Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is

Monday, December 11, 2003. Today's poem is by the late Lawrence Ferland Getty, and it's called

Constantly Risking Absurdity. I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it a second

time.

Here's constantly risking absurdity.

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience,

the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making and balancing on eye beams above a sea of faces, paces his way to the other side

of day, performing entreches and sleight of foot tricks and other high theatrics, and all without

mistaking anything for what it may not be. For he's the

superrealist who must perforce, perceive, taught truth before the taking of each stance or step

in his supposed advance toward that still higher perch where beauty stands and waits with gravity to start her death-defying leap.

And he, a little Charlie Chaplin man, who may or may not catch her fair eternal form,

spread-eagled in the empty air of existence.

This poem is what's known in the biz as an Ars Poetica.

This is a name that goes all the way back to a poem by the Roman poet Horace and has come

to be the name of a sort of subgenre in poetry

describing poems that discuss the act of writing poetry or the problem sometimes of writing poetry

and this is one of my favorite Ars Poetica,

because of the form that it takes.

Lawrence Ferlandgetti was a gifted and widely recognized poet,

but he was also notably one of the co-founders of City Lights,

the legendary bookshop and publisher in San Francisco, California.

...