diff options
Diffstat (limited to '12-arspoetica.txt')
-rw-r--r-- | 12-arspoetica.txt | 38 |
1 files changed, 38 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/12-arspoetica.txt b/12-arspoetica.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..382378e --- /dev/null +++ b/12-arspoetica.txt | |||
@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ | |||
1 | --- | ||
2 | title: 'Ars poetica' | ||
3 | project: 'Elegies for Alternate Selves' | ||
4 | ... | ||
5 | |||
6 | What is poetry? Poetry is. Inasmuch as life is, so is poetry. Here is | ||
7 | the problem: life is very big and complex. Human beings are neither. We | ||
8 | are small, simple beings that don’t want to know all of the myriad | ||
9 | interactions happening all around us, within us, as a part of us, all | ||
10 | the hours of every day. We much prefer knowing only that which is just | ||
11 | in front of our faces, staring us back with a look of utter contempt. | ||
12 | This is why many people are depressed. | ||
13 | |||
14 | Poetry is an attempt made by some to open up our field of view, to maybe | ||
15 | check on something else that isn’t staring us in the face so | ||
16 | contemptibly. Maybe something else is smiling at us, we think. So we | ||
17 | write poetry to force ourselves to look away from the mirror of our | ||
18 | existence to see something else. | ||
19 | |||
20 | This is generally painful. To make it less painful, poetry compresses | ||
21 | reality a lot to make it more consumable. It takes life, that seawater, | ||
22 | and boils it down and boils it down until only the salt remains, the | ||
23 | important parts that we can focus on and make some sense of the | ||
24 | senselessness of life. Poetry is life bouillon, and to thoroughly enjoy | ||
25 | a poem we must put that bouillon back into the seawater of life and make | ||
26 | a delicious soup out of it. To make this soup, to decompress the poem | ||
27 | into an emotion or life, requires a lot of brainpower. A good reader | ||
28 | will have this brainpower. A good poem will not require it. | ||
29 | |||
30 | What this means is: a poem should be self-extracting. It should be a | ||
31 | rare vanilla in the bottle, waiting only for someone to open it and | ||
32 | sniff it and suddenly there they are, in the orchid that vanilla came | ||
33 | from, in the tropical land where it grew next to its brothers and sister | ||
34 | vanilla plants. They feel the pain of having their children taken from | ||
35 | them. A good poem leaves a feeling of loss and of intense beauty. The | ||
36 | reader does nothing to achieve this—they are merely the receptacle of | ||
37 | the feeling that the poem forces onto them. In a way, poetry is a crime. | ||
38 | But it is the most beautiful crime on this crime-ridden earth. | ||