Comparing Poets

MARIANNE MOORE

1887–1972

Marianne Moore was a radically inventive modernist, greatly admired by other poets of her generation, and a powerful influence on such later writers as Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Richard Wilbur. Like her forerunner Emily Dickinson, she made of the traditional and constraining “woman’s place” a protected space to do her own work, but unlike Emily Dickinson, she was a deliberate professional, publishing her poems regularly, in touch with the movements and artists of her time. She was famous for the statement that poetry, though departing from the real world, re-created that world within its forms: poems were “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Her earlier work is distinguished by great precision of observation and language, ornate diction, and complex stanza and prosodic patterns. Her later work is much less ornate; and in revising her poetry, she tended to simplify and shorten.

She was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. In her childhood, the family was abandoned by her father; they moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where—in a pattern common among both men and women writers of this period—her mother supported them by teaching school. She went to Bryn Mawr College, graduating in 1909; traveled with her mother in England and France in 1911; and returned to Carlisle to teach at the U.S. Indian School between 1911 and 1915. Having begun to write poetry in college, she was first published in 1915 and 1916 in such little magazines as the Egoist (an English magazine with which Ezra Pound was associated), Poetry, and Others (a journal for experimental writing with which William Carlos Williams was associated, founded by Alfred Kreymbourg, a New York poet and playwright). Through these magazines she entered the avant-garde and modernist world. She never married; in 1916 she and her mother merged their household with that of Moore’s brother, a Presbyterian minister, and they moved with him to a parish in Brooklyn, New York. There Moore was close to literary circles and Ebbets Field, where the Dodgers, then a Brooklyn baseball team, had their home stadium. Moore was a lifelong fan.

While holding jobs in schools and libraries, Moore worked at her poetry. A volume called simply Poems was brought out in London in 1921 without her knowledge through the efforts of two women friends who were writers, H.D. (whom she had met at Bryn Mawr) and Bryher. Another book, Observations, appeared in 1924 and won the Dial Award. In 1925 she began to work as editor of the Dial, continuing in this influential position until the magazine was disbanded in 1929. Her reviews and editorial judgments were greatly respected, although her preference for elegance and decorum over sexual frankness was not shared by some of the writers—Hart Crane and James Joyce among them—whose work she rejected or published only after they revised it.

As a critic of poetry Moore wrote numerous essays—her collected prose makes a larger book than her collected poetry. She believed that poets usually undervalued prose; “precision, economy of statement, logic” were features of good prose that could “liberate” the imagination, she wrote. In writing about animals she was able to take advantage of two different prose modes that attracted her—scientific and historical description. Her poems were an amalgam of her own observation and her readings, which she acknowledged by quotation marks and often by footnotes as well. In Moore’s writings, the reader almost never finds the conventional poetic allusions that invoke a great tradition and assert the present poet’s place in it. Moore’s poems typically juxtapose disparate areas of human knowledge and combine the elevated with the ordinary. Her notebooks suggest, for example, that the image of the kiwi bird in “The Mind is an Enchanting Thing” emerged from a sketch Moore made of a shoe-polish tin; she praises the human mind both for its capacity to be mesmerized by the small facets of its ordinary environment and for its changeful, self-undoing freedom.

Against the exactitude and “unbearable accuracy” (as she put it) of her language, Moore counterpointed a complex texture of stanza form and versification. Pound worked with the clause, Williams with the line, H.D. with the image, Stevens and Stein with the word; Moore, unlike these modernist contemporaries, used the entire stanza as the unit of her poetry. Her stanza is composed of regular lines counted by syllables, instead of by stress, which are connected in an elaborate verse pattern, and in which rhymes often occur at unaccented syllables and even in the middle of a word. The effects she achieves are complex and subtle; she was often called the “poet’s poet” of her day because the reader needed expert technical understanding to recognize what she was doing.

Nevertheless, her poetry also had a thematic, declarative edge which the outbreak of World War II led her to expand. In “The Paper Nautilus,” she drew on her characteristic vein of natural observation in order to will that a threatened civilization be protected by love. At the same time, Moore was keenly aware of her distance, as a civilian and a woman, from direct experience of combat; “In Distrust of Merits,” her most famous poem of the war, reflects Moore’s struggle (like Emily Dickinson’s during the Civil War) to adopt an ethically responsible relationship toward the fighting she could know only through newsreels and photographs.

Moore received the Bollingen, National Book, and Pulitzer awards for Collected Poems in 1951. Throughout her lifetime she continued to revise, expand, cut, and select, so that from volume to volume a poem with the same name may be a very different work. Her Complete Poems of 1967 represented her poetry as she wanted it remembered, but a full understanding of Moore calls for reading all of the versions of her changing work.

Marianne Moore and 3 Poems

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

5. 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

10. 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-

15. 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,

20. 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

25. 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, then you are interested in poetry.

To a Snail

If “compression is the first grace of style,”

you have it. Contractility is a virtue

as modesty is a virtue.

It is not the acquisition of any one thing

5. that is able to adorn,

or the incidental quality that occurs

as a concomitant of something well said,

that we value in style,

but the principle that is hid:

10. in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusions”;

“a knowledge of principles,”

in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.

What Are Years?

What is our innocence,

what is our guilt? All are

naked, none is safe. And whence

is courage: the unanswered question,

5. the resolute doubt,—

dumbly calling, deafly listening—that

in misfortune, even death,

encourages others

and in its defeat, stirs

10. the soul to be strong? He

sees deep and is glad, who

accedes to mortality

and in his imprisonment rises

upon himself as

15. the sea in a chasm, struggling to be

free and unable to be,

in its surrendering

finds its continuing.

So he who strongly feels,

20. 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

25. thing, how pure a thing is joy.

This is mortality,

this is eternity.

CATHY SONG

b. 1955

In many of Cathy Song’s poems a particular moment or event becomes a window through which we enter a field of vision. “What frames the view,” she has written, “is the mind in the diamond pinpoint light of concentration tunneling into memory, released by the imagination.” As the title of her second book, Frameless Windows, Squares of Light, suggests, Song’s poems capture the way a warm afternoon, a childhood Easter, a picnic in the park is an opening for memory and reflection. The visual quality of her poems can suggest a photograph or painting, and Song feels a connection between her work and those of the Japanese printmaker Kitagawa Utamaro and the American painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Song’s first book, Picture Bride (1983), contains a number of poems inspired by the work of these artists. Writing, in “Beauty and Sadness,” of the way Utamaro’s prints rendered “Teahouse waitresses, actresses, / geishas, courtesans and maids” in “their fleeting loveliness,” Song suggests that the artist and poet capture the moment, knowing that it is always dissolving.

Picture Bride was chosen by the poet Richard Hugo for the Yale Younger Poets series. In the title poem Song comes as close as imagination allows to the experience of her grandmother, who, the poem implies, was chosen as a bride from a photograph and summoned from Korea to Hawaii. But Song is also aware of the limits of imaginative identification and the difficulty of knowing the full truth of the past. She respects the mystery of another’s identity. The grandmother in “Picture Bride,” the woman in “Lost Sister,” the mother in “Humble Jar,” and the geishas painted by Utamaro possess a privacy that the poet discloses but cannot fully enter. Song’s tactful sense of both the power and the limits of imagination is one of her distinctive marks as a poet.

She was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and grew up in Wahiawa, a small town on the island of Oahu. The setting of sugar-cane fields, of island life where “the sound of the ocean / could be heard through the ironwoods” (“Waialaua”), and of the rain that comes “even when the sun was shining” (“A Pale Arrangement of Hands”) is central to her work. That landscape belongs to her present but also evokes her childhood and the memory of another, more distant landscape—the Asia of her ancestors. Many of Song’s poems render the mysteries of what she has called “familial and personal ties; lives overlapping,” and her sense of these ties extends backward to her Chinese and Korean ancestors as well as forward to her children. She began her college education at the University of Hawaii and then attended Wellesley College. After her graduation from Wellesley, she received an M.A. in creative writing from

Boston University and has since taught creative writing at a number of colleges and universities. Her third collection of poems, School Figures, appeared in 1994, followed by The Land of Bliss (2001) and Cloud Moving Hands (2007).

Song’s ability to write about her own or another’s experience as an acute observer may have to do with her multicultural background, which often places her on the boundary of what she sees. Her capacity to let the power of observation give rise to feeling recalls at times the work of Elizabeth Bishop and also suggests Song’s resemblance to the Utamaro of her poem “Beauty and Sadness,” whose “invisible presence / one feels in these prints.” At other times Song writes about herself more directly. She has, for example, deftly rendered the erotic nature of her own experience: “

Cathy Song and 3 Poems

The White Porch

I wrap the blue towel

after washing,

around the damp

weight of hair, bulky

5as a sleeping cat,

and sit out on the porch.

Still dripping water,

it’ll be dry by supper,

by the time the dust

10settles off your shoes,

though it’s only five

past noon. Think

of the luxury: how to use

the afternoon like the stretch

15of lawn spread before me.

There’s the laundry,

sun-warm clothes at twilight,

and the mountain of beans

in my lap. Each one,

20I’ll break and snap

thoughtfully in half.

But there is this slow arousal.

The small buttons

of my cotton blouse

25are pulling away from my body.

I feel the strain of threads,

the swollen magnolias

heavy as a flock of birds

in the tree. Already,

30the orange sponge cake

is rising in the oven.

I know you’ll say it makes

your mouth dry

and I’ll watch you

35drench your slice of it

in canned peaches

and lick the plate clean.

So much hair, my mother

used to say, grabbing

40the thick braided rope

in her hands while we washed

the breakfast dishes, discussing

dresses and pastries.

My mind often elsewhere

45as we did the morning chores together.

Sometimes, a few strands

would catch in her gold ring.

I worked hard then,

anticipating the hour

50when I would let the rope down

at night, strips of sheets,

knotted and tied,

while she slept in tight blankets.

My hair, freshly washed

55like a measure of wealth,

like a bridal veil.

Crouching in the grass,

you would wait for the signal,

for the movement of curtains

60before releasing yourself

from the shadow of moths.

Cloth, hair and hands,

smuggling you in.

Beauty and Sadness

for Kitagawa Utamaro

He drew hundreds of women

in studies unfolding

like flowers from a fan.

Teahouse waitresses, actresses,

5geishas, courtesans and maids.

They arranged themselves

before this quick, nimble man

whose invisible presence

one feels in these prints

10is as delicate

as the skinlike paper

he used to transfer

and retain their fleeting loveliness.

Crouching like cats,

15they purred amid the layers of kimono

swirling around them

as though they were bathing

in a mountain pool with irises

growing in the silken sunlit water.

20Or poised like porcelain vases,

slender, erect and tall; their heavy

brocaded hair was piled high

with sandalwood combs and blossom sprigs

poking out like antennae.

25They resembled beautiful iridescent insects,

creatures from a floating world.

Utamaro absorbed these women of Edo

in their moments of melancholy

as well as of beauty.

30He captured the wisp of shadows,

the half-draped body

emerging from a bath; whatever

skin was exposed

was powdered white as snow.

35A private space disclosed.

Portraying another girl

catching a glimpse of her own vulnerable

face in the mirror, he transposed

the trembling plum lips

40like a drop of blood

soaking up the white expanse of paper.

At times, indifferent to his inconsolable

eye, the women drifted

through the soft gray feathered light,

45maintaining stillness, the moments in between.

Like the dusty ash-winged moths

that cling to the screens in summer

and that the Japanese venerate

as ancestors reincarnated;

50Utamaro graced these women with immortality

in the thousand sheaves of prints

fluttering into the reverent hands of keepers:

the dwarfed and bespectacled painter

holding up to a square of sunlight

55what he had carried home beneath his coat

one afternoon in winter.

Lost Sister

In China,

even the peasants

named their first daughters

Jade—

5the stone that in the far fields

could moisten the dry season,

could make men move mountains

for the healing green of the inner hills

glistening like slices of winter melon.

10And the daughters were grateful:

they never left home.

To move freely was a luxury

stolen from them at birth.

Instead, they gathered patience,

15learning to walk in shoes

the size of teacups,

without breaking—

the arc of their movements

as dormant as the rooted willow,

20as redundant as the farmyard hens.

But they traveled far

in surviving,

learning to stretch the family rice,

to quiet the demons,

25the noisy stomachs.

2

There is a sister

across the ocean,

who relinquished her name,

diluting jade green

30with the blue of the Pacific.

Rising with a tide of locusts,

she swarmed with others

to inundate another shore.

In America,

35there are many roads

and women can stride along with men.

But in another wilderness,

the possibilities,

the loneliness,

40can strangulate like jungle vines.

The meager provisions and sentiments

of once belonging—

fermented roots, Mah-Jongg tiles and firecrackers—

set but a flimsy household

45in a forest of nightless cities.

A giant snake rattles above,

spewing black clouds into your kitchen.

Dough-faced landlords

slip in and out of your keyholes,

50making claims you don’t understand,

tapping into your communication systems

of laundry lines and restaurant chains.

You find you need China:

your one fragile identification,

55a jade link

handcuffed to your wrist.

You remember your mother

who walked for centuries,

footless—

60and like her,

you have left no footprints,

but only because

there is an ocean in between,

the unremitting space of your rebellion.