Poetry For All Transcript for Episode 27: Marianne Moore, “Poetry” [intro music begins] Abram: Hello, I’m Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And I’m Joanne Diaz. Abram: And this is _Poetry For All_. Joanne: In this podcast, we read a poem, discuss it, learn from it, and then read it one more time. Abram: Today we’ll be talking about Marianne Moore’s poem called “Poetry.” Joanne, would you read that poem for us? Joanne: I would be happy to. “Poetry”: [https://poets.org/poem/poetry] Abram: Hm. Joanne: [chuckles] Abram: That’s great. Joanne: That was actually fun to read. I have not read that poem aloud before but I found that very entertaining. So, maybe we could talk about who Marianne Moore was and what her significance is. Abram: So, Marianne Moore was born in 1887 in Kirkwood, just outside of St. Louis--where I’m sitting here now--and she grew up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and she moved to New York City with her mother. And while she was in New York, she got interwoven with a whole bunch of the leading modernist poets of the 1920s, so she becomes a friend and a collaborator and a fellow writer with H.D. and William Carlos Williams and Wallace D Evans and Ezra Pound and all these others and later she ends up mentoring Elizabeth Bishop as well. So she’s really at the center of a whole movement of 20th century American poetry. It’s important to understand a little bit about what that movement was trying to do so that famous notion that Ezra Pound gives us, a “call to make it new,” it was kind of a rallying cry against convention and against all the stuff that had come before basically. And certainly Marianne Moore does that in her poetry. Her first book of poetry was selected and arranged by H.D. in 1921, her second collection in 1924 was called _Observations_ and that title gets at something really important about Moore’s poetry, which is that it’s highly observational. Often attuned to animals and nature, she really loved the kind of obscure animals that she came across. She studied biology when she was in college at Bryn Mawr University and so her poetry is really an attempt to take what is very peculiar and give it a kind of sense or order or meaning or structure through the kinds of poems that she creates. Joanne: There’s so many things to say about what you just laid out. The first is maybe some of the fun that I had as I read this poem came from how fresh and accessible her sentences and tone are. A lot of poets love this poem and readers of poems love it because it starts with that really funny first sentence: “I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all / this fiddle.” If a very serious, highly prolific and accomplished poet _also_ disliked poetry, then _what_ hope is there for the rest of us, right? Abram: [laughing] Joanne: So it’s a very--it’s one of the funniest and engaging first sentences of a poem that I can think of. However, there’s much more to it than just that. When you talk about modernism, that is a deep and broad field of poetic expression and the whole podcast could focus _just_ on modernism in poetry, there’s so much to say. However, if you just look at that first sentence--the colloquial accessible nature of that--if you were looking at what was being published in literary magazines up through the end of the 1800s, it is _so_ Victorian, it is _so_ Didactic and overly formal, right? And so how do we make poetry feel new? Especially in the years during and after World War I, when so many soldiers were coming back traumatized by the horrors of World War I. How do you take all of that highly, overblown, ornate language of the late Victorians and really speak to the moment in which readers are reading this work. That first line of this poem by Marianne Moore, you know, we’re laughing about it, it’s a wonderful first line, but it is truly innovative in ways that we kind of have to situate in its moment. Abram: You know if you just hear this poem, you don’t hear that there’s in fact a kind of rhyme scheme to it. There is a structure to this. Each stanza--there are five stanzas here--look the same. So she is constraining herself to a certain kind of structure, but what she’s doing is that she’s playing with those rhymes and so they happen almost in passing. They’re completely sort of unaccented rhymes. You almost wouldn’t notice that they’re happening except for the fact that she places them at the end of certain lines. So “in” and “genuine” and “eyes” and “rise.” She has “the” and “we” together, and “what” and “bat” together so that they _look_ the same, they _look_ like rhymes but they aren’t. She cuts the word “baseball” in half so that “base” will rhyme with “case” and “did” with “valid.” And she’s just completely playing with all these conventions about how the “end of the line is supposed to rhyme” and she says “fine, you want your rhyme? Here it is” and she makes it be the “base” of “baseball.” Joanne: That’s great. And you know, what I hear you saying is yes, of course she is attentive to form and to structure. There’s so many great quotes about Marianne Moore and her work and I’d just like to cite two of them that seem relevant to what you’re saying. The first one is from William Carlos Williams, who was her contemporary and he said this about her work: “So that in looking at some apparently small object, one feels the swirl of great events.” So that kind of speaks to what you were saying about yes, she’s interested in particulars, yes, she’s interested in what’s wild and uncontrolled, and there’s a swirling sort of feeling that’s in the poem, even as she’s a formalist. And then the other quote that I loved was from a slate article that Robert Pinsky wrote several years ago, and he says that “Marianne Moore likes to keep everything shifting and vibrating.” What a wonderful--oh!--I just _loved_ it! He would describe her work like that. Everything is shifting and vibrating; I feel like that’s relevant to this poem because she’s constantly re-situating what she’s trying to say about what poetry is and does and why we should appreciate what it does for us. Abram: And part of the shift and the vibration happens within a kind of overriding control as well, and I think that’s were the struggle of the poem is made clear. The struggle of the poem, of her poetry in general. There’s this sense of a search for order over and against a world that seems utterly disordered. In effect, that’s what she’s saying in that last stanza, if we could skip there and we’ll go back to these lists, these strange phenomena. In the last stanza, she has this very famous line that real poetry, what good poetry offers is “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” It’s just a great line! And basically what she’s saying is that an imaginary garden--so a garden is a kind of arrangement of things, it’s a very careful management of things. In fact, one critic says of Moore’s poetry that basically every poem is a kind of management. And that’s what a garden is. But what’s _in_ this garden? Well, not just the kind of flowers and vegetables that you want to be there, but _real_ toads. That is, the world’s real particulars that you may or may not want in your typical poetry, standing there and staring you in the face. And if _they’re_ not there in your garden, then your poetry isn’t real to begin with. It’s a kind of triviality. Joanne: That is so--I love that explanation of that line, that makes perfect sense to me because it feels to me, the more I read this poem, that it really is about that very thin line between my mind and the world. Abram: Mhm. Joanne: Like, she’s trying to understand that very, very precise relationship and she’s trying to say “if the poem only is an imaginary space with no referent in the world, it’s just going to be this imaginary thing; it just has to have some kind of grounding,” right? Abram: Yeah, and part of what she offers us there then is a series of things which if you just observe them seem strange. A bat hanging upside down or in quest of something, or the strangeness of elephants pushing one another, or a wild horse taking a roll, or a tireless wolf under a tree, or--and I love this--when we’ve got all these crazy animal things that might make us pause with amazement and wonder and what’s the next thing on the list? “The immovable critic”--and my version has “twitching his skin like a horse that / feels a flea,” “the base-- / ball fan, the statistician”--_these_ are the cases of these sort of unimaginable phenomena of the world that need to be imagined into a kind of sense and order that we’re _trying_ to understand, that poetry itself is trying to help us understand. Joanne: So she wants to understand them in order to admire them. That word seems really important too, right? Abram: Mhm. Joanne: Look at this, a couple sentences in: “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.” Okay, so she’s suggesting--I think--that poetry is capable of creating a world on the page in which hands _can_ grasp, eyes _can_ dilate, hair _can_ rise if it _must_. So when we read these lines together before we recorded this podcast, you looked at the grasping, the potential for grasping hands, dilating eyes, and hair rising as _fear_, and I thought that was so interesting and I’m sure you’re absolutely right! _However_-- Abram: [chuckling] I am not so sure! Joanne: However I-- Abram: [chuckling] I’m _never_ sure that I’m absolutely right! Joanne: No! Abram: [stammers] Please, continue. I like that! That sounds great! Go ahead. Joanne: No, it is! I think you’re probably right. I’m sure I’m wrong but I read them as amazement. I read them as true, true admiration, right? Admiration has in its root, the word is “mira,” “to look” and “to behold something.” And it feels like poetry asks us to behold the possibilities that she’s listing here and our physiological reactions to them, and so when she provides us with that list; “the bat, / holding on upside down or in quest of something to / eat, elephants pushing”--I had a bat in my bedroom a few weeks ago, by the way. Abram: [laughing] Joanne: Did I tell you? Abram: [laughing] That’s terrible! Joanne: It flew in through the garage! It was--I mean, ah! Abram: Did you experience fear or amazement? Joanne: [laughing] I think, yeah, fear. Mostly fear. Abram: Okay. Joanne: I just didn’t want-- Abram: Anyway, continue! Yeah, I was just curious. Go ahead. Joanne: So there’s fear, but then “elephants pushing.” Elephants are such sentient, feeling, intelligent animals. They’re such social animals, so I don’t feel fear there. I feel wonderment, right? Abram: Yeah. Joanne: And then “a wild horse taking a roll.” That horse is just loving rolling around in the cool grass on a hot day, like, that’s just _beautiful_! Why and how does he know how to do that, right? So, “a tireless wolf / under / a tree.” Uh oh, he’s probably eating something, so that’s scary, but then, “the immovable critic,” I have “twinking,” you have “twitching” like a horse that feels a flea, “the base- / ball fan”--. So I’m rambling here, but it’s because I’m really interested in what she’s trying to say about physiologically what a poem can do and describe and capture and evoke, you know? Abram: Mhm. And I think it’s important to recognize, even just in that difference between “twinking” and “twitching,” this poem has gone through many different versions. The fact that we, that you and I are not looking at the same word at the current moment is not an unusual aspect to this poem or to other poetry that she wrote. She was an editor, she revised her poetry frequently, and this poem famously went through _many_ different versions until the latest and final version in 1967 was only the first three lines. Joanne: Okay, so here we have this big rambling poem all about poetry, and as you say, in the decades from when she first published this early in her career to much later, she goes from a couple dozen lines to these three, more epigrammatic lines. And there are a lot of critics who look at those three lines: “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 that there is in / it after all, a place for the genuine.” That’s the poem, right? Okay, what she’s faced with is this big discursive initial iteration of this poem and then over the decades, her decision to compress it like that, it’s not so different from what we saw in an earlier episode of this podcast where Langston Hughes, with the “Johannesburg Mines” poem, he had multiple versions of that, different line breaks, different stanza breaks, etc. Even Marianne Moore’s contemporary, Ezra Pound, when he wrote “In a Station of the Metro,” probably his most famous poem, it was originally like thirty-six lines long. And then overtime, he whittled it down to the title plus two lines, and then _that_ had multiple iterations. So you know, we have this tendency to imagine that print, once something is printed, especially in the 20th and 21st century, that that means it’s _fixed_. It’s polished, it’s done. But with these writers, that is _rarely_ the case. Abram: And one other element that I think we should talk about before we leave this poem behind that makes it sort of new, that is a break with convention, is the way that she brings in prose quotes from other writers into a poetry. So there’s a kind of found element here. So part of this poem--again, you can’t see this if you’re just listening--but she has quotes in here. “Literalists of the imagination” is in quotes and the other thing in quotes here is “business documents school-books.” Well these are from actual writings. The first one, “business documents and school-books” is from Tolstoy. They asked Tolstoy to distinguish between poetry and prose, he said “I can’t. I don’t really know the difference. Poetry is poetry and prose is prose,” he says, “I guess poetry is anything that _isn’t_ business documents and school-books.” Joanne: Ohhhh. Abram: And here in this poem, she is basically saying, “Nope. Even _that_ can count.” At least those are phenomena that we may seek to understand in order to admire, and therefore they’re subjects of poetry as much as anything else. Joanne: That is so, so important. It’s essential for her poem, but I love how the argument that Tolstoy is making becomes a springboard for her to create her poem, so there’s that intertextuality. We’ve talked about this so many times. Abram: Yeah, and “the literalists of the imagination” is a quote from W.B. Yates, the poet who was reflecting on William Blake and he said, he was basically saying that “the problem with Blake was that he was a too real literalist of the imagination.” In other words--as far as I can understand it--that he was making things up too much in his mind and believing in a certain sense too much in the reality of the things that he was imagining, so that he basically couldn’t come back to Earth. [laughing] Joanne: Okay. And _then_ she’s able to take that critique that Yates has of Blake and _then_ suggest “Yes! Create imaginary gardens. Let the mind go wild, but keep a few real toads in there, so that it has that grounding.” That’s so important. Abram: It’s the meeting between the one and the other that makes for poetry. And in certain sense, that’s how that last stanza reads to me. “In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in / defiance of their opinion-- / the raw material of poetry in / all its rawness, and / that which is on the other hand, / genuine, then you are interested in poetry.” The two things there that I understand are “the raw material of poetry” is language in all of its structuring devices, including the imagination and all of it gone wild, and the genuine is the particular, the real, the thing you’re stumbling across. It’s the meeting of those two things that makes poetry. Joanne: Maybe something that we should emphasize here is that there’s a way in which this poem provides a kind of guide for reading Marianne Moore’s work and for understanding what she values and privileges as a poet. Abram: Yes. A wonderful combination of wit and depth. I mean, you can see the twinkle in this poem itself from that first line forward, but then also a sense of seriousness about the endeavor of poetry itself. Joanne: So with all of that twinkling and twitching, uh…[laughs] Abram: [laughing] Joanne: Would you be willing to read this poem again please? Abram: [https://poets.org/poem/poetry] Joanne: Yeah! [laughs] Abram: [laughing] Joanne: I am! I am! I believe you! Abram: [laughing] Absolutely! [outro music starts] Joanne: Ahh, she’s wonderful. Oh, thank you for reading that. For more information about Marianne Moore, please visit our website at poetryforall.fireside.fm. Abram: And please follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Joanne: Thank you for listening. Abram: Thank you. [outro music continues to end]