Moving to WordPress

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

Moving to WordPress

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 for some diversion:

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air. 

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

  - Wallace Stevens

From Wikipedia:  'This famous, much-anthologized poem succinctly accommodates a remarkable number of different and plausible interpretations ... Helen Vendler ... asserts that the poem is incomprehensible except as understood as a commentary on Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn", alluding to it as a way of discussing the predicament of the American artist, "who cannot feel confidently the possessor, as Keats felt, of the Western cultural tradition." Shall he use language imported from Europe ("of a port in air", "to give of"), or "plain American that cats and dogs can read" (as Marianne Moore put it), like "The jar was round upon the ground"? [He vows] "to stop imitating Keats and seek a native American language that will not take the wild out of the wilderness."'

Has American gardening also been in the same predicament? Should we continue to use models "imported from Europe" (oh, how many times have I read that Americans want English gardens!), or "seek a native American [garden] that will not take the wild out of the wilderness"? 

Noel Kingsbury and many others have noted that many American gardens are surrounded by woodlands, and this is one distinguishing characteristic.

I don't mean to be abstruse (though I'm doing just that) but when I stumbled upon Helen Vendler's comments on this old favorite poem, I was struck by a parallel concern in American gardening.