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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 12-arspoetica.txt | 38 --------------------------------------
 1 file changed, 38 deletions(-)
 delete mode 100644 12-arspoetica.txt

(limited to '12-arspoetica.txt')

diff --git a/12-arspoetica.txt b/12-arspoetica.txt
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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.
-- 
cgit 1.4.1-21-gabe81