This week began, like every autumn term in recent years, with a discussion of Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” (1919). As ever, my new MA students had new insights into this poem about poetry which begins — notoriously, awkwardly — “I, too, dislike it”. (If you don’t know the poem, you can read / like / dislike an annotated version here: https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/poetry-0).
One thought from class has stayed with me throughout the week. After a wry, oblique, volute-like series of reflections on how a poem may be “after all, a place for the genuine”, Moore ends with a pincer movement:
In other words, we are all interested in poetry — just as, sometimes, we all dislike it. Who doesn’t want “the raw material” of poetry i.e. reality, everything? And who doesn’t demand “the genuine” with both hands?
This was the new insight. Back in the first stanza, as Moore embarks on the extended, sideways meditation which takes us from “a place for the genuine” to “in the meantime”, she begins with an image for the instinctive response that tells us something is “important”: “Hands that can grasp”.
Talking about her own poetry, Moore said: “I have a liking […] for the inconspicuous or light rhyme”, but “I am against the stock phrase”. So when the last sentence of “Poetry” adopts the blandly judicious stock phrasing of “one one hand […] on the other hand” — with each hand floating, enjambed, either side of the lightest rhyme, and — the poem performs an ironically final separation of that which was already joined in an image — as if to make this gesture: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I like this.