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Ars poetica

The meteoric rise in the academic sanctioning of poets since the 1970s has made "ars poetica" one of the things never far from my mind.

The mind’s eyeball

To declaim the universal is tantamount to proclaiming the individual. Unless my logic is faulty, we’re now better able to understand the poor state of poetry in the dis-United States. Being poet first, logician second, the following epigram is two years older than the logical proposition in the preceding sentence!

Turned inward like a bad toenail is the mind’s eyeball,
an unblinking cyclops ready to light me up –
like a bored cop at the intersection of reflect and write.

p.s. I was chatting with the a couple local cops while taking the long view of mourners arriving at Donald Hall’s funeral. When a car sped past, by way of an order to a subordinate, one cop said to the other “light ’em up!”

Awaiting the funeral of Donald Hall
Awaiting the funeral of Donald Hall

p.p.s. This appears as “v.homeric” in Fakir’s Dozen Ways of Looking at Stuff.

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