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+---
+title: 'Ars poetica'
+project: 'Elegies for Alternate Selves'
+...
+
+What is poetry? Poetry is. Inasmuch as life is, so is poetry. Here is
+the problem: life is very big and complex. Human beings are neither. We
+are small, simple beings that don’t want to know all of the myriad
+interactions happening all around us, within us, as a part of us, all
+the hours of every day. We much prefer knowing only that which is just
+in front of our faces, staring us back with a look of utter contempt.
+This is why many people are depressed.
+
+Poetry is an attempt made by some to open up our field of view, to maybe
+check on something else that isn’t staring us in the face so
+contemptibly. Maybe something else is smiling at us, we think. So we
+write poetry to force ourselves to look away from the mirror of our
+existence to see something else.
+
+This is generally painful. To make it less painful, poetry compresses
+reality a lot to make it more consumable. It takes life, that seawater,
+and boils it down and boils it down until only the salt remains, the
+important parts that we can focus on and make some sense of the
+senselessness of life. Poetry is life bouillon, and to thoroughly enjoy
+a poem we must put that bouillon back into the seawater of life and make
+a delicious soup out of it. To make this soup, to decompress the poem
+into an emotion or life, requires a lot of brainpower. A good reader
+will have this brainpower. A good poem will not require it.
+
+What this means is: a poem should be self-extracting. It should be a
+rare vanilla in the bottle, waiting only for someone to open it and
+sniff it and suddenly there they are, in the orchid that vanilla came
+from, in the tropical land where it grew next to its brothers and sister
+vanilla plants. They feel the pain of having their children taken from
+them. A good poem leaves a feeling of loss and of intense beauty. The
+reader does nothing to achieve this—they are merely the receptacle of
+the feeling that the poem forces onto them. In a way, poetry is a crime.
+But it is the most beautiful crime on this crime-ridden earth.