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Marianne Moore…Ballads and Baseball

But love of baseball is not the reason this column celebrates Marianne Moore. She was a Big Leaguer of modernist poetry.
Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

In my salad days, as they say, a favorite poet of mine was Marianne Moore, though I admit it was partly because she was a huge baseball fan. I suspected that she prized her Mickey Mantle autograph as much as her Nobel Prize nomination.

I remember enjoying her poem about “baseball and writing.”

Fanaticism?  No.  Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
You can never tell with either
how it will go
or what you will do;
generating excitement—
a fever in the victim—
pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.
Victim in what category?
Owlman watching from the press box?
To whom does it apply?
Who is excited?  Might it be I?

It’s a pitcher’s battle all the way—a duel—
a catcher’s, as, with cruel
puma paw, Elston Howard lumbers lightly
back to plate.  (His spring
de-winged a bat swing.)
They have that killer instinct;
yet Elston—whose catching
arm has hurt them all with the bat—
when questioned, says, unenviously,
“I’m very satisfied.  We won.”
Shorn of the batting crown, says, “We”;
robbed by a technicality.

When three players on a side play three positions
and modify conditions,
the massive run need not be everything.
“Going, going . . . ”  Is
it?  Roger Maris
has it, running fast.  You will
never see a finer catch.  Well . . .
“Mickey, leaping like the devil”—why
gild it, although deer sounds better—
snares what was speeding towards its treetop nest,
one-handing the souvenir-to-be
meant to be caught by you or me.

* * *

Marianne Moore throws out the first pitch of the 1968 season at Yankee Stadium.

* * *

Moore lived in Brooklyn and was a devout Dodgers fan. That is until they moved to Los Angeles in 1958.  She then switched her allegiance to the Yankees.

* * *
But love of baseball is not the reason this column celebrates Marianne Moore. She was a Big Leaguer of modernist poetry. T.S. Eliot said that her “original sensibility and an alert intelligence and deep feeling have been engaged in maintaining the life of the English language.” And unlike Eliot and Ezra Pound who moved to England, Moore and other modernists William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens stayed in the States and forged remarkable careers here.

And she was proud of her American locus as she points out with some amusement in these lines from a poem called “England.”

ENGLAND

with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral,
with voices—one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept—
the criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy
with its equal shores—contriving an epicureanism
from which the grossness has been extracted:

and Greece with its goats and its gourds,
the nest of modified illusions: and France,
the “chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly,”
in whose products mystery of construction
diverts one from what was originally one’s object—
substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its emotional
shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its
imperturbability,
all of museum quality: and America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south,
where cigars are smoked on the street in the north;
where there are no proof readers, no silkworms, no digressions;

the wild man’s land; grass-less, links-less, language-less country—in
which letters are  written
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!

* * *

There are several characteristics that are typical of a Marianne Moore poem. Firstly, sometimes the title of the poem is also the opening line as in “England” above and

AN OCTOPUS

of ice. Deceptively reserved and flat.
it lies “in grandeur and in mass”
beneath a sea of shifting snow-dunes;

or

SPENSER’S IRELAND

has not altered;
a place as kind as it is green,
the greenest place I’ve never seen.

Her poems are typically unrhymed, that is until the last two lines which may be rhymed.

She is not afraid to present an unusual title As an example may I offer:
“Nothing Will Cure the Sick Lion But to Eat an Ape.”

* * *
Moore wrote often about living creatures and the integration of nature and art. She published an early piece called “A Jelly-Fish” in her Bryn Mawr College magazine.

Visible, invisible,
a fluctuating charm,
an amber-colored amethyst
inhabits it; your arm
approaches, and
it opens and
it closes;
you have meant
to catch it,
and it shrivels;
you abandon
your intent—

it opens, and it
closes and you
reach for it—
the blue
surrounding it
grows cloudy, and
it floats away
from you.

Later she wrote about a broad range of animals, some quite exotic but accurate in their scientific settings. Here, in part, is her commentary on reindeer.

“We saw reindeer
browsing,” a friend who’d been in Lapland, said:
“finding their own food; they are adapted

to scant reino
or pasture, yet they can run eleven
miles in fifty minutes; the feet spread when
the snow is soft,
and act as snow-shoes. They are rigorists,
however handsomely cutwork artists

of Lapland and
Siberia elaborate the trace
or saddle-girth with saw-tooth leather lace.

One looked at us
with its firm face part brown, part white,—a queen
of alpine flowers. Santa Claus’ reindeer, seen at last

* * *

Moore in her favorite attire: a black cape and a tricorn hat.

* * *

A poem called “An Octopus” is one of Marianne Moore’s most-famous pieces, but it has nothing to do with a sea-dwelling creature. It is her ecopoetic description of the glacial fingers that descend from the peak of Mt. Rainier in Washington State. Here is how it ends.

Neatness of finish! Neatness of finish!
Relentless accuracy is the nature of this octopus
with its capacity for fact.
“Creeping slowly as with meditated stealth,
its arms seeming to approach from all directions,”
it receives one under winds that “tear the snow to bits
and hurl it like a sandblast
shearing off twigs and loose bark from the trees.”
Is “tree” the word for these things
“flat on the ground like vines”?
some “bent in a half circle with branches on one side
suggesting dust-brushes, not trees;
some finding strength in union, forming little stunted grooves
their flattened mats of branches shrunk in trying to escape”
from the hard mountain “planned by ice and polished by the wind”–
the white volcano with no weather side;
the lightning flashing at its base,
rain falling in the valleys, and snow falling on the peak–
the glassy octopus symmetrically pointed,
its claw cut by the avalanche
“with a sound like the crack of a rifle,
in a curtain of powdered snow launched like a waterfall.”

* * *

Moore never married, but she wrote one of her longest and most ambitious poetic essays on the subject. Called simply “Marriage,” it is a collage of quotes and references, declarations and speculations beginning:

This institution,
perhaps one should say enterprise
out of respect for which
one says one need not change one’s mind
about a thing one has believed in,
requiring public promises
of one’s intention
to fulfill a private obligation:
I wonder what Adam and Eve
think of it by this time,
this firegilt steel
alive with goldenness;
how bright it shows —
“of circular traditions and impostures,
committing many spoils,”
requiring all one’s criminal ingenuity
to avoid!
Psychology which explains everything
explains nothing
and we are still in doubt.

Unhelpful Hymen!
a kind of overgrown cupid
reduced to insignificance
by the mechanical advertising
parading as involuntary comment,
by that experiment of Adam’s.

But amidst this passage, a quiet quatrain:

“I should like to be alone”
to which the visitor replies,
“I should like to be alone;
why not be alone together?”

Why not, indeed. And Marianne Moore is perfect company.

VIDEO.  Our Video includes two brief interviews with the lady herself and further excerpts from “An Octopus” and another of her finest poems, “The Steeple-Jack.”

CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO:    MARIANNE MOORE

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