Daffodils don’t smell but prose doesn’t care.  Prose likes to hear itself talk; prose is development and denouement, anticipation hovering near the canapés, lust rampant in the antipasta — e.g., a silver fork fingered sadly as the heroine crumples a linen napkin in her lap to keep from crying out at the sight of Lord Campion’s regal brow inclined tenderly toward the wealthy young widow . . . prose applauds such syntactical dalliances.

Then is it poetry if it’s confined?  Trembling along its axis, a flagpole come alive in high wind, flapping its radiant sleeve for attention — Over here! It’s me! — while the white spaces (air, field, early morning silence before the school bell) shape themselves around that one bright seizure . . . and if that’s so what do we have here, a dream or three paragraphs?  We have white space too; is this music?  As for all the words left out, banging at the gates . . . we could let them in, but where would we go with our orders, our stuttering pride?

The next one is from the October 20, 2025, New Yorker, and it gets at what Rosenblatt called her sassiness. You can hear Rita read it here.

For the Birds 

Cardinal Rule No. 1: Duck
if necessary. Don’t be
the canary in the coal mine
unless you like playing cards
with the devil and his stool pigeons.
Usually, the unassuming won’t show up
onscreen; no one remembers enough
to describe the ordinary wren
nesting in the elm outside their window
after the eagle swoops down
for a snack. So much for blending in:
Who’s the turkey now?

Here are a couple from 1989:

Canary

Billie Holiday’s burned voice
had as many shadows as lights,
a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,
the gardenia her signature under that ruined face.

(Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass,
magic spoon, magic needle.
Take all day if you have to
with your mirror and your bracelet of song.)

Fact is, the invention of women under siege
has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.

If you can’t be free, be a mystery.

The Breathing and the Endless News

Every god is lonely, an exile
composed of parts: elk horn,
cloven hoof. Receptacle

for wishes, each god is empty
without us, penitent,
raking our yards into windblown piles. . . . 

Children know this; they are
the trailings of gods. Their eyes
hold nothing at birth then fill slowly

with the myth of ourselves. Not so the dolls,
out for the count, each toe pouting from
the slumped-over toddler clothes:

no blossoming there. So we 
give our children dolls, and
they know just what to do—

line them up and shoot them.
With every execution
doll and god grow stronger.

Finally, here's one from 1987, because I'm a sucker for ars poeticas:

Ars Poetica

Thirty miles to the only decent restaurant
was nothing, a blink
in the long dull stare of Wyoming.
Halfway there the unknown but terribly
important essayist yelled Stop!
I wanna be in this;
and walked fifteen yards into the land
before sky bore down and he came running,
crying Jesus—there's nothing out there!

I once met an Australian novelist
who told me he never learned to cook
because it robbed creative energy.
What he wanted most was
to be mute; he stacked up pages;
he entered each day with an ax.

What I want is this poem to be small,
a ghost town
on the larger map of wills.
Then you can pencil me in as a hawk:
a traveling x-marks-the-spot.

I could go on and on, but this gives a taste. You can find more of her poems at the Poetry Foundation, and I'll end with a documentary film made in 2014 by Eduardo Montes-Bradley. I haven't watched it yet, but I will.

Book Report: The Question of Bruno

9. Aleksandar Hemon, The Question of Bruno (2000) (4/15/26)

This book is labeled "stories," and although I expect not all of the eight stories are completely autobiographical (the book is not labeled "memoir"), they all ring true to lived experience. Hemon was born in Sarajevo (then Yugoslavia) in 1964, and made his way to the U.S. in 1992, where he has lived since.

The Question of Bruno begins with "Islands," relating in short sections aspects of a childhood holiday on an island off the Bosnian coast—family interactions, family stories, that place and time. Some of the family stories are of atrocities under Stalin, but these are (almost) overwhelmed by swims in the sea and wonderful feasts, sweet interactions with loved ones. 

The next two stories are about an imagined forester, Alphonse Kauders, presented as a work of research, and a real spy, Richard Sorge, who informs the young Aleksandar's imaginings about his own father as a spy—though the truth proves sadder. 

"The Accordion" takes us to the moment when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in June 1914—and a relative of Hemon's happened to be in the throng, playing his accordion.

"Exchange of Pleasant Words" recounts a family reunion—a Hemoniad—following the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics, with attendant family history stretching from Ukraine and Bosnia back to Brittany and even Greece.

"A Coin" consists of love letters that focus on survival: getting from point A to point B in Sarajevo without being dropped by a sniper, and all the life lived in between.

"Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls" (the title is a reference to the narrator's youthful rock band in Sarajevo) is about a young man who comes to the U.S. and ends up staying, though he doesn't speak the language and he has no prospects. But he makes do, working all manner of odd jobs. (The book's title comes from this chapter, where a doddery old woman keeps asking, "Where's Bruno?")

And finally, there's "Imitation of Life," told from the perspective of a young boy in Tito's Sarajevo. The "imitation" concerns movies—all the stories we tell and are told, all the stories we want to believe. 

It took me a while to finish this book, though it's short. I liked it well enough at the start, but by the end I was a bit bored by all the "telling detail." The first few stories grabbed me the most. Still, I'm glad I read it. It gives a good perspective on lives that I do not know first-hand: lives in wartorn places, the immigrant's life. It stirs up imagination and empathy, both of which seem to be lacking these days...

96. Just poking around the universe

This afternoon the Artemis II successfully completed its mission with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Wonderful! Big applause for the dreaming, for the science, for the engineering, for getting some new glimpses of our fragile planet from space and for totally new views of the moon's backside! 

Meanwhile, I've been wondering how the ship slowed down from its 24,000 mph hurtle through deep space to a mere 17 mph as it approached the Earth's surface. I haven't found answers that satisfy me—those that I have found include aerobraking and eleven parachutes. (The best source of information I found was a thread on Reddit, but still—I'd really love a nifty video direct from NASA. NASA—do you hear me?) 

Anyway, as I wandered through the internet, I got to wondering about our atmosphere—which was ostensibly helping to put the brakes on the Artemis II. And once again, as so often, I realized (with some delight: there's so much to learn!) how ignorant I am. Check out this rather simplistic illustration:

So, what really slays me here is the Thermosphere, with temperatures from 930°F to 3600°F. This right after the Mesosphere, with a high temp of 5°F. What? And then, beyond the Thermosphere: absolute zero. How is that even possible? 

As a certain scientific type in this household explained, it doesn't mean the Thermosphere is hot. There are very, very few molecules out there. But what molecules there are (mainly atomic and molecular oxygen, molecular nitrogen, and atomic helium), they have a high temperature. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that. Why are they so high-temp? (The short answer is that they directly absorb intense, high-energy UV and X-ray radiation from the sun.) 

And now I'm resisting doing further research into the auroras—are they super high-temp too? But not hot? What is hot? What is cold? What exactly is an aurora? I'm so confused...

And then finally, I'm not even sure where this came from—it could be Mr. Science mentioned it—I learned that Elon Musk has launched over 10,000 LEO (low earth-orbit) Starlink satellites in the last seven years (since 2019). His plan is to have 1 million satellites as orbital data centers, "addressing the immense energy needs of AI on Earth." The 10,000 are already making earth-based astronomy harder to do. But 1 million? And for AfuckingI?I am beyond horrified.

Until last year, said satellites orbited at 550 km (340 miles), but they've now lowered the orbit to 480 km (298 miles) "to increase safety by reducing space debris and enabling faster re-entry of inactive satellites." Now I need to find out what "re-entry of inactive satellites" actually means.  

There's so much I don't know. But I have to say, it was a relief to venture imaginatively into space today, and avoid the earth-bound news, which never fails to be infuriating anymore. 

Book Report: Purgatory Ridge

8. William Kent Krueger, Purgatory Ridge (2001) (4/3/26)

Book #3 in the Cork O'Connor series (my reports on the first two are here and here), about an ex-sheriff in the small northern Minnesota town of Aurora. Cork is half Ojibwe, and the town is cheek by jowl with an Indian reservation, so some of the plot elements tie in with the cultural tensions following an explosion at a lumber mill in which a Native elder is killed. Accident? eco-terror? What about the nearby stand of white pines: who should have access, those who revere the Old Grandfathers, as the trees are known, as sacred, or the owner of the lumber mill, Karl Lindstrom, who after all provides employment to a good number of townsfolk? 

The book opens, however, with a twelve-year-old incident on Lake Superior when, in a violent storm, an ore carrier sinks and all but one aboard die. The one who survives, half-Native John LePere, has been a wreck ever since, mourning his lost younger brother and eking out a living as a janitor at the local Indian casino. And then Lindstrom builds a fancy house on the inlet across from John's cabin. His wife happens to be the heiress of the shipping line whose ore carrier sank. John's resentment, and pain over his brother's death, only grow. And then he meets a man who's (obviously) got things on his mind other than finding personal peace—like, shaking things up, and maybe getting his hands on vast amounts of money.

In the midst of all this, Cork is treading a tender line as he reunites, after mutual extramarital affairs, with his wife, Jo, a lawyer who represents, among others, the local Natives. She gets drawn into the lumber mill explosion, and Cork tags along. Cork bumps up against a few eco-warriors, and wonders what their involvement in the incident might be. He can't seem to keep his nose out of all the goings-on. And as he is the former sheriff, the various authorities—current sheriff, FBI, the state version of the FBI, etc.—let him keep nosing around.

Then Jo and their son, Stevie, are kidnapped, along with the heiress and her son. It's about here, halfway through, that the book becomes, as they say, unputdownable. And there is where I'll stop with the summary. Even my summary so far is sketchy at best—though I bet you can guess who might be behind the kidnapping. It's a pretty good book, and the dénouement did surprise me (not that I consider it convincing, but heck, it's genre fiction, not real life). 

I think now that I'll be giving Krueger a rest for a while. Then again, I do find it hard to resist a good thriller, and the three so far qualify. We'll see. The next one's called Blood Hollow, so if I continue on my alphabetical pattern at the present pace, it'll be up in, oh, five months. But maybe I'll find something more compelling for B. It'll probably depend on how demanding A was . . . 

And now, on to Q! Which I thought I'd skip, but then, scanning my shelves for an R book, what should jump up and wave its arms but a book of short stories, The Question of Bruno. My decision has been made. (I do love this method of choosing what to read next. And if whatever book lands in my hands just doesn't engage me, onto the discard pile it goes, and off I go in search of an alternative. If Bruno proves unsatisfying, I will be skipping Q. But here's hoping.)

Book Report: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

7. Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025) (3/29/26)

On October 25, 2023, the journalist and writer Omar El Akkad wrote on X: "One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this."

He was writing about Gaza—and about the West, about privilege, about power structures and power plays. He was writing about death and destruction, about lives turned topsy-turvy. And to what end? What does all the killing actually accomplish? Isn't it, simply, abhorrent?

This book is an extension of that tweet.

In it, he provides many anecdotes, which I found easy enough to grasp—anecdotes about love, about confusion, about power, about yearnings, about life's meaning, also about atrocities. He also interrogates this world order, and I found his polemics harder to get a handle on. He has plenty to criticize, but I ended up—as so often in these circumstances—unsure just what we are to do about it all.

El Akkad was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, is now a US citizen. From early on, he experienced the capriciousness of the world order as his father, who worked in the hotel business (think: capitalism, think: third world), tried to follow a career. He brings all those identities to bear here, in what is essentially a critique of western liberalism. 

Lord knows, we are living in a bizarre time when nothing much makes sense. Not Gaza. Not Trump. Not Ukraine. Now, not Iran. I read the news daily, and feel ever more alienated from what I've always thought of as "my country," of "the world." 

Maybe I need to read this book again, slower. Maybe I just need to accept that it will never make sense. That there's so much hatred in the world, so much desperate scrabbling for power.

Although as El Akkad reminds us at the end of his book, while atrocity is rampant, maybe the opposite is indeed stronger: kindness and love, caring and humanity. The final paragraph is this:

It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation. That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away. None of this evil was ever necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we'll learn to lay tracks on air. 

But: Evil is never necessary. We don't ride around in carriages. There is no cliff. We can't fly. I mean, I get the sentiments, but I guess I'm just overwhelmed by the fact that there are too many of us, and we seem to be ever more at odds. And there is so much fear and hatred, cruelty and greed in the world. That, I don't get. But it's a fact. I would absolutely love it if, today, we could all agree that we've always been against... all the suffering, all the heartache, all the death, all the turmoil. But that doesn't seem to be the human condition. How strange, that we would choose such a state of being. How absolutely strange.

In the meantime, however, I vote, as I have done in every election for 52 years. It often feels meaningless: I live in California; my vote for president has 1/4 the weight of a vote in Wyoming thanks to the stinking electoral college. On Saturday I waved my flag with 10,000(!) others at our local No Kings protest. It feels so small. But it's something.

Sorry, I've not really covered much about this book. You have to read it yourself. Let me know what you think.

And now, after two O books in a row, it's on to P.

95. Essays, part II

The other day I shared a multi-part list of essays from Summer Brennan's Substack "A Writer's Notebook" and her weeklong "essay camp." Here are the rest of the essays she recommends.

Day 4

"Passing Mary Oliver at Dawn," by Summer Brennan, 764 words, 3-minute read
"A Woman's Work: Home Economics," by Carolita Johnson, 1,075 words, 5 minutes
"Natural Intelligence," by Maria Popova, 1,538 words, 6 minutes
"The Face That Replicates," by Katy Kelleher, 2,620 words, 10 minutes
"The Heaviest Pain in the World," by Rob Delaney, 4,240 words, 17 minutes
"Chicxulub," by T. Coraghessan Boyle (a short story), 4,374 words, 18 minutes
"Dreamers in Broad Daylight: Ten Conversations," by Leslie Jamison, 7,271 words, 29 minutes
"The Reenchanted World," by Karl Ove Knausgaard, 10,766 words, 43 minutes
"Ugly, Bitter, and True," by Suzanne Rivecca, about 16,000 words, 1 hour 10 minutes
"Bluets," by Maggie Nelson, about 28,000 words, 2 hours

Day 5

"A Word for Autumn," by A. A. Milne, 892 words, 4 minutes
"Living Like Weasels," by Annie Dillard, 1,585 words, 6 minutes
"On Self-Respect," by Joan Didion, 1,826 words, 7 minutes
"Uncanny the Winging That Comes from Certain Husks," by Joy Williams, 2,251 words, 9 minutes
"Scent Makes a Place," by Katy Kelleher, 2,700 words, 11 minutes
"Frog," by Anne Fadiman, 6,019 words, 24 minutes
"When I Met the Pope," by Patricia Lockwood, 6,604 words, 26 minutes
"Shipping Out, by David Foster Wallace, about 20,000 words, 1 hour 20 minutes

And that's it! Plenty of reading material, most of which I've never encountered.