Poetry
By 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.
3 comments:
I am taking a poetry class with a wonderful Los Angeles poetess, Laurel Ann Bogen (google her to find out more about her -- she teaches a poetry class at UCLA). Until recently, I didn't understand poetry AT ALL. In fact, it irritated me to read what I couldn't understand or feel. But somehow, after going to some of her poetry readings, I'm beginning to understand that HEARING a poem spoken is one of the ways to begin to perceive its impact.
So now, instead of immediately rejecting something I don't get, I allow myself to be open to perceiving the poem on more than a surface level. It's been an interesting and enlightening time.
I am actually writing some poetry of my own (surprise! surprise!). Tentative, feeble attempts, to be sure, but I'm beginning to catch on to metaphors and how important they are in poetry.
Ms. Bogen stresses how important it is to read, read, read poetry of all types, not just the ones you enjoy -- since that's the only way to find your own poetic voice.
A poet too often overlooked. Thank you, Hecate.
sandy, a lot of the pleasure of a poem is how repeated readings and lots of thought can reveal deeper and deeper layers of meaning. The TV generated fallacy of instant comprehension has trained people to forego a lot of beauty and just about all complexity of thought. Moore's ability to present a beautiful surface that invites you into the deeper beauties of experience and thought should make her a good introduction to reading deeply. If you stop with the surface, though, you miss most of it.
If you will tell me why the fen...
"The TV generated fallacy of instant comprehension has trained people to forego a lot of beauty and just about all complexity of thought."
olvlzl,
A great observation! Thank you for your thoughts; they resonate with what I've been experiencing lately in the poetry class.
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