Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

Alien Life, an Ars Poetica

Deep in our cups at the dive bar
the tall, young poet declaimed to a table of poets (equally young)
that a poem is not about aboutness.

Not knowing that an older poet had already said it better:
a poem is about something the way a cat is about the house.

That poet had not read the advice of a slightly older poet,
who in his instruction manual for writing poems says: don’t be cute.

He was a dog person. Sometimes an actual dog when
young women were around — eating the shoes right off our feet
while we watched Lifetime or the latest true crime.

How should a dog person write poems?
What does it mean to run your nose along a seam of soil
to tarry over a scent in a mash of wet leaves, agains the riven bark, under the
stiff tails of other dogs?

Should you try not to remember the last line you’ve written?
But instead go headlong to the heartbeat,
flushing out the fattest
rabbit in the reeds.

For a dog, who has laid out for the kill, shaking the warm thing cold, lording
over it, baring her teeth when anything gets close, that is success. But for a
poet this is failure. You have killed the poem.

Once or twice it has happened I have darted and gouged a chuck of flesh only
to leave in a cloud of feathers.

Mostly I gallop and chafe against the halter and am yanked back when I am
just about to sink my teeth into the flesh.

To be a dog/poet, you must conclude that one of these situations is not
preferable to the other.

What matters is to not abandon the body. This is what pleases the master.

Tanya Larkin is the Managing Editor of Transition Magazine. She also teaches poetry and visual arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, now part of Tufts. She lives in Cambridge.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx