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authorCase Duckworth2015-02-09 12:13:08 -0700
committerCase Duckworth2015-02-09 12:13:08 -0700
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1---
2title: Ars poetica
3genre: verse
4
5project:
6 title: Elegies for alternate selves
7 css: elegies
8 order: 6
9 prev:
10 title: On seeing the panorama of the Apollo 11 landing site
11 link: apollo11
12 next:
13 title: The ocean overflows with camels
14 link: theoceanoverflowswithcamels
15...
16
17What is poetry? [Poetry is.][is] Inasmuch as life is, so is poetry. Here is
18the problem: life is very big and complex. Human beings are neither. We
19are small, simple beings that don’t want to know all of the myriad
20interactions happening all around us, within us, as a part of us, all
21the hours of every day. We much prefer knowing only that which is just
22in front of our faces, staring us back with a look of utter contempt.
23This is why many people are depressed.
24
25Poetry is an attempt made by some to open up our field of view, to maybe
26check on something else that isn’t staring us in the face so
27contemptibly. Maybe something else is smiling at us, we think. So we
28write poetry to force ourselves to look away from the [mirror][] of our
29existence to see something else.
30
31This is generally painful. To make it less painful, poetry compresses
32reality a lot to make it more consumable. It takes life, that seawater,
33and boils it down and boils it down until only the salt remains, the
34important parts that we can focus on and make some sense of the
35senselessness of life. Poetry is life bouillon, and to thoroughly enjoy
36a poem we must put that bouillon back into the seawater of life and make
37a delicious soup out of it. To make this soup, to decompress the poem
38into an emotion or life, requires a lot of brainpower. A good reader
39will have this brainpower. A good poem will not require it.
40
41What this means is: a poem should be self-extracting. It should be a
42rare vanilla in the bottle, waiting only for someone to open it and
43sniff it and suddenly there they are, in the orchid that vanilla came
44from, in the tropical land where it grew next to its brothers and sister
45vanilla plants. They feel the pain of having their children taken from
46them. A good poem leaves a feeling of loss and of intense beauty. The
47reader does nothing to achieve this—they are merely the receptacle of
48the feeling that the poem forces onto them. In a way, poetry is a crime.
49But it is the most beautiful crime on this crime-ridden earth.
50
51[is]: words-meaning.html
52[mirror]: moongone.html