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The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

1412: Ledge (ars poetica) (love poem) (true story) by Amorak Huey

The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

American Public Media

Performing Arts, Arts

4.81.3K Ratings

🗓️ 15 December 2025

⏱️ 7 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today’s poem is Ledge (ars poetica) (love poem) (true story) by Amorak Huey.


The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today’s poem calls itself an ars poetica, a love poem, and a true story. That’s a lot of work for one poem to do—a lot of layers of meaning! But this poet does speak to the precarity of it all: writing, and loving, and living.“


Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Transcript

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0:00.0

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1:04.0

I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

1:19.5

Thank you. and this is The Slowdown. An Ars Poetica is a poem about the art of poetry itself.

1:26.3

It offers a poet's perspective on what poetry is and how it should be

1:31.8

written and what it might do for the reader. The term Ars Poetica comes from a poem written by Horace,

1:40.6

an ancient Roman poet in 19 BC. Horace's poem is 476 lines long, written in the form of a letter.

1:53.8

In this poem, Horace advises young poets on the art of writing poetry. His writing advice includes maxims on word choice, tone,

2:06.9

meter, and characterization in dramatic poems. He also advises poets to show restraint and to avoid

2:16.4

overwriting. And like Horace's Ars Poetica, much of the

2:22.5

advice I've gotten has come to me in the form of letters. In one letter, the late poet Stanley Plumley

2:30.8

wrote, You seem to be suffering from second book, Idis.

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