philosophy of poetry

poetry is deliberate suffocation of the intangible. it is taking the world, piece by piece, and squeezing it until something beautiful comes out. it is clasping the good and the pain and the facets of existance, with vigor, and turning it over to look at it from the other side.

sometimes it is like a virus, industrious, eating its way out of you. always ravenous at the most inopportune times. sometimes one is deriving the quotient of

october is august's allargando
allegro? molto ritardando?
(no, it isn't, it is decrescendo)

or, perhaps, one is on the verge of discovering the fundamental basis on which


and there it is, hungry, whining and pawing at the door.

one day i sat down with the SAT dictionary that my mother had brought home from the dentist's office and i read and i read and i read through all those beautiful cavernous five syllable words and their various conjugations. and in plum-colored sharpie on the back of an index card i wrote what is probably the most unintelligable poem to be drafted by mankind, and i read it over and over again, the words melting melodiously in my mouth like some fantastic form of intraoral ballet. that's when i fell in love.

poetry is catharsis, and poetry is an exploration of all that is, a set of camera lenses through which one can view the world in green, in purple, in yellow, in Czech or Italian or in Hebrew, in teacher and banker and pharmacist. it is the marraige of language and philosophy, a relationship that is in turn joyful and enraged and burdened and stagnant. poetry is, perhaps, ourselves turned inside out; the documentation of every word we're too afraid to say. the authors' stamp at the bottom, my name, shedding my protection from the world. from you. a blatant signature, sprawled and deliberate in plum-colored sharpie.