Ars This

ARS POETICA TO YOU TOO, BUSTER

A poem should not mean, but be.
—Archibald McLeish

What poets mean by what they mean
Is tougher than it's ever been.
—Carl Crane

Cryptic and thick
as an Assyrian brick
a half-baked babble-born cuneiform

A poem should be warm
as fresh milk,
smooth as silk and cute
as a recycled woolen suit
made in Taiwan

A poem should be able
to float
like a McKenzie Riverboat
serene
dutiful and cold
like coarse Yukon gold
acetylene
and refrigerated grapefruit

A poem should stand oblique, but stable
resembling an antique pine table
where good old Mabel
sets 'em between rounds

See here, pseudo-Ezra-Pounds:
One should be rough and tough as an old boar!
A poem should endeavor not to snore.

—and move with the ease and dignity
of a constipated cat
who knows in the dark
precisely where it's at

—And demonstrate the technical power
at a conservative speed
not to exceed,
say, fifty-five miles per hour

A poem should not try to work too hard,
take time off, roll in the yard
One that tries to drain the swamp
will find it may be more tempting to dream
of skysful of exquisite blue guitars
hurt thumbs and empires of icecream

Like a ventriloquist birdsong
lascivious, clean
as a hound's tooth
a poem should not be,
like a Fender guitar on an emerald sea,
or an elegant Rube Goldburg machine.

A poem should grind out truth
be ornery, hard and mean.

—mark worden