16 Bars Poetica
Easy as an exquisite corpse paraphrased
as dictionaried as a pontificator
raised by the thump of the 146 bus—
these 16 are for you. Shout out
to the city warblers yelling in slanted
syllables on avenues porous
with ill-built adornments & horse-riding
monuments. These 16 are for you:
linebreakers & trash talkers, polysyllabic
halfsteppers ready to mom’s spaghetti
their one opportunity. Meanwhile,
the rooftop across from us undercuts
the sunsetted skyline & is topped with
two metric heretics dressed
like crows. Another bullheaded poet
ina Bulls hat rests his elbows
on the bench back & wonders if
it is his hoarse verse or the verbed
streetlights making ellipsis from
the veritable trees & inevitable breezes.
Copyright © 2025 by Adrian Matejka. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 24, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Poetry is an immersive and three-dimensional experience, so poems that are self-referential and go on about being ‘poems’ are mostly turn-the-pagers for me. All that self-awareness disrupts my experience. At the same time, I love the idea of poets writing poems that enact their aesthetics and proclivities. So, inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’ and Patricia Smith’s ‘Incendiary Art,’ I tried to write a few ars poetica, like this one, that live in their own sonic geographies.”
—Adrian Matejka
Adrian Matejka
Adrian Matejka is the author of The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), which was nominated for both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.