The Books: “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry” – Marianne Moore

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry shelf:

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair

T.S. Eliot wrote in 1923, early in Moore’s career:

“I can only think of five contemporary poets – English, Irish, French and German – whose works excite me as much or more than Miss Moore’s.”

He felt that her poetry was probably the “most durable” of all the greats writing at that time.

Sadly, I have no idea how to recreate what Moore’s poems LOOK like on my own site – does anyone have any tips? Movable Type irons out her jagged beginning lines – and half of the fun of Moore is what her poems look like. The start of each line is staggered, like little steps (or, in a lot of poems they are) – and so the reading of the poem becomes something almost experiential, as opposed to passive, or intellectual. Her poems really look like something.

Moore was great friends with people like H.D. (more on her here) and Ezra Pound (more on him here) and she had many admirers. Her work as a critic was unfortunately cut short, due to the collapse of the main journal she wrote for – but you can see her critical mind at work in her poems. She was one of those poets who wrote a lot about poetry itself. She had many ideas, she wanted to let images talk to one another through the verse – and perhaps the connecting links were opaque to us, the reader – but that just adds to the power of her stuff. Her poems have been compared to Cubist paintings. They are not literal. She goes into a dreamspace, and the words tumble out (at least that is the impression – not only from the sounds, but from, again, the LOOK of the words on the page) – almost like things happen in dreams. The unconscious is paramount. Poetry is not meant to reveal all. What you leave out is almost as valuable as what you include. She wrote: “Omissions are not accidents.”

My view of Marianne Moore was, for a while, tainted by her rather snotty response to an overly fawning Sylvia Plath. Plath was ga-ga, a young woman at the time, not famous yet – and they met in 1955. Plath had sent Moore some of her poems, and she feared she made some gaffe by sending her carbon copies. Moore sent her a pointed letter that hurt Plath’s feelings. Anne Stevenson writes in Bitter Fame:

In July, to Sylvia’s surprise and keen distress, Miss Moore sent her in reply what Sylvia saw as “a queerly ambiguous spiteful letter… ‘Don’t be so grisly,’” she commented; “you are too unrelenting.’” And she added “certain pointed remarks about ‘typing being a bugbear.’” Sylvia concluded that Miss Moore was annoyed because she had sent carbon copies instead of fresh top sheets. That seems unlikely. While Marianne Moore usually admired Ted’s work, she never warmed to Sylvia’s, disliking the early traces of the very elements that later were to carry her to fame: macabre doom-laden themes, heavy with disturbing colors and totemlike images of stones, skulls, drownings, snakes, and bottled fetuses — hallmarks of Sylvia’s gift.

Marianne Moore very much admired the poetry of Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s husband for a time, but Hughes never forgave her for her slighting of Plath, and wrote a poem about it in his collection Birthday Letters.

A Literary Life, by Ted Hughes

We climbed Marianne Moore’s narrow stair
To her bower-bird bric-a-brac nest, in Brooklyn.
Daintiest curio relic of Americana.
Her talk, a needle
Unresting – darning incessantly
Chain-mail with crewel-work flowers.
Birds and fish of the reef
In phosphor-bronze wire.
Her face, tiny American treen bobbin
On a spindle,
Her voice the flickering hum of the old wheel.
Then the coin, compulsory,
For the subway
Back to our quotidian scramble.
Why shouldn’t we cherish her?

You sent her carbon copies of some of your poems.
Everything about them -
The ghost gloom, the constriction,
The bell-jar air-conditioning – made her gasp
For oxygen and cheer. She sent them back.
(Whoever has her letter has her exact words.)
‘Since these seem to be valuable carbon copies
(Somewhat smudged) I shall not engross them.’
I took the point of that ‘engross’
Precisely, like a bristle of glass,
Snapped off deep in my thumb.
You wept
And hurled yourself down a floor or two
Further from the Empyrean.
I carried you back up.
And she, Marianne, tight, brisk,
Neat and hard as an ant,
Slid into the second or third circle
Of my Inferno.

A decade later, on her last visit to England,
Holding court at a party, she was sitting
Bowed over her knees, her face,
Under her great hat-brim’s floppy petal,
Dainty and bright as a piece of confetti -
She wanted me to know, she insisted
(It was all she wanted to say)
With that Missouri needle, drawing each stitch
Tight in my ear,
That your little near-posthumous memoir
‘OCEAN 1212′
Was ‘so wonderful, so lit, so wonderful’ -

She bowed so low I had to kneel. I kneeled and
Bowed my face close to her upturned face
That seemed tinier than ever,
And studied, as through a grille,
Her lips that put me in mind of a child’s purse
Made of the skin of a dormouse,
Her cheek, as if she had powdered the crumpled silk
Of a bat’s wing,
And I listened, heavy as a graveyard
While she searched for the grave
Where she could lay down her little wreath.

It is not Moore’s fault that a casual comment about carbon copies would send an overly-sensitive young woman into such a tailspin – but it is such tiny moments that make up art (for the artists, I mean) – moments where misconnections or loss are clearly revealed. Hughes had the sense of Plath’s sensitivity, he knew it back then, and tried to protect Plath from her own excesses (not an easy job). And now, decades and decades later, he still has some words for Moore.

Such is life.

Moore was a GIANT, by the time Plath and Hughes met her – the “grande dame” of American poetry. She was an eccentric (Moore was), although the outer aspect of her life was always quiet and narrow. She lived with her mother. She did needlepoint. She worked at a library. She wore hats with little veils and fur stoles. She never married.

But her poetry – with its breathless rhythms and counterintuitive images – its fascination with exotic animals – its SCOPE – shows that the enormity of life is not just represented by the events of our lives, but what is going on inside us, how we see. Plenty of people have had phenomenally interesting lives, with scandals and sex and drugs and months living in a tent in Tunisia – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the poetry is going to be good.

Marianne Moore walked a straight and narrow life, and her poems are HUGE.

Also, I have to say: I love that she was an enormous baseball fan. Actually, she was a huge sports fan, in general – but baseball was her passion. She wrote poems about baseball and I treasure them.

Marianne Moore and Langston Hughes

Here is a piece Ted wrote about Marianne Moore.

Here is one of my favorites of her poems. Again, I can’t replicate what it looks like – but the beginning lines are all staggered, so the poem looks almost fragmented, breathless. I love her imagery. Nothing about her is expected. Nothing is traditional. Only she could put these lines and these words together. I find her to be a rigorous poet to read. I can’t relax. She doesn’t let me. The images are too unexpected, I have to pay attention. Like: ” its rock crystal and its imperturbability, / all of museum quality…” To me, not only is that line perfect and evocative … but a surprise, a little gift.

ENGLAND

with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral;
with voices – one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept – the
criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy
with its equal shores – contriving an epicureanism
from which the grossness has been extracted,

and Greece with its goat and its gourds,
the nest of modified illusions: and France,
the “chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly,”
in whose products, mystery of construction
diverts one from what was originally one’s object -
substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its emotional

shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its imperturbability,
all of museum quality: and America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south,
where cigars are smoked on the street in the north;
where there are no proofreaders, no silk-worms, no digressions;
the wild man’s land; grass-less, linksless, languageless country in which letters are written
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!
The letter a in psalm and calm when
pronounced with the sound of “a” in candle, is very noticeable, but

why should continents of misapprehension
have to be accounted for by the fact?
Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools
which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous?
Of mettlesomeness which may be mistaken for appetite,
of heat which may appear to be haste,
no conclusions may be drawn.

To have misapprehended the matter is to have confessed that one has not looked far enough.
The sublimated wisdom of China, Egyptian discernment,
the cataclysmic torrent of emotion
compressed in the verbs of the Hebrew language,
the books of the man who is able to say,
“I envy nobody but him, and him only,
who catches more fish than
I do” – the flower and fruit of all that noted superiority
if not stumbled upon in America,
must one imagine that it is not there?
It has never been confined to one locality.