with real toads
“Imaginary gardens with real toads in them”.
That’s what the American modernist poet Marianne Moore thought poems should be. With this memorable phrase she suggests that poems should always contain something real. The abstract elements and imaginary constructs should be balanced out by genuine things – ‘real toads’, so to speak.
I like the metaphor of the poem as a garden, even though Moore intimates we should go beyond mere metaphor. It reminds me of my allotment, which has small ponds inhabited by toads, amongst other things. My role as occasional gardener there is to provide enough nourishment in the form of green leaves to feed the giant slugs, on which the toads can gorge.
The allotment is full of real things like earthworms, compost heaps, mice, sheds, spades, robins, aphids, tenacious weeds, bits of string, and so on. And real actions with real consequences too. The sowing of seeds puts you in touch with the creative forces at the heart of life. Digging into the soil brings you down to earth – literally grounds you.
All this could probably be included in Moore's category of “the raw
material of poetry, in all its rawness” (read her poem 'Poetry'). But of course there are lots of
imaginary things and hybrid real-abstract things there too. Especially now in the early days of Spring, just before
the growing season, visualizing what it will be like in the summer. Forget about past crop failures. The allotment now is nothing less than a field of dreams.
So the metaphor works both ways. Musing on this
as I prepare the ground for potatoes leads me to think that gardening and poetry
go very well together, balancing each other out. They are companion plants, as
gardeners might say, often grown in the same bed to mutual benefit. Like
marigolds and carrots.
This new poetry blog will be about imaginary gardens with real toads in them in the widest possible sense.
