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