Brookline Poetry Series

On Friday night I went with my sister to a reading at the Brookline Booksmith
. Tonight didn't feature any readers, rather you were meant to bring and read one of your favorite poems. And memorize it if you could. I chose Borges' "Ars Poetica" which lends a phrase to the title of this blog.




ARS POETICA

To look at the river made of time and water
And remember that time is another river,
To know that we are lost like the river
And that faces dissolve like water.

To be aware that waking dreams it is not asleep
While it is another dream, and that the death
That our flesh goes in fear of is that death
Which comes every night and is called sleep.

To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of the days of man and of his years,
To transmute the outrage of the years
Into a music, a murmur of voices, and a symbol,

To see in death sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold - such is poetry,
Which is immortal and poor. Poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.

At times in the evenings a face
Looks at us out of the depths of a mirror;
Art should be like that mirror
Which reveals to us our own face.

They say that Ulysses, sated with marvels,
Wept tears of love at the sight of his Ithaca,
Green and humble. Art is that Ithaca
Of green eternity, not of marvels.

It is also like the river with no end
That flows and remains and is the mirror of one same
Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
And is another, like the river with no end.

(translated by W. S. Merwin)




It's an easy enough poem to memorize, given its repetitions. I'm still not sure what the poem means to me. There is something in it that resists the urge to put art outside of life. The river and time are things that we live, that we have to make poetry out of.

As always, I had a great time, and I think it was fun for my sister - it's not the kind of thing she gets to do much in Fort Lauderdale. It's a great bookstore, too. I don't go enough, but at least the readings give me an excuse to visit Coolidge Corner.