Laura Orem
You know what it's time for? It's time for an ars poetica. And what an example The Nepotist has to post for you today. What I have to say about Laura Orem is this: she is the real deal. She's true blue, fiercely loyal as a friend, and as a poet, her poems reach out and grab absolute fistfuls of your heart and won't easily or ever let go of them. This poem, in particular, has a quiet and marauding quality about it. It's angry, it's direct, and it's also a precise artistic expression of heartbreak in sixteen compact lines: oh, heretical grief / poetry will live forever / in the face of absence. The tension that this poem builds (and then resolves so frankly, so bleakly in its final couplet) is undeniable and difficult to watch as it unfolds. As an artist myself, it's often been my tendency to take my sadnesses and devastations as they come and, when the moment of ruin passes, to tally my losses and chalk whatever's left up to poetic fodder. I'm sure many of you do this as well. This astute and rending poem is a reminder to us that art, while a lot, simply isn't all. We must know when to say fuck the poems. We must know when to beg a body back to life. To beg it back to love.
Thanks, Laura.
***
Ars Poetica
They say, we say, poetry
will live forever
but I say,
fuck the poems
art means nothing
in the face of absence
grief is heretical
fuck the poems
I say, art means nothing
in the face of absence
oh, heretical grief
poetry will live forever
in the face of absence
art means nothing
fuck the poems
come back
***
About the Poet:
Laura Orem is a writer, editor, artist and teacher living in Red Lion, PA. She is a featured blogger at The Best American Poetry and is the senior editor of Praxilla: an Online Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Performance. She is also a member of the editorial board of Toad Hall Press. Her poems and essays can be found at OCHO, Poets Against War, The Writer’s Chronicle, Nimrod, heART (Human Equity Through Art), The Montserrat Review, Wordwrights!, and many others. She teaches writing at Goucher College in Baltimore. On the identity of The Nepotist:
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