Skip to 0 minutes and 6 seconds I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Some people don’t like poetry. Addressing this problem head on, the American Modernist poet, Marianne Moore, confesses that verse can be slippery, difficult, even unintelligible. In her poem, ‘Poetry’, she says that the quest of the poet is to keep writing, to find a way to express the things that matter. The poet’s job is to find a language that fits, and transforms, the contours of the world. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in it after all, a place for the genuine. Poetry matters. It describes events and emotions we recognise but can’t express.
Skip to 0 minutes and 58 seconds It conjures new states of feeling into being; offers new ways to experience our own lives and the lives of others.
Skip to 1 minute and 9 seconds Whether you’re nervous of poetry or a fully-fledged fan, ‘How to Read a Poem’ is the course for you. You’ll spend four weeks reading a wide range of poems, in the company of world-leading experts and one of the world’s most important contemporary poets, Vahni Capildeo.
Skip to 1 minute and 27 seconds MARIANNE MOORE SAYS: ‘We do not admire what we cannot understand’. ‘How to Read a Poem’ will help you to understand poems, to talk about them effectively, and even to write your own. And it will give you lots of opportunities to admire – and to enjoy! – the brilliance of poetry from across the ages and across the world. 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.
