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