What Marianne Moore Can Teach Today’s Poets
Marianne Moore. Sculpture by Gaston Lachaise, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bronze 1924, cast 1946.
Having just returned from last week’s exhilarating Poetry by the Sea Conference, I’m experiencing the sensation that a large, deep swath of new territory has been ploughed into my brain. A major symptom of that experience is the reverberation stemming from a critical seminar I led on the poetry of Marianne Moore there.
Following a six-months’ submersion in Moore’s work and life that culminated in the seminar, I feel confirmed in my long-held belief that she’s one of the great geniuses of the American language and an artist of the highest order. Far beyond my own solitary study and the verse I’ve written under Moore’s spell, my mind has been expanded considerably by the richly varied critical work of the seminar participants.
I’ve long been an advocate and practitioner of New Criticism, the notion that the best way to experience a poem is to fully embrace the text on the page without the intrusion of insights based on the author’s life, her psychology, her politics, or the history of the times in which she lived. The seminar participants’ approaches to Moore have gone a long way toward broadening my view of how to read a poem—especially a poem with as vast a frame of reference as one of Moore’s is likely to have.
What a wonderful team effort the seminar was! Together we excavated Moore’s art from many angles: biographical, ecological, biological, ekphrastic, philosophical, geographical, musical, metrical, and, finally, emotional and spiritual, simply sighing together while we read "The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing" and "A Graveyard." Yes, the primary focus of the study of a poem should be the poem itself, but applying a broad array of lenses to a poem can only magnify our appreciation of it.
As for me, I feel that submerging ourselves in the poetry of Marianne Moore for a sustained period of time can only expand our vision of what a poem can be. An edited version of my introduction to the seminar appears below.
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Following the lead of the career of a Marianne Moore can stimulate our thinking about how our own poems and lives as poets may be developing. To echo Emerson, a seminar like this can help us hitch our wagons to a star.
To mingle that echo with one of a line of Frost’s, one could do worse than to hitch our wagons to a star like Marianne Moore.
Such a star may be an errant one, but it can guide us to experience previously undiscovered places–fully envisioned, meticulously detailed places rendered with breathtaking precision.
When I began to think about the choice of what poet to cover in this seminar, Moore came immediately to mind—both because she is a poet I have adored for more than a half century and because her work can and should serve as an inexhaustible fount of knowledge and inspiration for poets.
For the poets in the Poetry by the Sea community, most of whom gravitate toward traditional forms and meters, she can be mind-expanding. Here, after all, is a genius of form rather than a formalist, a poet of unsurpassed rigor and musicality who has created a versification system of her own rather than one imported from the past.
Yet paradoxically, while her compositional techniques can seem sui generis and utterly unique to her, they are nevertheless completely transparent— observable on the page, syllabically countable, often regularly rhymed.
That transparency makes her techniques available to us as poets to put to our own individual uses. Poems are, as she writes in the earliest version of her most famous poem, “Poetry,” “important not because a//high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because/they are/useful[.]”
Indeed, Moore's poems have a great deal to teach us about our craft. They open our ears to the nuances of light rhyme, off-rhyme, and buried rhyme, of delicate assonance and firm alliteration; they reveal how the use of an extended prose sentence can yield exquisite music; and they show how the visual placement of words and lines and stanzas on a page can contribute to the overall effect of a poem.
Besides such formal lessons, Moore’s work can help us expand our sense of the vocabulary available to us as poets, perhaps enabling us to pluck words from such unlikely worlds as industry, fashion, business, biology, and baseball, as she has done.
Moore’s vast poetic word-hoard no doubt stems in large part from the unrivaled range of the texts she felt free to draw on. Concerning her widespread sources of quotations, it's fair to say that no poet has used the daily newspaper, as well as trade magazines, scientific journals, art catalogs, and all manner of printed matter, to greater effect. In a 1960 Paris Review interview, Donald Hall asked Moore about her "extensive use of quotations."
With characteristic modesty, she replied, “I was just trying to be honorable and not to steal things. I’ve always felt that if a thing had been said in the best way, how can you say it better?"
As she selectively surveyed the papers about a panoply of events–rather than, say, a single breaking-news story—Moore was always searching for the best way to say what her poem needed to say at any given point.
So much to discuss and so little time! For my purposes here, therefore, I want to focus on just one aspect of Moore’s artistry, maybe the first one that poets tend to notice: her utterly original use of syllabics.
The typical approach to the use of syllable-counting in composing English verse is for the poet to choose a simple, predetermined per-line syllabic form. Undetectable to the ear, forms such as 5-7-5-line haikus (the most widely familiar example) or poems of 5-syllable or 7-syllable lines have the virtue of providing poets with a given internal structure with which they can easily navigate their way through the composition of their poems.
In stark contrast to that turnkey approach are the methods invented by Marianne Moore. Rather than selecting commonly and/or traditionally used syllable counts, she lets the language of her original inspiration determine the form, which she then pursues rigorously. “I never ‘plan’ a stanza,” she says in The Paris Review interview. She then characteristically chooses a biological simile to explain how her stanzas come into being: “Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.”
At first glance, the syllable counts of the lines within her stanzas can seem wildly erratic. To cite “Poetry” again, the first line of each stanza spans 17 syllables, but then the poem snaps back to lines of just two syllables: “I too dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this/fiddle[.]”
How personally expressive, how evocative of common speech that “fiddle” is! Allowing her stanzas to assume unique shapes, Moore visually as well as aurally asserts a radical individuality—what the critic Bonnie Costello calls Moore’s “gusto.”
But combined with Moore’s joie de vivre is extraordinary formal precision. Speaking of how she creates her stanza forms, she says, “I may influence an arrangement or thin it, then try to have successive stanzas identical with the first.” Paying obvious attention to the visual, she shows how syllabics can foreground the visible shape of a stanza. In a nice phrase, Allen Ginsberg noted her “butterfly-wing-like patterns of syllables, stanza to stanza.”
Yet although Moore drapes many of her poems on visible stanzaic grids, by her own account she composed her lines largely by ear. Further, she expressed a taste for “light rhymes, inconspicuous rhymes and unpompous conspicuous rhymes.” To remind herself of the rhymes she wished to make conspicuous, she underlined them with red, blue, and other colored pencils—"as many colors as I have rhymes to differentiate,” she explained.
Besides rhyme, Moore’s syllabics aggregate assonance and alliteration to dazzling musical effect. Let’s take close look at the opening of “The Buffalo,” first published in 1934:
Black in blazonry means
prudence; and niger, unpropitious. Might
hematite-
black incurved compact horns on a bison
have significance? The
soot-brown tail-tuft on
A kind of lion-
tail
Appropriately—in a poem about buffalos—Moore begins with a battery of alliterating b’s and maintains it through the stanza: “Black”; “blazonry”; “black” repeated; “bison”; “soot-brown.” There are strong alliterating p’s within a line— “prudence” and “unpropitious”—and the alliteration of t-sounds within a phrase: “tail-tuft.”
While this pattern of hard consonantal sounds has been developing, an abundance of assonanced i-sounds, including some prominent rhymes, proliferates: “Might”; “hematite”; “bison’”; “kind”; and “lion.”
This densely textured weave of sounds is compressed and intensified in a single virtuoso line (line 4) beginning with a staccato concatenation of hard c’s— “black incurved compact”—that softens with a plethora of “o” sounds: “compact horns on a bison.” With microscopic precision, Moore makes the word “compact” a linchpin containing both assonance and alliteration. Thus:
black incurved compact horns on a bison
If that line were read to a jazz accompaniment, it could very well be punctuated by a rim shot on the drums. In his poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” Wallace Stevens, a great admirer of Moore’s poetry, suggests that one of the most basic requirements of art is that “It Must Give Pleasure.”
There are many other things we can learn from the poetry of Moore about how to please ourselves and, by extension, our readers: how to move fluidly among incongruous ideas, how to use aphorisms to significant effect, and how to end a poem with a bang, for instance.
What I have mainly tried to convey here, however, is that, in magnifying the possibilities of the poetic line and stanza, Moore’s work has much to teach formal and free verse poets alike about how to unearth previously unseen sources of music in our language.