Rain, Poetry

 It's raining here in Venice – sometimes hard, sometimes gently, but raining most of the time – and I've discovered that it is still possible to get truly, hopelessly lost in at least one part of Venice, the part where our hotel is. We have spent an inordinate amount of time wandering in circles and failing to get any nearer where we want to be – a state of affairs made worse by my having mysteriously lost my one truly useful street map of the city, an unwieldy monster the size of a tablecloth. However, we did find our way to San Sebastiano, Veronese's parish church, and San  Nicolo dei Mendicoli, to Santa Maria dei Carmini (one fine Lotto), and to that great Gothic church full of preposterous monuments, the Frari, where I once again sat in wonder in front of Titian's great, astonishing, endlessly fascinating altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin...
Meanwhile, I note that it's National Poetry Day back in the homeland, where I'm sure the nation is once again given over to wild celebrations to mark the occasion. Here is my contribution, courtesy of an American poet – Marianne Moore, who else? 

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 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, then you are interested in poetry.