in verse #76 : Why I did not post in April

I did not contribute a post from “in verse” to Dawning of a Brighter Day for two simple reasons, and one complex one.  The first simple reason is that I had spinal fusion surgery on the 29^th of March to correct pinched nerves.  I was therefore in the hospital, cut off from my usual sources of information, when Jonathan Langford died on the 31^st of March.  I had posted late in March, on Monday the 26^th (although the entry is date-stamped Tuesday the 27^th at 01:37) because that entry was a hard one for me to finish.

I was not released from the hospital until April 6^th, due to complications.  And I couldn’t really sit at the computer for a week or so after, and then only in short spurts.  So I didn’t know that Jonathan Langford had died until I noticed that I had received no reminder from him in April to post punctually on the 27^th.  I liked receiving his kind reminders and composing clever replies, such as “I’m on it like white on snow,” to which his replies, when he made them, were never less than pleasant, no matter how much scorn I deserved.

The second simple reason was what happened on the 27^th.  I went back to my surgeon’s office for a 4-week post-operative check-up.  I had gone in earlier, on the 11^th, to have the staples pulled from my back; the incision was healing well, and I was able to spend the next week filing my taxes, sitting when I could and fuming when I could not.  I was seen by the surgeon’s assistant on the 27^th, who told me to start pool walking, because I needed to walk more, and especially against gentle resistance.  That appointment was in the early morning; when I received a phone call at 16:45 from a person trying to sell me an Orthofix bone-growth stimulator, a bargain at $699 or less, whatever remained of my out-of-pocket insurance expenses after paying my hospital bills, whichever bill arrived at my insurance’s office first, and the salesman knew all about my insurance, and said that the surgeon had approved the use of the machine, which normally retails for $4,000, so it would be a bargain — I hesitated.

Then I googled Orthofix, and spent the rest of the evening reading about various fraud settlements the company had made, without admitting guilt, including one for over $42 million in Texas in 2012, and pondering whether I was being lured into a Medicare fraud scheme.  I spent a week trying to determine whether or not my surgeon had recommended the machine, and whether I needed to use one, because no one in the surgeon’s office had told me I needed to in any face-to-face visit.

I could still have posted, but here’s the far more complex reason:  I wanted to talk about what makes the following poem verse, about what is poetic about “Poetry” by Marianne Moore.  It’s one of the most famous poems of the 20^th Century.  I studied it in high-school in 1962, at Provo High, in Gladys Nelson’s AP English class, for which I also read The sound and the fury, by William Faulkner.  Valerie and I have a running argument about what is poetry, or should be.  She prefers rhyming, metered verse — Dickinson over Whitman, Hardy over Pound, Yeats over Lowell (either one), Tolkien over Swenson, or almost any other mid-century poet, or any contemporary poet.  So I am breaking this post into two parts:  I want you to read Moore’s poem, copy it and print it off even, do an analysis of the prosody, mark up the text for stresses, and consider what makes this text verse.  Is it, as Valerie says, prose in mufti, an assertion of verse but lacking the form thereof, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing, an experiment ending not with a bang but a whimper?

I will do the same thing, then in a day or so, when things are all quiet on the AML front, I will post my analysis.  Here’s the poem:

**********Poetry / Marianne Moore

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 that there is 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 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, you are interested in poetry.[i]

 

I do not quibble with Moore that this is poetry.  It has also been widely accepted as poetry, so I do not quibble with its audience.  But is it verse?  And, as Valerie would ask, is it really a poem?

But hold on, I hear you say.  Isn’t answering that your job?

Your turn.

_______________

[i] The poem was first published in Others for 1919 : an anthology of the New Verse / edited by Alfred Kreymborg. – (s.l. : Nicholas L. Brown, 1920); (note that the title of the anthology does not claim its contents for poetry).  This text comes from poem-a-day, an e-mail from poets.org, launched by the Academy of American Poets in 2006.  You should all subscribe.