A Caricature

Clerihew for Miss Moore

MARIANNE MOORE

Marianne Moore
Grew up poor
And lived with relations
Of various stations.

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From Complete Poems, by Marianne Moore

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. 

Daily Dose

From Complete Poems, by Marianne Moore

WHAT ARE YEARS

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, —
dumbly calling, deafly listening—that
in misfortune, even death,
encourage others
and in its defeat, stirs
the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.
So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity. 

Daily Dose

From Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics, by Marianne Moore

 W. S. LANDOR

There
is someone I can bear —
" a master of indignation . . .
meant for a soldier
converted to letters, " who could

throw
a man through the window,
yet, " tender toward plants, " say, " Good God,
the violets! " (below).
" Accomplished in every

style
and tint " — considering meanwhile
infinity and eternity,
he could only say, " I'll
talk about them when I understand them. "

Daily Dose

From The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman


NOTHING WILL CURE THE SICK LION BUT TO EAT AN APE

Percieving that in a masked ball
attitude, there is a hollowness
that beauty's light momentum can't redeem;
since disproportionate satisfaction anywhere
lacks proportionate air,

he let us know without offense
by his hands' denunciatory
upheaval, that he despised the fashion
of curing us with an ape -- making it his care
to smother us with fresh air.

Quick Review

My Poets by Maureen N. McLane

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


It is a mark of just what an interesting writer poet Maureen McLane is that when I agree with her, I want to quote her, in and out of context, as here, in her essay "My Marianne Moore": "... Moore stands alongside (albeit more decorously) D. H. Lawrence..." which made me laugh aloud, or here, from the dazzling entry titled "My Impasses: On Not Being Able to Read Poetry," just the very last word on the subject, and something I want printed on a T-shirt:

"Q: How to read?
A: ALOUD."

Now, that same essay that provides me with the above, and that also made me smile nearly throughout at the portrait of the poet's younger self, earnestly parsing Olsen & O'Hara, etc., also came to not a few conclusions as to the value of what she calls her "impasses" at which I simply shake my head and envy her her optimism, and her faith, for want of a more strictly reasoned, or persuasive argument.

Throughout this book there are discernments -- many of them tossed off as easily, as conversationally as the poet might make among friends -- that have changed and already enhanced my reading of even quite familiar poems, and poets, (Moore and Bishop, specially,) and made me want to read more of others less familiar (H. D.) or new to me entirely (Fanny Howe.) What better could one want from a poet writing about poetry?

McLane's book can also be a bit maddening, again because of the conversational, almost gabby structure and sometimes tryingly, relentlessly subjective tone. As with even the most accomplished monologist, there are arguments not so much made as begun, and free-floating opinions, and the occasional assumption made about the reader's level of familiarity with composition and form that for me proved not to be true. Mostly though, it is McLane's sudden drops into poetry, or at least out of prose into things other than, that can make the head spin, and not always in a good way, even acknowledging the fun of to be had, and the excitement generated by watching her pull most of these improvisations off. What's exciting can also, on more sober consideration, just be sound silly; "For a Gothic ecstasy is not to be gainsaid" or, just two lines on, both banal and, well, wrong: "For Romeo and Juliet are paradigms" -- of what? youth? murder/suicide? the Renaissance? Romantic clichés? Oh, please.

Still, poets writing about poetry and other poets is so rarely, in my experience an exciting experience rather than a duty or a job, that a poet bringing this kind of intelligence and enthusiasm to the task is a welcome event. Any regular reader of poetry who's picked up the criticism of even great poets will appreciate how rarely those efforts rise to even the level of their least poems. (Yeats, for one example, in most of his books other than poetry is unreadable, as he pursues his own preoccupations, crochets and crankiness far up his own fundament, arrogantly expecting the reader, presumably, to just follow behind, gathering wisdom.) I still can't speak to McLane as a poet, but here at least as an enthusiast and knowledgeable practitioner, she has provided a very entertaining and even thrilling lot of often very smart talk.

Glad to hear it.



View all my reviews

Daily Dose

From The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose Volume II, 1939 - 1948, edited by Edward Mendelson

MARIANNE MOORE

"The endless musical and structural possibilities of Miss Moore's invention are a treasure which all future English poets will be able to plunder. I have already stolen a great deal myself."

From Beauty Is Everlasting, a review of Nevertheless, by Marianne Moore

Clerihew of a Noble Spinster

MARIANNE MOORE

Until her mother died,
She never left her side.
Unmarried, therefore
Was Marianne Moore.

Pain We Obey

Around five o'clock in the morning last night, it occurred to me I was not going to sleep. When I put my head down, it filled and overflowed. When I propped myself up, I coughed. When I stood up, I shivered with cold. When I pulled blankets and covers and quilts over my head to get warm, I grew dizzy with heat. Sleep was not possible, but neither was seriousness. How could I read? My eyes watered, my nose ran, the book shook in my hand. A conundrum.

Poetry answered the need. If I could not sustain a paragraph of prose, but that it came back up unrecognized a minute later, I might take a dose of rhyme, line by line, and thus sustain myself in my weariness, so long as the poem was light, familiar, repeatable.

I May, I Might, I Must

If you will tell me why the fen
appears impassable, I then
will tell you why I think that I
can get across it if I try.

- Marianne Moore

I spent the gray early morning then, in the company of "The Pobble who has no toes," and in the "gently smiling jaws" of the Little Crocodile. I might not laugh, but at least I could smile -- though a hideous, red-eyed, milky-mouthed, runny-nosed grin it must have been, so I avoided mirrors.

My Own Epitaph

Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, but now I know it.

- John Gay

I'm sure I dozed, I know I nodded. I am not better now, neither rested nor refreshed, but I am still alive, at least a little, because I listened to Marcel, “Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.”

I will not stir again today.