Tag Archive for 'Emily Dickinson'

Found Poetry Friday: Ars Poetica

jordan published on April 23, 2010 in art. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

On the 2nd and 4th Friday of every month SuperForester Jordan “rediscovers” a literary gem from the vast treasure trove of an art form that, in our technological age, has become largely under-appreciated and “lost”.

Ars Poetica or “the art of poetry”, is a tradition of poetry that dates back as far as Aristotle and the blind poet Horace — and encompasses a poem’s attempt (or any medium really), to capture the essence of the form through which it is being expressed.

In short:  An ars poetica poem is one that writes about poetry.

There are many famous and great examples.  But here is one by contemporary and great Spanish poet Luis Garcia Montero, that, as Emily Dickinson once put it: “knocks the top of my head off”.

POETRY BY LUIS GARCIA MONTERO (B. 1958)

Poetry is useless, it serves only
to behead a king
or seduce a young woman.

Perhaps it serves also,
if water is death
to part the water with a dream
And if time grants us its unique matter,
it serves possible as a blade,
because a clean cut is better
when we open memory’s skin.
With broken glass
desire
leaves ragged wounds.

You are poetry
a clean cut,
a part in the water
-if water is the reason for existence-,
the woman who submits to seduction
in order to behead a king.

Luis Garcia Montero – translated from Spanish by Katie King

Write a poem about poetry, or a song about singing, a SuperForest post about SuperForest.  OR BETTER STILL…

Write a “vita poetica” –write the art of your life and live it like it is your own!

Happy Weekend!

-jordan

Friday Found Poetry – Whitman’s Spider Soul

jordan published on April 10, 2009 in art, celebrity and zeitgeist. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

On the 2nd and 4th Friday of every month SuperForester Jordan “rediscovers” a literary gem from the vast treasure trove of an art form that, in our technological age, has become largely under-appreciated and “lost”.

Before there were ipod touches, and hd television and 3d, before even movies and video-games… at a time in our not distant past — words were our art and entertainment.  And even Poetry held a center spotlight in the zeitgeist of pop culture.  Today I couldn’t name our nation’s Poet Laureate without a google search (it’s Kay Ryan, read him here).  

So while Found Poetry technically refers to a type of poem that, like those nifty refrigerator magnets, is created by mashing-up words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources… I’ve decided to co-opt the term.  To find and present those great glittering jewels of poems past that, while not lost,  seem to have fallen by the wayside of our current culture.

Emily Dickinson once said that “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”  So I present for the  first in my new, bi-monthly SuperForest Series – the first poem I ever read that beheaded me.   The grandfather of modern American Poetry: Walt Whitman and his “Noiseless Patient Spider”.

A NOISELESS, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.
  
And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.