Ars Poetica

             Portrait of the poet Eileen Chong

I am, admittedly, a late bloomer when it comes to appreciation of poetry. 

In my first prac as a student teacher I remarked to my supervisor that I wasn't much into poetry. She told me, in good humour, that I needed to get my act together. Grasping for some kind of validation, I told her a few days later that I'd picked up a bargain copy of a Pam Ayres volume. She was less than impressed and I was confused. I was fairly green when it came to the idea of a poetry canon; I'd read Coleridge at school some 15 years previously and all I could remember was that he smoked a bunch of heroin and wrote the poem that inspired the classic Iron Maiden song Rime of the Ancient Mariner. 

It's been ten years since my practicum block and it feels like a lifetime ago.

I have had some time to read a bunch of poems since those days and the construction of effective poetry appeals to me a lot more now that I'm in my (late) 30s. I used to play in bands, write song lyrics, and have always loved a neat turn of phrase. Finding my way into poetry has been both a joy and a sadness. So far, the poets I've liked are:

• Ellen Van Neerven
• W.H. Auden
• Eileen Chong
• Dylan Thomas
• Tracy K. Smith
• Olivia Gatwood
• Kim Boey Cheng
• Anita Heiss
• Percy Mumbulla
• Oodgeroo Noonuccal

I find myself listening to singer-songwriters with a much more critical ear now too; Paul Kelly, Brian Sella, Francis Quinlan, Ted Leo, Wil Wagner - they're all pulling words from the ether to craft stories as song, and I find myself scanning them for swearwords to check if I can use them for junior English classes. 

I didn't post anything to this blog for December and as I'm currently working on some other writing projects I'm thinking my online output will probably slow down a little. So I wanted to post something... I wanted to put down some thoughts regarding 'Ars Poetica' too, and this seems as good an excuse as any to write something.  

'Ars Poetica' is a poem by the classical Roman poet Horace that offers advice on how to write poetry. The phrase 'Ars Poetica' (meaning 'the art of poetry') has become an emblematic term used to describe a metatextual work in which an author reflects on the why and how of literary creation.

I hadn't really heard of this term until about a year ago but, hey, I'm only about 2036 years late. Isn't that the way, though? That you hear or read a term like this and then suddenly you see it everywhere. I was reading The Tempest and doing some paratextual research and this is exactly what happened. In the midst of reading about John Dee's career as a spy, the doomed Virginian colony, and whether the Jacobeans were aware of their king's homosexuality or not, I came across W.H. Auden's 'The Sea and the Mirror'. This long, complicated, multi-perspective text features a series of interconnected poems in which the various characters of The Tempest talk to one another and the audience. Auden referred to it as his ars poetica, with the text acting as his own personal commentary about how we view art. In extension of this, Auden posited that The Tempest itself was Shakespeare's ars poetica.

Looking at Prospero's enigmatic epilogue, in which the magician implores directly for the audience to set him free, it's easy to see why so many academics have imagined an ailing Shakespeare speaking through the character. Whether this is really the case or not we will probably never know, but I can appreciate the romance and poetry of the Bard reaching the end of his career and wanting to create a final statement on his work in the theatre.

The Tempest as ars poetica is further supported by the play's thematic core as a narrative built around the motif of performance. Prospero 'performs' for his daughter, Miranda, by keeping certain facts from her. He uses metaphors relating to the stage to refer to his elaborate plans of manipulation and revenge. Ariel and the other spirits put on a masque as a symbol of Ferdinand and Miranda's union. The idea of performance is one of several keys to understanding the text on a deeper level.

Of course, the other side of this sentimental coin is that Shakespeare had no idea when he was going to die. The only real record of his cause of death is a possibly apocryphal tale told 50 years later that attributes Shakespeare's passing to a fever contracted after a wild drinking session. If this is even remotely true then it would make no sense to assume that he wrote The Tempest knowing it would be his last play. Any intention for it to serve as his ars poetica wouldn't be tied to his supposed retirement or demise.

Anyway. 

I've also been analysing Eileen Chong's Burning Rice collection in connection to the English Extension 1 Elective 'Literary Homelands' and pulling together any relevant paratext I can find that will support student parsing of her work. During this process I found the poem 'Burning Rice' referred to as Chong's ars poetica.

There's that phrase again.

The poem itself is a three stanza piece about memory, ancestry, and the preparation of rice. These fifteen short lines are so carefully poised and constructed, so central to Chong's writing in the rest of the volume, so metatextually ripe as a metaphor for creation, that they can indeed be seen as definitively representative of what her poetry is essentially about.

It's interesting and I can see Extension students, with further discussion of what ars poetica means, attempting to find examples of texts from other writers that metatextually represent what they do, how they do it, and why they do it.