Soup and Butts

This is a genre of poem called ars poetica which is not, as you might believe, Oxford schoolboy slang for the rear end of a bird you fancy. Supposedly, these are poems about the art of poetry. Usually, they turn into treatises on the mechanics of poetry. Which is actually a heckuva lot more interesting.

This one in particular is quite fine because it manages to be a poem, too.

Soup Song

Russell Edson

How I make my soup: I draw water from a tap...


I am not an artist. And the water is not so much 
drawn as allowed to fall, and to capture itself in a pot.


Perhaps not so much captured, as allowed to gather 
itself from its stream; the way it falls that the drain 
would have it.


But in this case a normal path interrupted by a pot; 
for which soup is the outcome of all I do...