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