apostrophe.

(or "Breaking the Fourth Wall, whose name is 'monitor'")

or, really, just addressing you all directly... even though I said I'd keep out of it...

I) ... but hie you over to "http://somniloquy.org/blog/", my dearest stalkers and skulkers (yes. all three of you.), where Mr. Preston Mark Stone knows what he's doing. Even the "I am blogging because I happen to be awake" posts are pretty good. Just a real treasure box. Although, given it's slightly behemoth proportions (archives date to 2001. which means at least 2 years BMS "Before MySpace..."), I should probably say "chest"...

... but "treasure chest" just doesn't have that same pleasingly arch twee-ness to it. Which brings me to my second point...

II) I'm always looking for a nicely aphoristic way of describing "What Is Poetry?"... and since it never can be comprehensive, it might as well be catchy.

In the past, I have tried poetry-as-pinecone (which it is, if you've ever really thought about pinecones. because what is a pinecone? a pinecone is always, first and foremost, a pinecone. Just as a poem is always itself, before being anything else. what else is a pinecone? It is an odd and spiky thing, pleasingly solid-- and it carries all the seeds for a forest beneath it's hard and horny shell... and what is a poem but an awkward, inaccesible thing that carries the whole world in itself-- if it's a good one?)

... and when I was nose deep in Kant (which phrase is much, much funnier, btw, if you use the proper German pronunciation) a few months ago, I came up with "poems are the logical constructions of an alien ontology"... which, if you ever felt the bird-ness of your heart, or the moon-ness of your longing, you probably understand. Although my friend the self-taught (this is the great compromise of the liberal arts education: if you're smart, they'll teach you to directly access the canon and if you're brilliant, they'll just leave you alone) Classics major didn't really get it. But that could be because he's not used to thinking about the ontology-ness of things, or it could be because it only works for me and is therefore a shoddy definition...

... and those are the two best overall descriptions I can come up with, but from a purely functional standpoint... I say that poetry is all about precision without accuracy...

... because that leaves room for the ness-ness and the ish-ness which are necessary to check the tyranny of the definitive.