Lee Price - Self Portrait in Tub with Chinese Food

Every week, we handpick one song, one visual artwork (including photos), and one poem and share them with you. Additionally we share artworks submitted by our community.

Simple.

This is unusual poetry :)

Song submission by our community

Courtney Hartman - Like A Woman

Poem Submission from the Community

‘The Big Black Door’ A compilation of 5 poems by David Muir

——————

The big black door: (5) wooden flowers

A

A row

A row of

A row of glasses

A row of glasses each

A row of glasses each with

A row of glasses each with a

A row of glasses each with a wooden

A row of glasses each with a wooden flower

Well, not all of them.

The big black door: (4) lights, an ending

Maybe it was a mistake

To live there

Back then

Not now though

Now is different.

Through the frosted glass

I can just about make out some blurred lights

Small, round, glowing

It’s probably a small Christmas tree

I should probably stop looking

Now is different.

The big black door: (3) Ghost town

This is a ghost town, now.

The empty chambers are haunted

There are no routes home without passing

This is a ghost town

The blinds are pulled and the windows are foggy

I can still see in and the cat needs fed

This is a ghost town

I can still hear their footsteps faintly at night

Onward Christian soldiers to save me

This is a ghost town

But The cactus still grows happily

They grow in the desert you know

This is a ghost town

I can’t lift you up this time

I held on as long as I could but the spikes pierced my hands

This is a ghost town, now.

The big black door: (2) Cacti

There are 2 cacti there now

On the top of the bottom sash window

It’s a nice touch

I suppose they could have chosen a more vibrant plant

But those little guys will do

It’s a far cry from the swollen torn socks and the permanently lit room

It’s a quiet distance from

the rage

The horror

The brutal scene of the demise

Maybe a cactus is perfect

I never plan to return

The big black door: (1) Flat

Who lives in the ground floor flat on Glasgow road?

I’ve not seen the door open in years

Must be seized

The Lights are on though

I am sure someone is in

I feel sick when I pass

all my shame lives there

Everything I ever did wrong is built into the window frame

It’s fogged glass so you can’t see in

Thank god!

I wonder what they are like

Maybe they are happy chatting while they are making food

Do they feel the extra gravity?

Where has the air gone?

It’s definitely not in my lungs anymore

It might be in there

There are still ghosts in that house

Lying on the floor

Silently wailing help me

I am not sure they can hear it

I should help them escape

From

The ground floor flat

On Glasgow

Road

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Painting by Hennie Niemann

Every week, we handpick one song, one visual artwork (including photos), and one poem and share them with you. Additionally we share artworks submitted by our community.

Simple.

This is unusual poetry :)

Song of the week

Millow - Ayo Technology

Poem of the week

It’s not as though

we stop and start our way through life,

jerking this way and that,

half yanking our feet from one course

and onto another.

It’s not as though

we go so far and then,

consulting our maps, make a sudden turn

and head off in a new direction.

It’s not as though

we choose each new beginning

from a menu of life’s options.

And yet,

each moment opens soft and pure

awaiting our response;

each day lifts its head from the dew-strung grasses

and offers new hope, new possibility, extra chances;

each idea stirs a constellation of thoughts into being

and we are captivated by their courses.

May we know and celebrate new beginnings

in our lives and the lives of others

and as we do,

may we honour what has passed

and hallow its traces

through our lives, our hearts, our loves.

To this we commit ourselves

as those who begin anew this day.

» A focused moment by Gretta Vosper « Submitted by Jay Moore

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Photo of the week by Pia Riverola

Every week, we handpick one song, one visual artwork (including photos), and one poem and share them with you. Additionally we share artworks submitted by our community.

Simple.

This is unusual poetry :)

Song of the week

Chequerboard - True North

Poem of the week

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We’d love to see your work or discover something you think deserves a wider audience.

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Available to the members of the unusual poetry community at only $1 per week.

Join UP community

You can submit the following:

• a song

• a poem

• a visual artwork (photo, illustration, painting, etc.)

You can submit either your own works or works created by someone else that you find beautiful or unusual.

Submission window is open by the end of this month. Submitted works will be featured in June.

p.s all submitted works will be featured

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Photo of the week by Alvaro Barella

Every week, we handpick one song, one visual artwork (including photos), and one poem and share them with you. Additionally we share artworks submitted by our community.

Simple.

This is unusual poetry :)

Song of the week

Tour-Maubourg - Ode to Love

Poem of the week

Time will go, time will come.
Time is off, time is on.
Time is wail. Time is woe.
Time is yes. Time is no.
Time is give. Time is take.
Time is split. Time is share.
Time is day. Time is dawn.
Time is ripe. Time is raw.
Time is tired. Time is active. Time seems on occasion absent.
Time is during. Time is hectic.
Time is rest. Time is defective.
Time is loose. Time is fixed.
Time is burden. Time is bliss.
time is doing. time is learning.
time is tide. time is turning.
time is spilling, time is flowing.
time is pruning for the sake of growing.
time is thinking. time is feeling.
time is targeting. time is dreaming.
time is wishing. time is willing.
time is hunger. time is stilling.
time is chances, time is to choose.
there is no time, there is no time, there is no time… to lose.
time is job. time is done.
time is being. time is gone.
time is finding. time is knowing.
time is… forgetting time keeps going.

time is most. time is least.
time is often. time won’t cease.
time is gain. time is pain.
Time is round, never a chain.
time is dual. time is there.
time is strange. time is here.
time is then. time is later.
time is fire. time is water.
time is dark. time is light.
on open sea and land in sight.
time is god. time is lot.
time is blunt. time is soft.
time is me. time is you.
time just ended… and starts soon.
time is against, time is with.
time is willing, time is witting.
time is behind. time is ahead.
time is through. time is detatched.
time is piss. time is moan.
time is around us and in our bones.
time is subtract, time is add.
time is sane. time is mad.
time is mercury. time is honey.
time is rubble. time is hope.
time is hit. time is miss.
time is, time is, time is… time is.

time is living, letting live.
time is one day losing life.
time is always, we are brief.
time is nooks. time is crannies.
time is whole. time is all.
time is must. time is shall.
time is still. time is free.
time has you. time has me.
time is shore. time is quay.
time is everywhere, always.
time is making, time is breaking.
time is stairway, time is tread.
time is remembrance. time is deceit.
hollow phrases, basking in heat.
time is cut. time is dry.
time is real. time is no lie.
time is finite in its foundation.
definitions merely AN interpretation.
time is lightning. time is thunder.
time is world. time is wonder.
time is old. time is new.
time is heart. time is soul.
time is straight. time is bent.
time, time, time is… spent.

— Time by Derek Otte

This photo went viral on our substack so we decided to create a postcard ($2.64) and an art print ($4.89) versions of it. Available for US users (anyone can order but shipping costs make sense for US based audience).

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Painting by Eddie Martinez

Every week, we handpick one song, one visual artwork (including photos), and one poem and share them with you. Additionally we share artworks submitted by our community.

Simple.

This is unusual poetry :)

Song of the week

Open Mike Eagle - Bucciarati

Poem of the week

Do we write poems to save the species?
We write poems and map routes
to convey information that teaches us
to follow joy as a vocation:
fireflies
luminous bacteria.

To nestle against the she-wolf’s back on our journey up the mountainside.

To stop is another way to flow.

— Questions by Maricela Guerrero

From our community

the sun sets over the end of the world

and i feel my hunger flesh of me rising for its walk

i want to love the way my mother eats

lips spilling with joy fingers searching and finding

around each joint dipping into the juices of the salt-stung tomatoes

and of course i like everything intense

i am a climber i see a boulder and i need to know how it can hold me

and it’s hard to let go, baby, tho your hand slipped

a mist opportunity, my friend calls it

as if all i had to do was pick up the phone and say hello, world:

here is me + my needs that are too big for you

i am flower i am feral i’ve been walking for days devouring

every pilgrim who dared spend the night

and i’m praying to a cunty saviour that this time

i manage to (verb) my way out of this

that she make my hunger too, like the sun, finite

— by Adi David (Follow on substack)

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René Gruau, Italy (1909-2004) - Untitled

Every week, we handpick one song, one visual artwork (including photos), and one poem and share them with you. Additionally we share artworks submitted by our community.

Simple.

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Song of the week

MF Doom - Guinnessez

Poem of the week

HOW MUCH MORE BEAUTIFUL COULD YOU BE NOW YOU’RE EATING PEACHES FOR BREAKFAST

and I am licking you out like a pan glinting I turn all your stories
round the beating part of me

muted living tires me out and the green parakeets tell me I must be quick
they emphasise that haste is required

I pour myself out all over you like something for which I’d still like to find a metaphor
the days are sweet I pick them
cook them down thick to syrup
add too much sugar again leave it sitting there night after night
tea towel over the top as though this will somehow protect us from the insects

how much more beautiful could you be and the procession of ants
winding across the tile floor.

Poem by Yentl van Stokkum

From our community

Broken Boat by Jay Moore

A broken boat lies on a beach

Steps from the salty shore

Seeing the foam that froths nearby

It recalls the roils it bore.

Water smashed and water crashed

Against its pointed prow

Gunwhales groaned as waves assailed

But what does it face now?

Sunshine bakes its bare rib bones

Heat hastens the barnacled rot

Paint peeled away ages ago

Fresh coats are long forgot.

Lifted up by sunrise shadows

Then takes its sunset stand

Silently saying “I’m still here”

Before it sinks in sand.

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Painting of the week

Catherine Murphy, USA (b. 1946)

Every week, we handpick one song, one visual artwork (including photos), and one poem and share them with you. Additionally we share artworks submitted by our community.

Simple.

This is unusual poetry :)

Song of the week

London Grammar - Stay Awake

Poem of the week

During the Soviet Union, like Marcel Tolcea, I had a bicycle, except that mine didn’t have any brakes. It wasn’t that I liked it very much, but I didn’t have any other.

When I straddled the saddle I knew what to expect. I knew that eventually the brakes would give out, but I couldn’t have cared less, the main thing was that I had a bicycle and I could ride it anywhere I liked.

Usually, I was level-headed and only rode down straight, flat, level roads, precluding any surprises, and it was then that I’d press on the pedals as hard as I could, until the wind whistling in my ears reminded me of the national anthem.

I never forgot that the bicycle I was riding didn’t have any brakes, and that’s why I chose only the empty roads by the pond or down in the parched valley.

But once a month I had to go and inspect the wheat field on top of the hill and on the way back I would hurtle downhill from Cantea, shouting at anybody up ahead to get out of my way.

Once a herd of cows got in my way and I avoided a violent collision only by jumping off the bicycle toward the branch of a tree, which I grabbed onto at the last moment, and the riderless bicycle hit a Frisian cow and fell to the ground.

Once a month, and not because I liked to take risks, but because I didn’t have any choice.

Once a month my hair stood on end and my eyes bulged out of their sockets.

Once a month I returned home covered in cuts and scrapes.

Once a month I returned home in tears, bawling.

After that I would ride only along roads as smooth as a mirror.

On that bicycle without brakes I took my first girlfriend for a ride.

On that bicycle without brakes I rode when she left me.

On that bicycle without brakes I rode the whole night long after my grandmother Anica died.

On that bicycle without brakes I celebrated my sixteenth birthday.

On that bicycle without brakes I fled conscription. In the Soviet Army.

On that bicycle without brakes I celebrated the fall of the Soviet Union. And the first hours of freedom.

I mounted it every day. I rode down that slope, with the trees grimly whizzing past.

With my heart quailing. Down a road that wound now right, now left, like fate itself.

With my damp shirt plastered to my back. Beads of sweat trickled into my eyes and I didn’t dare take my hands off the handlebars to wipe them away. A car overtook me, the same as so many other things overtake you in this life. When I rode it, I thought of my cat back home, willy-nilly I thought of what the future would bring.

The Soviet Union was long gone, but I was still riding the same bicycle.

But I don’t ride it any more.

Because now even when I walk

It’s as if I’m riding a bicycle without brakes.

A bicycle without brakes by Dumitru Crudu

Poems from our community

The sad season thaws
the sun shakes off his sorrow
Persephone climbs

Haiku by Wes Martin

Humility is the fire
in which the great phoenix renews itself,
rising ever greater.

There is death,
and there is death aimed toward greater life:
sacrifice.

In death,
something reorganizes itself.

That which believes it has grasped the whole
collapses into a closed fist.
The whole cannot be seized at once.

The open hand can grasp the world;
the closed hand,
only a dull fist.

The Open Hand by Antonio Camalleri

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We’d love to see your work or discover something you think deserves a wider audience.

You can send submissions for our weekly curation to unusualpoetryoffice@gmail.com

Available to the members of the unusual poetry community at only $1 per week.

Join UP community

You can submit the following:

• a song

• a poem

• a visual artwork (photo, illustration, painting, etc.)

You can submit either your own works or works created by someone else that you find beautiful or unusual.

Submission window is open by the end of this month. Submitted works will be featured in May.

p.s all submitted works will be featured

Join UP community

You can send submissions for our weekly curation to unusualpoetryoffice@gmail.com

Available to the members of the unusual poetry community at only $1 per week.

Subscribe now

Painting of the week

Les Alitérations - Leny Guetta

Every week, we handpick one song, one visual artwork (including photos), and one poem and share them with you.

Simple.

This is unusual poetry :)

Song of the week

Kamasi Washington - Dream State

Poem of the week

words
shatter
like glass
under
boots

syllables
scattered
in
rubble

i
say
love
it
comes
out
lo
ve
shrap
nel.

Poem by Lyuba Yakimchuk (Ukraine) - War zone (translated by Lisa Hayden)

Poems from our community

I still love everyone I have loved - by Martin Mulderig

Let’s start a riot by David Muir

Curved Shined

Mean

Let’s start a riot

That was the surprise

Before the pain

It Wasn’t the worst

I managed to roll my arms around microseconds before impact

The bags were absorbing most of the shock

I suppose I was embarrassed

Small

It only lasted at most a minute

A glowing sensation

I was famous and they all knew it

A star

They wished they were me.

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Subscribe now

You can send submissions for our weekly curation to unusualpoetryoffice@gmail.com

Available to the members of the unusual poetry community at only $1 per week.

Subscribe now

Painting of the week

Ozy - Agoraphobia

Every week, we handpick one song, one visual artwork (including photos), and one poem and share them with you.

Simple.

This is unusual poetry :)

Song of the week

YE - Father (feat. Travis Scott)

Poem of the week

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one would leave home
unless home chased you,
fire under feet,
hot blood in your belly.
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin is tough enough

the
go home
blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up
what do they
look like
when they are
homeless

degraded
lost
if you had to choose
between rotting
and
being
saved
you would choose
being
saved
you wouldn’t
wait
for
permission
you
wouldn’t
wait
to
be
asked
you
would
just
do
it
like
a
child
running
through
fire
nothing
is
holier
than
this
nothing
is
prouder
than
this
nothing
claims
you
like
this.

Poem by Warsan Shire - Home

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It maddens me to hear this conversation again and again in the public media space, but also among my friends and family.

I want to talk today about a concept that was introduced 2 centuries ago but that still stands today. I will also tackle this subject from the perspective of an artist, so that we cover all bases.

The lump of labor fallacy is the misconception that there is a finite amount of work, a fixed "lump" to be distributed across an economy, creating or eliminating jobs as the lump gets sliced differently. Named and called out as wrong by economist David Frederick Schloss in 1891, it's also called the fixed pie fallacy, the zero-sum fallacy, and the fallacy of labor scarcity.

The error is foundational: it treats the economy as a static container with a fixed amount of work to be done. If the fallacy were true, new jobs could not be created, only redistributed. But economies don't work that way. The demand for labor is not fixed. Changes in one industry can be offset or overshadowed by growth in another, and as the labor force grows, total employment grows too.

The mechanism is simple: automation drives down the cost of producing something → prices fall → demand expands → more labor is needed, often in the same or adjacent field.

This panic is embarrassingly old.

In 1589, Queen Elizabeth I refused to grant a patent to the inventor of a mechanical knitting machine, fearing it would put knitters out of work. Luddites in the early 19th century smashed automated looms for the same reason. John Maynard Keynes worried about technology causing unemployment. None of these fears came true at the scale feared.

The most instructive case is the ATM.

When ATMs were deployed at scale from the mid-1990s onward, over 400,000 installed across the US, everyone assumed, including some bank managers, that this would eliminate the teller job.

It didn’t.

What actually happened is the average urban bank branch needed about 21 tellers before ATMs. That dropped to 13. But cheaper branch operation meant banks wanted more branches, so demand for tellers increased enough to offset what would otherwise have been job losses.

The teller's job transformed. With routine cash transactions handled by machines, tellers became valuable for relationship banking: complex customer needs, financial product sales and personal connections.

The same pattern appeared in textiles two centuries earlier. During the 19th century, 98% of the labor required to weave a yard of cloth was automated, yet the number of weaving jobs actually increased. Automation drove the price of cloth down, expanding highly elastic demand, resulting in net job growth despite the labor-saving technology.

These fears are rooted in a mistaken zero-sum view of the economy (and of the world tbh), which holds that when someone gains in a transaction, someone else must lose. This maps onto how individuals experience job loss: concretely, personally, and immediately. The new jobs that emerge downstream are diffuse, delayed, and invisible when you're the one getting displaced.

The fallacy also ignores what economists call the demand response. Technology will only generate persistent unemployment when it no longer brings major new goods and services that consumers want. There is no evidence this is the case today any more than it was 200 years ago.

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What about A(G)I?

The evidence from the first years of the generative AI era suggests that, so far, AI is making most workers more productive rather than making them obsolete, just like earlier waves of automation increased productivity without rendering human workers obsolete.

A landmark study by Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond examined the introduction of a generative AI assistant among over 5,000 customer service agents and found an average productivity increase of 15 percent.

Where you should be less dismissive of concern is the transition costs. These are real and fall unevenly. Not every individual lands safely on the other side of a technological shift. So it comes down to how adaptive you are.

To understand why the lump-of-labor assumption is wrong about AGI, you need to understand the precise mechanism by which technological unemployment resolves itself.

There are four distinct channels, all operating simultaneously.

When a technology increases the productivity of labor or replaces labor entirely in a given task, it lowers the cost of producing whatever that task was part of. Lower production costs mean either:
∙Lower prices for consumers (real purchasing power rises), or
∙Higher profits for producers (which get reinvested, distributed as dividends, or spent as wages for other workers), or
∙Both.

Either way, aggregate real income in the economy rises. That additional real income does not evaporate. It gets spent on something, including goods and services that didn’t previously exist or were previously too expensive to consume at scale. That spending creates demand. That demand creates jobs.

This is not a theoretical conjecture. The average American in 1900 spent roughly 43% of their income on food. Today it’s around 10%. Agricultural mechanization didn’t produce a nation of starving unemployed farm laborers but freed up 33% of household income to be spent on automobiles, television sets, air conditioning, healthcare, education, travel, smartphones, and streaming services, most of which didn’t exist as industries in 1900. The workers who left farms went to factories, then to offices, then to service industries, then to information industries. The economy metamorphosed.

Artists resisting AI have a real complaint dressed up in a wrong argument.

French painter Paul Delaroche, upon seeing a daguerreotype in 1839, reportedly declared “From today, painting is dead.” Instead, photography spurred Impressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Artists stopped competing with cameras to reproduce reality and started exploring expression, mood, and abstraction.

The history of art is punctuated by “milestones of outrage”: monks complaining about Gutenberg’s printing press, painters claiming photography could never be art because its means of production was mechanical, and other fear mongering arguments. The argument that AI lacks “soul” or “skill” mirrors the exact critique leveled at photography in 1839. But this is a Luddite claim where a machine was collapsing the value of a learned craft. The argument was aesthetic in form, but economic in substance.

Photography changed the market for painters. AI changes the terms of authorship. Photography introduced a tool anyone could hold. AI introduces a system whose power is concentrated in the hands of a few companies that trained their models on the unpaid labor of millions. Photography became a new way to capture the world. AI becomes a way to simulate the people who already interpret it, without needing them at all.

The artists burning the most energy on "AI cannot be art" are fighting the wrong battle. The tractable fight is compensation frameworks, opt-in training data policies, and transparency.

So artists better stop arguing about whether AI is “real art.” That debate is already lost historically. AI will definitely uncover new ways of creating art, because art is ultimately about capturing human’s unique perspective on life. Fight instead for data rights, consent, and compensation. That’s winnable, concrete, and actually addresses the harm.

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But why?

Ancient Egyptians viewed creativity as a sacred act aligned with cosmic order (Ma’at), emphasizing imitation, translation, and interpretation of ancient models to produce something new, akin to incremental innovation rather than personal expression.

Ancient Persians conceived creativity as imagination and innovation, embracing foreign customs and envisioning how things could be better; artistic expression appeared in carpet weaving and symbolic motifs, and creativity was defined to include imagination.

Ancient Chinese saw creativity as the endless producing and renewing changes of nature, rooted in the Dao, Tai‑ji, or yin‑yang, and associated with innovative ideas, imagination, intelligence, independence, and high levels of activity/energy.

The ancient Greeks had no terms for “to create” or “creator”; art was considered discovery through submission to rules, with poetry as the sole exception where the poet was regarded as a maker, and creativity was linked to divine inspiration via the Muses.

According to Plato and Socrates, creativity is the result of divine inspiration. It comes about when the Muses breathe into the creative person, sending him or her into a temporary state of madness (Phaedrus, Plato).

Ancient Romans adopted the Greek view but later Latin possessed the terms “creatio” and “creator”; in the Christian period, “creatio” came to designate God’s act of creation from nothing, excluding human creativity, though earlier writers like Horace and Philostratus suggested poets and painters shared imagination and inspiration.

The concept of creativity evolved from being largely absent in most ancient cultures (where art was seen as discovery, not creation) to being viewed as the sole province of God in the Judeo‑Christian‑Islamic tradition; so no wonder why so many describe creativity as God hand and divine intervention.

During the Renaissance, creativity was reconceived as arising from human abilities, particularly those of “great men”; the word “creativity” was first applied to human activity (poetry) by the 17th‑century Polish poet Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski; by the 19th century, art alone was regarded as creativity.

At the turn of the 20th century, discussion of creativity in science and nature transferred artistic concepts to those domains; and the modern psychometric study of creativity began with J. P. Guilford’s 1950 address to the American Psychological Association.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the man who coined the term “flow”, defines creativity as a systemic process occurring through the interaction of three elements: a person (individual), a domain (cultural rules), and a field (experts). In his view, creativity requires an individual to bring novelty, a domain (e.g., music, physics) to hold the information, and a field (experts) to validate and accept the innovation.

David Deutsch defines creativity as the capacity to create new knowledge, specifically the ability to generate explanatory conjectures that can be tested, criticized, and refined, thereby producing understanding that did not exist before. We generate new understandings about how things work and why they behave as they do. Creativity, therefore, is about producing new explanations that can survive criticism and open the door to further progress.

As long as environments allow curiosity, freedom, and criticism, knowledge can grow without bound, making creativity the engine of unbounded progress, or what he calls the “Beginning of Infinity”.

David Deutsch’s view of creativity as the capacity to create new knowledge reframes the artist’s act not as mere self‑expression but as a process of conjecturing and testing explanations about the world, especially about human experience, emotions, and social intentions.

When a singer composes a new melody or a poet writes a fresh verse, they are generating novel explanatory guesses: for example, a conjecture that a particular combination of rhythm, timbre, and lyric can convey a specific nuance of longing, or that a certain metaphor can reveal a hidden aspect of cultural identity.

These guesses are then subjected to criticism through the artist’s own reflective judgment, feedback from listeners or readers, and the internal logic of musical or poetic forms, allowing the idea to be refined, rejected, or retained as a piece of knowledge that survived error‑correction.

Thus the discoveries made by the artist are not just aesthetic objects but new understandings: how a certain vocal break can embody vulnerability, how a specific poetic meter can evoke historical memory, or how a harmonic shift can model a social tension. And each adds to the shared pool of explanatory knowledge about what it means to feel, relate, and belong.

The domain knowledge of music theory, poetic conventions, linguistic nuances, and performance practice serves as the grammatical background against which conjectures are formed and tested; it provides the tools (scales, rhyme schemes, breath control) that make novel combinations possible and gives critics a shared language for evaluating whether the new work genuinely extends understanding.

In short, Deutsch’s framework turns the singer or poet into a knowledge‑creator whose art proceeds by proposing explanatory guesses about human life, refining them through criticism, and contributing to the growth of explanatory knowledge that can be built upon by future artists and audiences alike.

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But what makes a good explanation?

A good explanation, according to David Deutsch, is one that is hard‑to‑vary: every detail plays an essential role, so changing any part would ruin its explanatory power; it is testable (or at least criticizable), makes specific and risky predictions, and reveals the underlying mechanism that generates the phenomenon rather than merely describing it.

When this criterion is transferred to the arts, a work of music, poetry or painting can be seen as a candidate explanation of some aspect of human experience; e.g., a particular emotion, a social tension, or a perceptual shift.

Take a song as an example. A song that explains “longing” through a precise combination of a descending minor‑third motif, a syncopated rhythm, and a breathy vocal timbre is hard‑to‑vary: if you replace the motif with a major interval, straighten the rhythm, or use a bright tone, the felt longing disappears or changes. The specific details are indispensable to the explanatory claim.

Listeners can judge whether the piece succeeds in conveying the intended affect; feedback from peers, audiences, or the artist’s own reflective listening acts as criticism that can refine or reject the explanatory guess, just as scientific hypotheses are subjected to experiment.

Good artistic explanations do more than label a feeling; they reveal how musical elements (tension‑release cycles, timbral contrasts, structural expectations) generate that feeling, offering a mechanistic account that can be applied to other contexts (e.g., film scoring, therapeutic music).

The same structure applies to poetry and painting: a poem explains “impermanence” through a tightly interwoven metaphor, meter, and image that cannot be altered without losing the insight; a painting explains “isolation” via a specific palette, composition, and brush‑stroke technique whose interdependence makes the explanation hard‑to‑vary. In each case, the artwork functions as an explanatory conjecture about reality, open to criticism and capable of producing new, testable knowledge about human experience.

The Process of Discovery

Objective aesthetic solutions are not inborn but created. Just as Beethoven agonized over changes to meet a standard he knew existed, artists use creative effort to reject “mistakes” and converge on an objective standard. This process is a beginning of infinity for art: because humans are universal explainers, we can continue to solve aesthetic problems to create unlimited increases in beauty and even design new senses to experience qualia that are currently inconceivable.

This is most straightforwardly so in the case of art forms that involve stories – fiction. ... a good story has a good explanation of the fictional events that it portrays. But the same is true in all art forms. In some, it is especially hard to express in words the explanation of the beauty of a particular work of art, even if one knows it, because the relevant knowledge is itself not expressed in words – it is inexplicit. No one yet knows how to translate musical explanations into natural language. Yet when a piece of music has the attribute ‘displace one note and there would be diminishment’ there is an explanation: it was known to the composer, and it is known to the listeners who appreciate it. One day it will be expressible in words.

What does the future hold?

We will never reach a state of “perfection” in art or science; instead, we will continue to move from misconceptions to ever better, more beautiful misconceptions, forever at the beginning of an infinite journey.

If we look at creativity as the capacity to create new knowledge, than AI will 100% become creative. There is no way it’s not.

We may eventually design new senses and new qualia (subjective experiences), allowing us to experience and create forms of beauty that are currently inconceivable.

The artists will thrive no less than they used to, and the technology will only make things better not worse, but about this in the next post.

I hope this post brought you new perspectives about the concept of creativity. My goal is not to change your opinion but to offer you options to consider. At the end of the day, as Bruce Lee said, everyone should create their own philosophy of life.

Or you can anytime just say that it was God’s hand, who cares?

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Special thanks to David Deutsch, the author of the book The beginning of Infinity. Only after reading this book I could connect all the dots. I researched this topic for many years and read many books before I read The beginning of Infinity. Understanding creativity helped me discover the tools that makes accessing creativity more predictable.

Stanislav Maslowski - Moonrise

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In the beginning it was just scary, but then it started to make me angry. Now I get all those jokes about people in traffic, not funny

Anyway, my anger had been building for a while before I even noticed it. Once I did, I I had to do something about it. So I invented a little game for myself: every time I’m driving and I let someone merge or do a small favor in traffic, I score a point. The goal is to rack up as many points as possible.

It sounds stupid, but once you start playing, it actually becomes fun. It also completely changes how you perceive other drivers. They stop being obstacles and start being opportunities to do good.

This post is not about driving in traffic.

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Palaiciuc Tatiana - The Quiet Burn

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American Gypsy - Inside Out

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This is a sales letter addressed to those who struggle with creativity blocks. If it’s not something you’ve experienced feel free to close this email.

Over the last few months I talked to a lot of our subscribers and ran a poll to which over 100 people responded.

This is a finding that I couldn’t imagine to uncover. I share this with you first to tell you that you are not alone - there are others going through the same feelings as you.

Second, I am launching a program called Present Tense to help creators and hobbyists exactly with these issues.

I’ve been a creator for my entire life. I am a spoken word performer, I dealt with these issues myself, and I was always curious about how creativity works so I deeply researched the topic.

What I offer you is the following:

• A 4 week program created for 12 participants;

• A NOT self paced program. The reason is accountability. Research shows that 90% of the people who buy online courses never complete them, so there’s no point in wasting your money.

• During this program, we’ll meet 4 times for 1-2h sessions where we’ll discuss creative blocks, impostor syndrome, taking art too seriously, performance anxiety and everything in between.

• I’ll share with you science-proven protocols and exercises that will help you get unstuck. We’ll do these exercises together in between the live sessions. I will be as much a participant as a curator. Remember, we are in this together.

• The exercises and protocols are collected from 5+ years of research on creativity. I’ve read books from: Martha Beck, Byron Katie, David Deutsch, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Rick Rubin, Julia Cameron, and many more.

• You’ll get access to a private, small community of people who are going through this program. It will be a place where you can make new friends (only if you want), and a place of accountability. Maybe a place of fun too, depends on you all :)

• I’ll (re)define for you what creativity is so that you understand how it works and how to work with it.

• I promise you there is no voo-doo and no magic in it; only tactics and real actions that will take you from “I don’t have time”, “I am not talented”, “Who am I to make this”, “I will never create anything good (again)”, “Nobody cares”, blah blah to freely creating again.

• The Present Tense program costs $100 for the first 6 participants and $150 for the last 6 participants.

• Registrations are opened by April 4th.

• The program begins on April 5th.

Enroll to Present Tense

Now look, I have a habbit of being honest with you.

What I sell you here is not a completed novel or painting series or music album.

The “completed body of work” is not the promise. The identity shift is. You go from someone who has abandoned their creative identity through fear, self-doubt, or internalized criticism, to someone who shows up and creates consistently, on their own terms, without needing permission or perfection first.

The before is someone addicted to anxiety as a substitute for creating: staring at blank pages, self-censoring, waiting to feel ready. The after is someone who has reclaimed the daily habit of creating as a practice, regardless of outcome.

What success actually looks like for a completionist is you stop waiting for inspiration or permission, and you start saying yes to creative opportunities you previously deflected, and the inner critic’s volume drops enough that you can move.

Remember, blocked people are not lazy. They're working extremely hard at not creating. The mental effort of avoidance, self-censoring, and waiting to feel ready is exhausting.

Enroll to Present Tense

Yuval Robichek

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Noga Erez - End of the Road

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Hasui Kawase, Japan (1883-1957)

Daybreak over Lake Yamanaka

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Hermanos Cutierrez - Esperanza

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