When I think of the ars poetica, I think often of TV shows that break the fourth wall. Older examples like The Office and Modern Family, and more recently, Fleabag and Abbott Elementary, where characters take turns talking to the camera in the style of a tell-all interview or a reality show confessional cam. Sometimes, it’s just a split-second knowing look, a nod to us as audience members at home. The jarring yet intimate direct eye contact makes me think of the poetic possibilities of metacognition, defined in Merriam Webster as the “awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking processes.” On TV and in poems, metacognitive strategies create opportunities for addressing the audience, critiquing self and others, building ethos, depicting multiple perspectives, and expressing authorial intent. Through these and other strategies, the ars poetica becomes an especially effective form for representing marginalized experiences.

We began this workshop with context on the original “Ars Poetica” from 19 BC, where Horace makes the claim that “Poetry wants to instruct or else delight; / Or, better still, to delight and instruct at once,” an approach he says leads to monetary and professional success. He writes that any instruction should be “succinct, so the mind / Can quickly seize on what’s being taught and hold it,” while the delight should “stay close to actuality.” But because success in writing favors those who already have a leg up in life, in aspects like race, class, gender, and sexuality, we considered in the same breath Joy Priest’s claims that “craft is not an objective activity” and “we must realize that what we bring to craft is the world that crafted us” (from her craft essay “Craft Is Not Objective”); a related line of thinking went viral in Noor Hindi’s poem “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying.”

In academic settings, for example, didactic is a negative and often racially coded term when applied to poetry, associated with obvious, political, moralistic, and condescending. Similarly, Horace’s injunction to delight privileges poets and poetry whose perspectives are mainstream and fit in with, or appeal to, dominant white culture. With this in mind, we read poems and contemplated: How do writers with marginalized identities extend or challenge the tradition of ars poetica? What can we learn from the way these writers engage with, reorient, or even challenge their audiences?

Poems:

Carmen Giménez, “Ars Poetica”
Layli Long Soldier, part three of “Ȟe Sápa”
Joy Priest, “Ars Poetica”
José Olivarez, “Ars Poetica”
Michael Torres, “Ars Poetica”

The following prompts were inspired by discussions of the above poems and designed as pre-writing activities for an ars poetica:

List seven spaces: they can be spaces from your poems, spaces you encounter in real life on a daily basis, spaces that are indoors or outdoors, etc. Then, list seven ways of seeing or watching: seeing someone familiar from across the street, déjà vu, watching a TV show, watching yourself on camera, watching a test subject through a one-way mirror, etc. Choose one thing from each list. Begin a free-write by placing yourself as the writer in the space, seeing or being seen in the specific way that you chose. Don’t worry if they’re a little bit disconnected (example from my own poem: room with a ceiling that opens up, like a dollhouse + being watched from above).
Telling can be a powerful strategy in an ars poetica. In contrast to the writing workshop dictum show-not-tell, telling statements indicate a rewriting of the rules on the writer’s terms, prioritizing a strategy of self-preservation (the writer doesn’t have to explicitly depict vulnerable or traumatic moments in detail) while also ensuring clarity for resistant audiences so they do not misunderstand—even if they still do. Using Carmen Giménez’s and José Olivarez’s poems as a jumping off point, write a series of I-statements or a list starting with “my work.”
Brainstorm a list of your hobbies or interests. It doesn’t have to be explicitly related to the act of writing or the concept of audience, but it could be. Then, choose one for a free-write, exploring images/metaphors and creating a word bank unique to you. In your ars poetica, incorporate an image/metaphor from this brainstorm to describe the act of writing, as a visual counterpoint, or to create setting/atmosphere.

Further reading:

Krista Franklin, “Manifesto, or Ars Poetica #2”
Marwa Helal, “poem to be read from right to left”
Layli Long Soldier, “38”
Valzhyna Mort, “Ars Poetica”
Sharon Olds, “Take the I Out”