Of all the many entertaining characters I encountered in reading Rachel Cohen’s brilliant set of interlinked mini-biographies of American artists, “A Chance Meeting???, the one I would most like to meet, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, would be the poet Marianne Moore. I think what impressed me most about her was the sheer style of her eccentricity. She wore a black cape and Tricorne hat when out in public. Fastidiously punctual, she also sported two watches. Trips in public included visits to the fights, which she adored. She particularly liked Muhammad Ali, and wrote the sleeve notes for his album, I Am The Greatest. Baseball was another passion, such that (and I think this is my favourite detail) she threw in the opening ball of the Yankees 1968 season. She had a bit of a thing about elephants, and never missed the circus when it was in town. If no circus was available, there was always the zoo. A bit of a prude and a devoted Republican (perhaps for their elephant connection?), she nonetheless got on like a house on fire with a Norman Mailer at the height of his fame and boorishness. What’s not to like? Even before I’d read a word of her work, I was a fan. This is her most famous poem, entitled “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.
The opening line, “I too dislike it??? is of course a bluff, less bold than it first appears to be. It is used as a means of shunning the high-falutin’ and emphasising kinship with the ordinary and the genuine, rather than being a genuine renunciation of her own craft. Almost as soon as she makes her opening statement, she begins taking it back. One discovers in poetry “a place for the genuine???. Poetry, when it has the savour of reality, is, she says with considerable understatement, “useful???. It becomes clear to the reader that she comes not to bury poetry but to praise it. Or rather, to praise true poetry and to bury the dross perpetrated in its name (“when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry???). Giving school books, baseball statistics and business documents their due, Moore is celebrating the details of the everyday, those that the pretentious “half poets??? might dismiss as mundane. Her stance then is an adroit one; setting “Poetry??? up in opposition to “Life???, she practices the latter by privileging the former. Her final verse contains her charming, surrealist demand of true poets, that they “present for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’???. It goes on to demand from poetry honesty and fidelity to reality, qualities Moore has given in abundance in this odd, remarkable poem.