Didn’t I hear John read this poem elsewhere?
Yes! Good memory:
- He reads the poem in full on Ours Poetica, which you can find here!
- Also quoted in parts by him — alongside some other poetry excerpts —in the follow-up vlogbrothers September 24, 2019 video I, Too, Dislike It.
The brothers’ related banter…
H: Do you have a short poem for us?
J: I do, it’s called “Poetry”, it’s a special poem just for you, Hank, by Marianne Moore. Again, the title is “Poetry”. You must bear in mind the title, “Poetry,” as I read you the poem.
(Reads poem)
Poetry, by Marianne Moore. Published in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, published in 1967.
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I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.
(The unquoted remainder of the poem)
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—case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; 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 autocrats 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, in defiance
of their opinion—
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
John Green Reads Poetry 