NEPC President Steven Ratiner recently featured a poem by our past NEPC President, Mary Buchinger, in Red Letter Poem #258. Her poem “Ars” explores the physical and creative process of working with clay—and the parallels to writing poetry.
Steven’s commentary emphasizes the poem’s focus on the act of shaping material, both literal and metaphorical, and the artist’s role in giving form to raw substance. He places Mary’s work in conversation with poetic tradition, referencing Archibald MacLeish and Horace.
This feature recognizes Mary’s contributions not only as a poet but as a long-standing leader in the New England literary community.
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Reprinted here with permission.
In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters. To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.
—Steven Ratiner
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb. . .
Archibald MacLeish
from: “Ars poetica”
Ars
I press the long handle of the mallet
into the wedged clay the clay has already
been slammed into the table again and again
in the process of consolidation airless it accepts
the smooth wooden dowel making way
as I work it down and begin to stir finding
and making space a shape inside round
and oblong and square it is everything before
it is something
one hand on the new forming
inner wall the other across the exterior fingers
spread palm flat the skin of me against the skin
of the clay I shape its heavy liquid substance
this spadeful of earth that will never sprout a seed
listens to me to my making mind that moves
inside it pressing pulling I draw up edges
to surround the hollow center it shows me
it can stand upright and so I begin
the subtraction gouging the surface
cut after cut I take whole slabs away
whose life is it after all
—Mary Buchinger
Blame Horace. Whether you’re delighted by, intrigued, or simply cringe at those occasions when poets take their own art form as the subject of their work, this Roman bard deserves a good deal of the responsibility. Sometime between 20 and 13 B.C.E, he penned his treatise in verse, Ars Poetica, and legions of poets ever since have felt a certain compulsion to add to their repertoire—not only poems about their lives and loves—but the very process involved in turning life into verse. The principles Horace highlighted included: knowledge, decorum, and sincerity; and he advised poets to read widely, strive for precision, and seek honest criticism (not a bad starting point for an MFA curriculum). Poets—like all who labor earnestly at any profession—eventually feel the urge for self-reflection: the why and how of the practice, and to what end? What remains to be discovered about language’s capabilities—and, more specifically, what will that search show us about our own lives? I prefaced this commentary with an excerpt from Archibald MacLeish’s famous example of this sub-genre; influenced by the “no truth but in things” Imagists, he urged poets to create work that moves away from the rhetorical and, instead, produce word-objects that stand in the world like sculptures, whose physicality and presence embody the act of meaning-making. Today’s Red Letter from Mary Buchinger—esteemed poet, professor, part-time painter, full-time student of existence—would, I imagine, have made both Horace and MacLeish smile.
If not for the title (“Ars”—Latin for ‘skill’ or craft’, but also the root of our modern term ‘art’), we might read this poem simply as a hands-on description (and I use the word literally) of what it’s like to work with clay. But coming from a skilled poet, we can’t help but feel this is a double-game, where we can exist in the physical and intellectual realms simultaneously. As we, too, work the substance, arduously preparing clay to be used for pottery or sculpture, we are kneading the mind as well, feeling the materiality of thought and language, as it resists and accepts the forms we wish to impose upon it. Haven’t you sometimes wanted to slam some poor sentence onto the desktop, to squeeze the air pockets from its recesses, to feel it smooth out beneath the dowel of our attention? Is this potter/poet producing a vessel—and, if so, what is it intended to contain? Isn’t that one of the goals of all artists: “making space a shape”—whether intended for the pedestal, the page, or the mind? And what better description of the marvelous (and mysterious) stuff we craftspeople work with—clay, color, gesture, sound, word—than Mary’s observation: “it is everything before/ it is something.” “Ars” sits on the page as a protean mass of possibility, being formed (forming itself?) into a shape of which the mind might make use. Even the elastic sentence structure, the lack of punctuation, the caesuras (like air pockets in the clay? like places to catch our breath?) give us the feeling that we, too, must be actively involved if this poem is to cohere and stand before us. No, not a double- but a triple-game, because we cannot escape the Biblical allusion to clay being the substance from which our ancestral bodies were formed. Perhaps the maker inside these lines is divinity itself, bringing some sort of new progeny into being—and, if so, how can we not ask (as the poet does): “whose life is it after all”?
Mary is the author of five full-length poetry collections and three chapbooks, the most recent being The Book of Shores (Lily Poetry Review Books.) Among her many honors are: the 2024 Elyse Wolf/Slate Roof Press Annual Chapbook Prize; the Daniel Varoujian Award; the Firman Houghton Award; and honors from Best New Poems Online and the Massachusetts Center for the Book. She is the past-President of the New England Poetry Club, one of the nation’s oldest literary associations, and (as many in this part of the country will tell you) has worked tirelessly on behalf of poets and poetry. MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” concludes: “A poem should not mean/ But be.” Yes, we know how the game is played: art is made by humans, for human attention, assembled from the substances of our material existence. Even when the result seems effortless (the artifice hidden from view), we grasp the intent of this undertaking. But here, we can feel the mind of the maker strenuously shaping this offering, as if arriving at its finished form at the precise moment we do. Mary’s poem sits here like a clay vessel, filled with sheer potentiality. Clearly, it is in the kiln of our shared imaginations that it must be fired.
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To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:
https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices
and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene:
http://dougholder.blogspot.com
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