November 20, 2024

Ars Poetica

Kenyatta Rogers

^{After Amiri Baraka and Stefania Gomez}

Poems are bullshit unless they are broken
like a horse, like a dog kicked in the ribs,
Like your favorite toy that’s missing an arm.

Love can make you feel used.
I want the poem that limps back to me.
Poems should hurt like love,
like ice water on your teeth
like a massage to smooth out a cramped muscle.

Give me the poem that’s like leather.
Give me the poem that smells like gasoline.
I want a poem that is a warning,
a poem that makes me check to see
if I left the shotgun by the door,
a poem that’s a runny nose, a sneeze, a poem
that’s the moment the sky turns green.

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“Poet Stefania Gomez came to do a teaching demo at my school and she gave the students a prompt to write an ars poetica after reading an excerpt of ‘Black Art’ by Amiri Baraka. So, I wrote along with them, and then we were asked, ‘What can a poem do? What can a poem be in the world?’ And I have been writing a lot this past summer, and in some ways, rediscovering poetry, and those questions really resonated with me. I guess for me, poetry is a love that never leaves and is always there when I’ve needed it. It’s a wild, crazy, unhinged fever dream of a love language, it can be.”
—Kenyatta Rogers

Kenyatta Rogers teaches at The Chicago High School for the Arts and is the cohost of the Sunday Reading Series with Simone Muench. He lives in Chicago.

“Ars Poetica #1,002: Rally”
by Elizabeth Alexander
read more

“Poetry is This Screaming Madwoman”
by Giannina Braschi

read more

Thanks to Laura Tohe, author of Tséyi’/Deep in the Rock (University of Arizona Press, 2005), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Tohe’s curatorial approach and find out more about our Guest Editors for the year.

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Poem-a-Day - "Ars Poetica" by Kenyatta Rogers

Ars Poetica

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