From f00d869e4c0e64be6093e4980e62e3c9b9b33cc9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Case Duckworth
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2015 10:36:44 -0700
Subject: Add links to Elegies; write TODO.txt

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 11-arspoetica.txt | 41 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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 create mode 100644 11-arspoetica.txt

(limited to '11-arspoetica.txt')

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+---
+title: 'Ars poetica'
+project: 'Elegies for Alternate Selves'
+...
+
+What is poetry?  [Poetry is.][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.
+
+[is]: 98-words-meaning.html
+[mirror]: 28-moongone.html
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