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Ars Poetica Quotes

Browse 16 quotes about Ars Poetica.

Ars Poetica Quotes

“At some point, Tracy sent me the demos for the next Static Saints album. I was knocked out, and soon became fixated on the song "Useful and Beautiful." It would likely be heard as an ode to sexual debasement, but I think it's also an invitation to root your life and your art in utility and beauty. I found myself returning endlessly to this question: How can we make Tracy's memoir more useful and more beautiful. I love that her song enacts what it extols. It reminds us that we can revel in sexual pleasure and perversity ("I've got uses, I've got bruises") while also opening up to become more expansive, more useful, and more beautiful ("Oh let me be a crashing wave. Oh let me be a secret cave.").”

“Whatever may have been the case in years gone by, the true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and to common lives, endowing them with the glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to every real thing, and to real things only. Without that ultimate vivification—which the poet or other artist alone can give—reality would seem incomplete, and science, democracy, and life itself, finally in vain.”

“...an actualized poem requires the actualization, or radical transformation, of the poet - that a poem is the discovery and enactment of an emotional and psychological investigation into the vexed interiority of a speaker, that the interior is indeed political - and that every poem, every time, in some miraculous way, must be an argument about the making of poetry itself.”