John Green Reads Poetry

Yes! From Moore, “Poetry” | Favorite Poem Project:

The most famous (and most widely lamented) version of “Poetry” is the one Moore published in her 1967 The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. Many readers, including numbers of Moore’s fellow poets, consider this one of the most egregious examples ever of terrible revision. In that 1967 version, Moore reduced “Poetry” to just three lines:

I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.

This drastic compression seems designed to frustrate the poem’s admirers (perhaps especially the critics and scholars who had commented on the poem), taking back the exquisitely twisty epigrams and images that readers had enjoyed, analyzed, quoted. To tease her admirers and critics—or to complicate their responses even further—Moore had it both ways by including the longer poem as a kind of endnote to the three-liner. She published the full, 1924 version (reprinted below), the one preferred by many of her admirers and later editors, in the back matter of that same 1967 Complete Poems with the laconic heading “Original Version.” In various ways, the two incarnations of the poem annotate, challenge, and criticize one another. I think they amusingly challenge and criticize us readers, too.

Good morning Hank, it’s Tuesday. So there’s this Mary-Anne Moore poem called “Poetry” which begins…

Which is more or less how I felt about poetry for much of my life. Partly because it seemed a little dead, in the sense that, like, all the poets I could name were in fact, dead. So there didn’t seem to be like, a present tense to poetry.

But also I never felt smart enough to “get” poetry. Like, I thought to read a poem well you had to be able to know that the wolf howling in the distance represented the poets dead father or whatever. And that if you could figure that out, you were good at reading poems, and if you couldn’t, you were bad at reading them. In which case, I was bad.

So I mostly quit reading poems, and tried instead to focus on the things that were important beyond all that fiddle. But it turns out, I love poetry.

As Mary-Anne Moore puts it later in that poem, “One discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine.” And I am desperate to discover places for the genuine.

And I’m also desperate for language that will help me understand the weird, and overwhelming worlds I encounter within, and without, and *that’s* what poetry does for me.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,

that there is

         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.