O Melhor Amigo

If a poem should not seek to recount a poetic event, but be a poetic event of its own, then we have to do more than just describe. Description, I hereby declare a little too grandly, is the opposite of poetry. Description is when we try to indicate in language the material existence of something, so that a fish, say, is ‘scaly’, ‘oily’, ‘smelly’, ‘wet’, ‘shiny’, etc. All these descriptive words refer to the material reality of the fish: it has scales that secrete oil, an oil which reflects light, making the fish shiny, but also the oil makes the fish smell fishy, because it is a fish. All this adds up logically. Poetry, on the other hand, begins when you describe the fish in terms of things that do not refer to its material reality: the fish can also be ‘mechanized’, ‘unpopular’, ‘deeply religious’, etc. When you assign qualities further away from the fish’s material reality the reader has work to do; they must participate in overcoming the problem of that distance between the reality and the leap away. This is the logic of metaphor. This is not description.