Round 300: Tossup 9
A line from this poem titles Paisley Rekdal’s 2024 book on reading and writing “forensically.” This poem quotes Tolstoy’s diary in a line about “business documents and school-books” and borrows a critical description by Yeats of William Blake. This poem’s list of things “we cannot understand” includes “the baseball fan, the statistician,” and “the immovable critic twinkling his skin.” This poem, which its author radically abridged to just three lines for the collection Complete Poems, claims that there is “after all, a place for the genuine” in its subject. This poem imagines a time when “the autocrats among us” can be “literalists of the imagination” and present “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” For 10 points, the claim “I too, dislike it” opens what poem by Marianne Moore? ■END■
ANSWER: “Poetry” (Rekdal’s book is titled Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens. Yeats called Blake a “too literal realist of the imagination.”)
<Michigan B, American Literature> | Packet I - McGill B, UCLA A, Michigan B, Georgia Tech C, Southampton B
= Average correct buzzpoint
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