Moving to WordPress
After six years with Blogger, I'm having serious technical problems and I'm no techie. Perhaps Blogger bogs down after several years of use?
I've decided to move View from Federal Twist to WordPress.
I'll provide a new address within the next few weeks. Meanwhile, posts will continue here, and the old blog will remain accessible.
Now, a poem on imaginary gardens with real toads in them:
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 raw
material of poetry in
all its
rawness and
that which is
on the other hand
genuine,
you are interested in poetry.
- Marianne Moore
James Golden