Poests

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 twinkling 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 one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

The Pipling by Theodore Roethke

Behold the critic, pitched like the castrati,
Imperious youngling, though approaching forty;
He heaps few honors upon a living head;
He loves himself, and the illustrious dead;
He pipes, he squeaks, he quivers through his nose,—
Some cannot praise him, I am one of those.

Poests

“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
it after all, a place for the genuine.” (Marianne Moore, 1887-1972)

Nothing is more useless than its conventional practitioners,
“The usual suspects,”
Congregation of the committed,
Illegitimate borrowers of professional status,
Writing for the mirror;

Nor can I agree with my fellow workers
Who, like myself, to often miss the mark by
Just the difference between penpoint and paper:
Those who can’t do… chase phantom essences.

Done for its own sake it is best answered with a bloodied nose.
Many do not praise us. I am one of those.