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1---
2title: Ars poetica
3genre: prose
4
5id: arspoetica
6toc: "Ars poetica"
7
8project:
9 title: Elegies for alternate selves
10 class: elegies
11 order: 6
12 prev:
13 - title: On seeing the panorama of the Apollo 11 landing site
14 link: apollo11
15 next:
16 - title: The ocean overflows with camels
17 link: theoceanoverflowswithcamels
18...
19
20What is poetry?
21[Poetry is.][is]
22Inasmuch as life is, so is poetry.
23Here is the problem: life is very big and complex.
24Human beings are neither.
25We 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.
26We much prefer knowing only that which is just in front of our faces, staring us back with a look of utter contempt.
27This is why many people are depressed.
28
29Poetry 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.
30Maybe something else is smiling at us, we think.
31So we write poetry to force ourselves to look away from the [mirror][] of our existence to see something else.
32
33This is generally painful.
34To make it less painful, poetry compresses reality a lot to make it more consumable.
35It 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.
36Poetry 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.
37To make this soup, to decompress the poem into an emotion or life, requires a lot of brainpower.
38A good reader will have this brainpower.
39A good poem will not require it.
40
41What this means is: a poem should be self-extracting.
42It 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.
43They feel the pain of having their children taken from them.
44A good poem leaves a feeling of loss and of intense beauty.
45The reader does nothing to achieve this---they are merely the receptacle of the feeling that the poem forces onto them.
46In a way, poetry is a crime.
47But it is the most beautiful crime on this crime-ridden earth.
48
49[is]: words-meaning.html
50[mirror]: moongone.html