FeatheredThing wants poetry.
Marianne Moore
Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyondall 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.
Source: Poets.org
From The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. Copyright © 1961 Marianne Moore, © renewed 1989 by Lawrence E. Brinn and Louise Crane, executors of the Estate of Marianne Moore.
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Comments
back to the drawing table.....
PS. If we were talking motorcycle repair manuals, I'd have a better idea about how to respond.
And I like it.
Clever girl, that one was.
Did you know Marianne Moore proposed the name "Utopian Turtletop" for the Ford Edsel, the ugliest car ever? Probably the best-paying gig she ever had.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne_Moore
rated for meta
we
do not admire what
we cannot understand
It doesn't get any better than this...pass the beer.
Thanks, for posting and mentioning my post too. Yes, FeatheredThing wants Poetry!
Now who can improve on that?