Ars Poetica

“Imagine a painter who wanted to combine a horse’s neck with a human head, and then clothe a miscellaneous collection of limbs with various kinds of feathers, so that what started out at the top as a beautiful woman ended in a hideously ugly fish. If you were invided, as friends, to the private view, could you help laughing? Let me tell you, my Piso friends, a book whose different features are made up at random like a sick man’s dreams, with no unified form to have a head or a tail, is exactly like that picture.” —Horace (65-8 BCE)

The burning bush paints shadow-black

Upon the canvas sand

‘Twixt Lucania and Apulia

Going, going, gone

To Rome, then on to Athens

And war

Octavian to Augustus

Enemy turned patron

Scriba quaestorius

Virgil grease the wheels

So he may write and write

And nothing else

Until his dying breath

Give me a practised mastery of a craft

Give me a systematic knowledge of theory and technique

Give me a capacity for objective self-criticism

Give me decorum: the discernment and use of appropriateness, propriety, proportion, and unity in the arts – to fit the part to the whole, to delight and instruct

The mad scientist tried in vane

To sew together snake to bird, and the tiger to the lamb

But the purple patch it could not bear

The fierce and gentle pull and tear of thread

Such monsters have no place

Here

In the wine-jar lung of the drowning man

Beggars can’t afford to be anything other than choosers

In the lion’s maw, cling to a single fang, and send the rest to the wind

Make familiar words new

Through your own tears

Make me cry

Attuned to Fortune

You cannot light the smoke

Only bring smoke to light

The friendliest of fires and

Weapons of Mad Divination

God shall not intervene

While the goat sings his tragic song

And the old drunk snores

His faced daubed red with lees and trub

A truly tragic end, when, at the curtain,

the bush speaks: Please Clap…