STUDIES FOR POETRY: AN ARS POETICA

Studies For Poetry

A poem must be magical as a seagull.

-- Jose Garcia Villa, Selected Poems and New

1. Reasons for Imagery

Stars must be capable of violence,

Frogs eloquence, earthworms grace;

And Chaucer’s cock or Peter’s gaoler,

Endless crowing into bright space.

Search here ends where fire begins

To consume the log which must be

Unconsumed; the logs are ember;

But in the ken, the log is reality.

Reality as reality is not even sound,

But a thing for mutes to talk about.

2. The Balance of Thought and Emotion

Agility on the tightrope

Is becoming to the dancer;

No put-on teetering robs

The act of its exquisite danger.

What happens then to clothes

Stripped off the limbs slowly,

While dancer on air unloads

Daily fears and common pity?

Circus fares keep shorn rags

Like widows their memento mori.

3. The Creative Process

Trust trembling cups, Alejo, fashion

answers to questions asked of black coffee:

Why is the cup a cup not a reason

for us to forget this morning’s ennui?

If coffee must be itself and must be black,

why do I take it and ask how the cup,

empty as it is, can take the lack

of mass where form and coffee overlap?

It is the cup as master of the form

resolves the problem of St. Augustine.

It is the cup as mystic on the table

shapes the pain that stops whatever we are in.

-- ALBERT B. CASUGA

Poets Jose Garcia Villa, Achibald Macleish, had their Ars Poetica. So should I.

Macleish's "A poem should not mean / But be." is faithful to the New Critic's concept of the poem as an art work that stands on its on. It also perishes on its own.

Villa says: "A poem must be magical as a seagull." How so? Listen to the sounds of "magical" and "seagull". Do they recall the gongs of the Shinto shrine that one must strike before entering the temple? Visualize the glide of the seagull. Poems should be made of these.

Existing as ontological creations, poems thrive on these: oxymorons, conceits, ironies, the magical chemistry of form achieving content and content birthing a form.

"Reality as reality is not even sound,/ But a thing for mutes to talk about."

Indeed, "Search here ends whre fire begins/ To consume the log which must be/ Unconsumed; the logs are ember;/ But in the ken, the log is reality."

What is a poem? It is the "cup as mystic on the table". It is the shorn rags of lovers kept by "widows like their memento mori."

"It is the cup as master of the form/ resolves the problem of St. Augustine." Can the entire sea be contained in a teacup? The entire universe of possibilities, indeed.