More of Moore

We remember 1972 as the year of the Watergate break-in, Nixon’s re-election and the Christmas bombing of Hanoi. The year further darkens if we recall its literary deaths. In the deep Minnesota winter, on January 7, we lost John Berryman – a shock if not a surprise. Five months later, on June 12, Edmund Wilson, once a critical deity, died. Two days after his 87th birthday, Ezra Pound, whom Hugh Kenner called “the center of modernism,” died in Venice, on Nov. 1.

For a shameful moment I forget the death of another writer that year -- Marianne Moore, whose best poems celebrate and express joy, a rarity among the modernists. In her Paris Review interview with Donald Hall, she quoted George Grosz: “How did I come to be an artist? Endless curiosity, observation, research – and a great amount of joy in the thing.” I love the precision and scrupulosity of her poems, their tendency to read like essays, their playfulness and humor and the way she stitches together the words of others and makes the resulting collage indelibly her own. Among the modernists, her only rival for giving pleasure is Wallace Stevens. In Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller, Hugh Kenner wrote of Fuller’s “ventilated prose” and compared it to Moore’s poetic method:

“He had discovered, in his own way, a mode of American poetry, the straightforward sentence collected out of energized units, and analyzed into them again by a visual aid. Marriane Moore, for one, understood this principle by 1921, the year of her first volume, Poems. (`What I write,’ she later wrote, `could only be called poetry because there is no other category in which to put it.’) She had even discovered that the energized units need not be composed by the poet but could be borrowed from auction catalogues, magazine captions, technical leaflets – occasions when sincerity of perception (never mind whose) was engaged with some reality.”

Here, from 1920, is “Picking and Choosing”:

“Literature is a phase of life. If
one is afraid of it, the situation is irremedial; if
one approaches it familiarly,
what one says of it is worthless. Words are constructive
when they are true; the opaque allusion -- the simulated flight

“upward -- accomplishes nothing. Why cloud the fact
that Shaw is self-conscious in the field of sentiment but is otherwise re-
warding? that James is all that has been
said of him if feeling is profound? It is not Hardy
the distinguished novelist and Hardy the poet, but one man

“`interpreting life through the medium of the
emotions.’ If he must give an opinion, it is permissible that the
critic should know what he likes. Gordon
Craig with his `this is I’ and `this is mine,’ with his three
wise men, his `sad French greens’ and his Chinese cherry -- Gordon Craig, so

inclinational and unashamed -- has carried
the precept of being a good critic to the last extreme, and Burke is a
psychologist -- of acute, raccoon-
like curiosity. Summa diligentia;
to the humbug, whose name is so amusing -- very young and very

“rushed, Caesar crossed the Alps `on the top of a
diligence.’ We are not daft about the meaning, but this familiarity
with wrong meanings puzzles one. Humming-
bug, the candles are not wired for electricity.
Small dog, going over the lawn, nipping the linen and saying

“that you have a badger – remember Xenophon;
only the most rudimentary sort of behavior is necessary
to put us on the scent; `a right good
salvo of barks,’ a few `strong wrinkles’ puckering the
skin between the ears, are all we ask.”

“Ventilated prose,” indeed. This seems to be a poem about itself, about the relation of poems and critics, written by a poet of “acute, raccoon-/like curiosity.” In a mixed review (collected in The Undiscovered Country) of The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003), edited by Grace Schuman, William Logan, when he’s not being snotty, is right on the money:

“You can love her for her maze of syntax alone, for the abstractions she turns on and off like a light switch, for descriptions out of Ovid’s metamorphoses (Moore’s embody the wish to be transformed), for logic that leaps about, in the way of her jerboa, `like the uneven notes/of the Bedouin flute.’ You can love her for all these things, because there’s something winning about a poet who makes poems out of magazine cuttings and horsehide glue – to the last she remained an outsider…Whatever other poets have done, they have done nothing like Marianne Moore. Her virtue is not only that she is peculiar, but that she is ours.”

Guy Davenport was another informed admirer (in “Marianne Moore,” collected in The Geography of the Imagination):

“Miss Moore is neither a sentimental collector nor a dabbler in wildlife [an apt description of too many American poets]. Behind her work is a love of -- it is unfair to have to speak for her – things cunningly made: for one, armored anteaters, and for another, Egyptian pulled glass bottles. Things that seem to defy description but which her art labors well to describe well: icosaspheres and paper nautiluses. Beauty – her triumph is that she has found it where few have before, and convinced us of it. Conciseness and symmetry. Liberty. Tough, even cantankerous individuality.”

Cunning, concision, symmetry, toughness, cantankerousness – weapons in the poet’s arsenal. With her funny hats, persnickety syntax and love of the Brooklyn Dodgers, readers of Life magazine thought she was a joke – a good cover for an artist who has work to do.

In The Art of Celebration (1992), the Nabokov scholar Alfred J. Appel Jr. proposes that we devote four or five of our bookshelves exclusively to what he calls “the life-affirming, celebratory works of the twentieth century.” Along with recordings by Louis Armstrong, Ruby Braff and Henry “Red” Allen, and the movies of Astaire-Rogers, Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin and Keaton, Appel suggests appropriate books:

“Ulysses should occupy a place of honor on the top, shortest Yes Celebratory Shelf, flush left against the varnished wood. Nabokov, a writer whose works I happen to love, should have seven or so inches to himself there, next to Joyce. Hardcover volumes of the collected poetry of W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Richard Wilbur will be conspicuous for their handsome, durable spines.”

Appel is not suggesting we judge literature with a Happy Meter: Life-affirming, good; Nay-saying, bad. In fact, he admires Kafka while placing him, rightly, on the “No” shelf, probably next to Beckett. But assigning Moore to the Yes-saying shelf is appropriate. In 1966, in a letter to Writer’s Digest, she quoted John Cheever approvingly:

“I have an impulse to bring glad tidings. My sense of literature is one of giving, not diminishing.”