Poetry Friday
Assignment: The Poetry of Poetry
Read the following poem by Marianne Moore about why she writes poetry and what the goal of the poet should be. Do you agree or disagree with her assessment? By way of answer, create a poem that addresses your idea of what poetry is and can be. The poem you write can take any form you choose, you may add two stanzas replicating Moore’s own style, create a series of haikus, or create a style of your own.
Minimum Length: 12 lines
Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
Poetry
1 I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
2 Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
3 it after all, a place for the genuine.
4 Hands that can grasp, eyes
5 that can dilate, hair that can rise
6 if it must, these things are important not because a
7 high sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
8 useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
9 the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
10do not admire what
11we cannot understand: the bat,
12 holding on upside down or in quest of something to
13 eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
14 a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base
15 ball fan, the statistician --
16 nor is it valid
17 to discriminate against "business documents and
18 school-books": all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
19 however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
20 nor till the poets among us can be
21 "literalists of
22 the imagination" -- above
23 insolence and triviality and can present
24 for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
25 it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand,
26 the raw material of poetry in
27 all its rawness and
28 that which is on the other hand
29 genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
Mr. K Sample
Words that take themselves too seriously are weighted down
Immobile and inert, yoked to the tether
Of their own feet, seeing nothing but hair on toes
Where is humor, subtlety, nuance and
suggestion? When faced with the
absurdity of your own feet, what can you do but laugh?
The crowd at the ball game
by William Carlos Williams
The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them—
all the exciting detail
of the chase
and the escape, the error
the flash of genius—
all to no end save beauty
the eternal—
So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful
for this
to be warned against
saluted and defied—
It is alive, venomous
it smiles grimly
its words cut—
The flashy female with her
mother, gets it—
The Jew gets it straight— it
is deadly, terrifying—
It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution
It is beauty itself
that lives
day by day in them
idly—
This is
the power of their faces
It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is
cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail
permanently, seriously
without thought