Poetry
Marianne Moore
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
-------all this fiddle.
---Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
-------discovers in
--- it after all, a place for the genuine.
-------Hands that can grasp, eyes
-------that can dilate, hair that can rise
---------- if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
-------they are
--- useful. When they become so derivative as to become
-------unintelligible,
--- the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
------- do not admire what
------- we cannot understand: the bat
-----------holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
--------wolf under
--- a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
--------that feels a flea, the base-
---ball fan, the statistician--
--------nor is it valid
------------to discriminate against "business documents and
school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
-------a distinction
---however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
-------result is not poetry,
--- nor till the poets among us can be
-------"literalists of
-------the imagination"--above
------------insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
--------shall we have
---it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
---the raw material of poetry in
--------all its rawness and
--------that which is on the other hand
------------genuine, you are interested in poetry.
4 comments:
your poetry...must be even more incredible read aloud...
Hannah,
I prefer this version of the poem that originally appeared in her "Selected Poems" published in 1935 and the "Collected Poems" of 1951 over the other two incarnations: the original thirteen lines printed in Observations and the last version, appearing in the "Complete Poems" of 1967 in which the pome had been whittled down to 4 lines.
I believe the latter version invites misinterpretation. The longer version (38 lines)denigrates the kind of poetry where intellectualization has led to incomprehensibility, while simultaneously seeking to define what poetry ought to be. A mean feat to be sure.
Feminine Expressions,
I'm not sure to whom the "your" refers to:
i) If to Marianne Moore - unequivocally
ii) If to Hannah Craig - indubitably
ii) If to me - unassured(ly)
Great line: "the rest of it seemed to be padding."....hmmmm!
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