About Me
Poetry/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 row material of poetry in/
all its rawness and/
that which is on the other hand/
genuine, you are interested in poetry./Marianne Moore
