• Skip to main content
  • Skip to header right navigation
  • Skip to site footer
The Friday Poem

The Friday Poem

A poem every Friday

  • The Frip
  • About
    • Masthead
    • Contributors
  • FAQ
  • Archive
    • Search the archive
    • Friday Poems
    • Reviews
    • Features
  • Subscribe
  • Submit a poem

The Friday Poem on 20/08/21

We chose Chris Edgoose’s poem ‘Portrait of the Poet as an Artist’ because it is so sure footed, so quietly confident. It’s about more than Michelangelo’s sculpture, it’s about the business of writing a poem — the notion that a poem is waiting fully formed and all the poet has to do is remove the parts that don’t belong — and it’s about how we learn about ourselves as we write, and do best if we see our position as being part of a greater whole. It’s hard to get away with use of big abstract words like ‘history’, ‘time’, and ‘existence’, but Edgoose earns every one.

Portrait of the Poet as an Artist

The Pity was waiting for Michelangelo
in a perfect block of Carrara marble,
and in its carving he learned the weight,
the hang, and the fold of his own heart, 
whose hidden dimensions in the Alpi Apuane
had been revealed by the work of men,
not a single man or woman, matter,
like history flowing through time, water
where no one atom is alone or still.
And this is the matter of writing a poem,
to carve one’s heart in lines of ink
and not just learn it into brief existence
but to release it into history’s river 
where every word is shared experience.

Chris Edgoose is a poet and blogger at Wood Bee Poet. He lives near Cambridge in the UK, and has had work published in several magazines in print and online.

Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on Email

Read this next

Frozen

Frozen

by Jonathan Totman — our Friday Poem on 29/10/21

Site Footer

MENU

  • About us
  • FAQ
  • Submit a poem
  • Contact
  • Privacy
  • Mentions Légales
  • THE FRIP

    The Frip is The Friday Poem’s reviews and features magazine. We run book reviews, profiles, interviews, essays, lyric essays and other features of interest to poets and readers of poetry. Read the Frip here.

    NEWSLETTER

    Why not sign up for our weekly newsletter and never miss a Friday Poem again? Pop your email address in the box and click the button.

    Copyright © 2023 · The Friday Poem · All Rights Reserved · follow the Friday Poem on Twitter · follow the Friday Poem on Facebook