diff options
author | Case Duckworth | 2015-01-31 13:10:17 -0700 |
---|---|---|
committer | Case Duckworth | 2015-01-31 13:10:17 -0700 |
commit | e0b1c2737397839ff5ba8c129d31baf6f97805fe (patch) | |
tree | 567dc9a605406134541c8da4effdf9141c288e6e /11-arspoetica.txt | |
parent | Add Hezekiah; Work out YAML metainfo" (diff) | |
download | autocento-e0b1c2737397839ff5ba8c129d31baf6f97805fe.tar.gz autocento-e0b1c2737397839ff5ba8c129d31baf6f97805fe.zip |
Finish linking Elegy, Hezekiah; Rename files
Diffstat (limited to '11-arspoetica.txt')
-rw-r--r-- | 11-arspoetica.txt | 43 |
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 43 deletions
diff --git a/11-arspoetica.txt b/11-arspoetica.txt deleted file mode 100644 index b950645..0000000 --- a/11-arspoetica.txt +++ /dev/null | |||
@@ -1,43 +0,0 @@ | |||
1 | --- | ||
2 | title: 'Ars poetica' | ||
3 | project: 'Elegies for Alternate Selves' | ||
4 | project-order: 11 | ||
5 | genre: 'prose' | ||
6 | ... | ||
7 | |||
8 | What is poetry? [Poetry is.][is] Inasmuch as life is, so is poetry. Here is | ||
9 | the problem: life is very big and complex. Human beings are neither. We | ||
10 | are small, simple beings that don’t want to know all of the myriad | ||
11 | interactions happening all around us, within us, as a part of us, all | ||
12 | the hours of every day. We much prefer knowing only that which is just | ||
13 | in front of our faces, staring us back with a look of utter contempt. | ||
14 | This is why many people are depressed. | ||
15 | |||
16 | Poetry is an attempt made by some to open up our field of view, to maybe | ||
17 | check on something else that isn’t staring us in the face so | ||
18 | contemptibly. Maybe something else is smiling at us, we think. So we | ||
19 | write poetry to force ourselves to look away from the [mirror][] of our | ||
20 | existence to see something else. | ||
21 | |||
22 | This is generally painful. To make it less painful, poetry compresses | ||
23 | reality a lot to make it more consumable. It takes life, that seawater, | ||
24 | and boils it down and boils it down until only the salt remains, the | ||
25 | important parts that we can focus on and make some sense of the | ||
26 | senselessness of life. Poetry is life bouillon, and to thoroughly enjoy | ||
27 | a poem we must put that bouillon back into the seawater of life and make | ||
28 | a delicious soup out of it. To make this soup, to decompress the poem | ||
29 | into an emotion or life, requires a lot of brainpower. A good reader | ||
30 | will have this brainpower. A good poem will not require it. | ||
31 | |||
32 | What this means is: a poem should be self-extracting. It should be a | ||
33 | rare vanilla in the bottle, waiting only for someone to open it and | ||
34 | sniff it and suddenly there they are, in the orchid that vanilla came | ||
35 | from, in the tropical land where it grew next to its brothers and sister | ||
36 | vanilla plants. They feel the pain of having their children taken from | ||
37 | them. A good poem leaves a feeling of loss and of intense beauty. The | ||
38 | reader does nothing to achieve this—they are merely the receptacle of | ||
39 | the feeling that the poem forces onto them. In a way, poetry is a crime. | ||
40 | But it is the most beautiful crime on this crime-ridden earth. | ||
41 | |||
42 | [is]: words-meaning.html | ||
43 | [mirror]: moongone.html | ||