The poetics of being meta

& songs about songs

I'm a self-deprecating comedian...though I'm not very good at it.
— Stewart Francis

Ah, a good meta moment.

Lately I’ve had a particular kind of meta moment on the mind: the ars poetica. If you’re not familiar, buckle up because I’m about to be a pain in the ars about it…

“Ars poetica” is Latin for “about poetry” and is, quite literally, a poem about poetry—what it is, why it exists, etc.

The genre has a wide range. Early examples were more directive, like Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” with the killer line:

A poem should not mean
But be.

—Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”

But many contemporary examples are more “show, don’t tell,” like Dana Levin’s “Ars Poetica (cocoons)” which compares poetry to butterfly cocoons clinging to the back of your throat—both impossible to hold back and terrifying to release.

There are some playful edge cases, like Billy Collins’ “Workshop,” which reads like a poetry workshop in progress. It begins:

I might as well begin by saying how much I like the title.
It gets me right away because I’m in a workshop now
so immediately the poem has my attention,
like the Ancient Mariner grabbing me by the sleeve.

—Billy Collins, “Workshop”

But my favorite ars poeticas are the conversational ones—the ones that you think are about something else, until they sneak up on you.

Dorothea Lasky’s “Ars Poetica” describes a call from a drunk ex that devolves into a discussion of the purpose of poetry, ending in the revelation:

Goodness is not the point anymore
Holding on to things
Now that’s the point.

—Dorothea Lasky, “Ars Poetica”

And so this brings us to the Big Mac of ars poeticas in my opinion, Terrance Hayes’s “Ars Poetica with Bacon.” *Cue poetry nerd stage left!!!*

A poem about bacon

The poem’s genius is in that it reads like a fable. There is the speaker, leading this hungry family away from a war-torn country, much like a poet might lead a reader through a poem.

There’s some obscurity. In fact, apparently after Hayes shared this poem in a recent Yale lecture, he joked, “I don’t know what it means either.”

But not knowing is part of the point. When you read it, you can actually feel the speaker grappling with their own metaphors in real time, asking, what does all of this even mean? But the story is resisting tidy metaphors.

The job of a poet

In the poem, the speaker describes their job, which seems to also be the job of a poet: “to lead the family to a territory full of more seeds than bullets.” But they find that “in the darkness there was no telling / what was rooting in the soil.” It just isn’t that easy to swaddle everything in retrofitted meaning.

Even the speaker themselves seems to want a simpler explanation than they can give, saying:

I too, wanted to reach through the thorns for the egg
or ball, believing it was a symbol of things to come.

Where does the “I” go?

As the poem unfolds, time and time again, this strange “I” appears in unexpected places. It slips in and out of the poem, as if the speaker is never sure how much of themselves belongs in there—and if it might make a difference.

Somehow, at last, it culminates in a “we”:

The heart, biologically speaking, is ugly as it pumps
its passion and fear down the veins. Which is to say,
starting out we have no wounds to speak of
beyond the ways our parents expressed their love.

And suddenly it feels like the poem has done what it’s meant to do. It’s turned a “they” and “I” into a “we,” albeit a messy and convoluted one. The metaphors aren’t wrapped in bows; there are still a lot of questions. But there is something to hold onto. And it’s something that doesn’t mean, but is.

Songs about songs

Of course, poetry isn’t the only art capable of self-reference. Take “songs about songs” for example. I thought it would be fun to gather a bunch into a single playlist. So here’s Ars Musica for your listening pleasure.

*dons 90s TV commercial voice* Ars Musica includes bangers like “Hallelujah”:

And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

—Hallelujah

Or another classic:

But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died

—American Pie

The Billy Collins of this category would be Carly Simon with:

You're so vain
I bet you think this song is about you
Don't you, don't you?

—You’re So Vain

And of course the Patron Saint Band of my Teen Years, Twenty One Pilots:

I wish I found some better sounds no one's ever heard
I wish I had a better voice that sang some better words
I wish I found some chords in an order that is new
I wish I didn't have to rhyme every time I sang

—Stressed Out

And the Patron Saint of my College Years, Noah Gundersen:

Sometimes making songs for a living
Feels like living to make songs
…
Am I giving all that I can give
Am I earning the right to live
By looking in a mirror
There's nothing more sincere
Than selfish art

—Selfish Art

^ Warning: that song is quite melancholic. In college when I posted it to my Instagram Story, my mom called immediately to make sure I was ok. I still adore it.

At the bottom of the playlist, I’ve added a podcast where Mary Karr and Paul Muldoon read “Ars Poetica with Bacon.” Happy listening, my friends.

And lastly, a poem about mud

This week, Same Faces Collective published my own poem, “Ars Poetica with Mud,” written in response to (and out of my love for) Terrance Hayes’s. I wouldn’t claim to hold a candle to him, but if you’d like to read my poem, you can find it here.

That’s all for today. I won’t submit you to an Ars Substackia about Substacking, though I imagine it exists already…

🐱
Emma