"Poetry" by Marianne Moore (poetry reading)

The picture of the toad, with whom I am informed I share 80% of my DNA, comes from this site, where you can find pictures of other family members:
http://www.duiops.net/seresvivos/gallery_frogs_toads.html

The killer toad is from Freaking News (actually it seems to be the same toad)

Analysis of the poem here:
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1488.html

and more here with a reading by Robert Pinsky:
http://www.slate.com/id/2221785/

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 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.

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• Moore

[langstonify]

Fine reading! Thanks. Interestingly, her "Octopus" poem concerns climbing Mount Rainier.

[thissong4you]

Saturday morning poetry and analysis. Loved the poem, the reading, the analysis and the family photos. Thanks, Tom

[Idlinfarm]

Thank you for this----one of my favorites. And thank you for times of being transported by your readings-----you make my day sometimes.

[paulpellicci]

Thanks

[belisariusorb]

A strange poem. To me it seems more like a manifesto or essay than a poem. What I mean is, the lines are cast into verse but there is a distinctly prosy feel to phrases like "become so derivative as to become unintelligible", which you could read in a critical essay. And the metre surely doesn't sound anything like poetry, at least to my cloth-like ear.