New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore

If you’ve only read later editions of poetry by Marianne Moore, you might not have read the poems that actually made her famous. We discussed this previously in my review of Observations, but basically, Miss Moore’s original work helped to create a modernist culture in poetry while earning impressive awards – from the National Book Award and Bollinger Prize to a Pulitzer. Giant names in poetry, from Elizabeth Bishop to William Carlos Williams to T.S. Eliot, applauded her work too.

Many (most?) poets would be thrilled to have such literary accolades and appreciation of their work, but apparently Miss Moore was not one of those. She continued to revise and rework her already-published and highly acclaimed poems until some might say she occasionally butchered them!

In hopes of remedying this, English professor and writer Heather Cass White undertook the massive task of trying to find the earliest versions of each poem to show the proper trajectory of Moore's work. Ironically, this collection from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who kindly sent me a copy to review, has been entitled the New Collected Poems since Poems, Selected Poems, Collected Poems, and Complete Poems had already been taken. However, the Introduction points out, “…’selected’ is the only adjective that accurately describes any book of Moore’s work thus far produced, or any that can be produced,” since “Moore’s art has no straight path from beginning to end.”

As Professor White explains, “For Moore, the publication of a poem in a periodical, or the ordering of poems in a book, marked resting-places in her poetry’s development, not its final form.”

Having seen Miss Moore’s flamboyant personality on television, which, for years, personified the general public’s perception of poets, I wonder if her revisions were part of the act – i.e., showmanship born, not of the perfectionism that might make some of us incessantly revise our poems, but of her inclination to dazzle.

As the Introduction reminds us, the clear eye and distinctive voice of Moore’s poetry were “also part of its simultaneous ‘dazzlement,’ the poems’ sometimes overwhelming complexities of statement, form, and metaphor.” i.e., “If clarity allows us to see better, dazzlement, however exciting, may mean we can hardly see at all. It is seldom easy to say what a Moore poem as a whole is about, even when it comes with a seemingly straightforward title. Moore was serious, but also witty, and not above liking to shock her readers.”

Yes. That’s it, exactly.

At the time of Moore's writing, rhymes ending the ragged lines of her poems would have been a novelty as would her use of quotations pulled from obscure literature, magazine ads, and even information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

As we look at “To a Snail,” for example, notice the delayed rhyme (adorn/horn), the use of words with four or more syllables, and the quotes included:

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 acquision of any one thing
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:
in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusions”;
“a knowledge of principles,”
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.

Moore’s Notes 296 . Editor’s Notes 361

To assist us in finding the eclectic sources of the poet’s quotations, this edition presents each poem followed by a page reference to Moore’s Notes and/or the Editor’s Notes at the bottom of the page. So, “To a Snail,” includes a reference to Moore’s note on page 296 and the Editor’s note on 361.

With these aids, we can find the prior publications Editor White has tracked down for us, and, if the poet made a comment about a poem, we can find that too.

For instance, “compression is the first grace of style” in Moore’s poem above is credited as a quote from Democritus, whereas she cites Duns Scotus as the original source for the phrases “method of conclusions” and “knowledge of principles.”

Since the later phrases don’t seem to warrant quotation marks today, it’s hard to know if they were fresh at the time of her writing or whether the poet was just playing with us and the literary scene. Since that scene changes drastically, you can see why a highly innovative poet might think her poems needed to do the same.

Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2017, poet-writer, reviewer

New Collected Poems, hardback



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Multitudinous Heart: Selected Poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade

In his home country of Brazil, Carlos Drummond de Andrade was considered a great poet in his own lifetime (1902-1987) with his poems going beyond borders, thanks first to John Nist then such well-known American poets as Elizabeth Bishop and, later, Mark Strand, who translated his work from Portuguese into English. Now, Richard Zenith has translated poems in a new bilingual edition Multitudinous Heart, published by Farrar Straus Giroux, who kindly sent me a copy to review for which I’m grateful. Without this highly recommended book, I might never have discovered a new-for-me poet whose work I look forward to experiencing and reading again.

Zenith’s Introduction presents a brief biography of this fascinating poet, who, as a child of 10 or so, begged his father for a 24-volume set of Western literature to study, “beginning with Homer, as well as many selections from nineteenth-century British and American authors now more or less forgotten. This hodgepodge of poetry, essays, fiction, and theater became the literary foundation for the little boy,” whose readings as an adult “would continue to be a mixed bag of irreproachable classics and recent literature of uneven quality.”

Reading those words from the Introduction made me wonder if a poet’s academic study of literature today has been impoverished by a lack of poorly written poems and stories! Conversely, a self-taught poet, such as Carlos who initiated his own studies at an early age, might be apt to come up with an eclectic mix of writings, whose inconsistencies could help a poet discern the characteristics of well-written works on one hand and provide a list of “Things Not To Do” on the other.

No doubt Carlos’ background as a lifelong lover of literature and his adult employment as a government bureaucrat helped to shape his view of himself and the world as revealed, for example, in the opening piece entitled “Seven-Sided Poem.”

“When I was born, one of those twisted
angels who live in the shadows said:
‘Carlos, get ready to be a misfit in life!’”

The poem “Elegy 1938” gives us another glimpse of that ongoing push-pull between a literary life and the everydayness of the working world, beginning with “You work without joy for a worn-out world/ whose forms and actions set no example.”

Then midway in the poem, these sad but insightful lines appear:

“You love the night for its power to annihilate
and you know, when you sleep, the problems stop requiring you to die.
But you fatally wake up to the Great Machine existing,
and once more you stand, minuscule, next to inscrutable palms.

“You walk among dead people and with them you talk
about things of the future and matters of the spirit.
Literature has ruined your best hours of love.”

The intrusion of literary arts goes “Hand In Hand” with the resolutions put forth in these lines:

“I won’t be the singer of some woman, some tale.
I won’t evoke the sighs at dusk, the scene outside the window.
I won’t distribute drugs or suicide letters.
I won’t flee to the islands or be carried off by seraphim.
Time is my matter, present time, present people,
the present life.”

That life spent “In Search Of Poetry” finds what works in poems and what does not. For example:

“Don’t write poems about what happened.
Birth and death don’t exist for poetry.”

Also, “In Search Of Poetry”

“Don’t sing about your city, leave it in peace.
Poetry’s song is not the clacking of machines or the secrets of houses.
It’s not music heard in passing, nor the rumble of ocean on streets
near the breaking foam.
Its song is not nature
or humans in society.
Rain and night, fatigue and hope, mean nothing to it.
Poetry (don’t extract poetry from things)
elides subject and object.”

Despite the negatives "In Search Of Poetry," the poem "I'm Making A Song" acknowledges that...

“My life, our lives,
form a single diamond.
I’ve learned new words
and made others more beautiful.”

The title poem “Multitudinous Heart” also reflects the connections poetry brings to us through other people or places, for instance, where

“The sea was beating in my chest, no longer against the wharf.
The street ended, where did the trees go? the city is me
the city is me
I am the city
my love.”

Connecting the self with the city hints at the “Truth” found in the poem by that name:

“The door of truth was open
but would only let in half
a person at a time.

And so it wasn’t possible to have the whole truth,
since the half person who entered
returned with the picture of a half truth.
And the person’s other half
likewise brought back a half picture.
And the two halves didn’t line up.”

We need our full selves and one another to see a whole truth, which, like any subject for poetry, often eludes us. Therefore, “Truth” tells:

“.... And so each person chose
according to his whim, his illusion, his myopia.”

The truth in that statement gives us a subtle truth about poetry in general as we search for ways to encounter new experiences through the written word while connecting our own experiences with ones richly provided in insightful poems such as these.


©2015, Mary Harwell Sayler, writer and reviewer, has 3 books of poems in print: Living in the Nature Poem published by Hiraeth Press and Beach Songs & Wood Chimes (for children) and Outside Eden, published by Kelsay Books.


Multitudinous Heart: Selected Poems, hardcover


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Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan

The strange, evocative poetry of Paul Celan seems impossible to translate from German into English while retaining its unique twists and inventive word-combinations, yet poet-author Pierre Joris did just that! You get a glimpse in the title and will see more in a moment, but first let’s consider some relevant background on Celan.

When I received my review copy of Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan, published by Farrar Straus Giroux, the Introduction reminded me that only Rilke had an impact comparable to Celan’s. Both were major poets of the 20th century, who wrote in German, and both penned poetry that was prolifically reviewed, studied, written about, and annotated, then and now.

Born Paul Antschel in what became the Ukraine, Celan grew up in a Jewish family, speaking German but learning many other languages as well. As a young adult, he worked in forced labor camps until they were closed and he could continue his studies. By then, both of his parents had been killed.

Other hardships and devastations followed, including the death of a child, which created, no doubt, unimaginable influences on the poet and his work. Some deemed the resulting poems as surreal, but Celan saw his poems as rising from the real with clarity as “law.”

Again, in the Introduction, Pierre Joris says, “Radically dispossessed of any other reality, Celan had to set out to create his own language – a language as absolutely exiled as he was himself.” The author goes on to explain that “Celan’s ‘language,’ as I have tried to show, is really a number of dismantled and re-created languages.”

What does any of this have to do with us now – as poets or as poetry readers? A lot! Not only was Celan ahead of times in compressing and reducing the elements of a poem as poets often do today, his work presents the essence, the essentials, the core of life, the crux of being stripped of superfluities and the superficial.

That was a mouthful! But Celan’s poems, amazingly rendered by Joris, give us beauty and a breathturn into brevity. For example:

YOU MAY confidently
serve me snow:
as often as shoulder to shoulder
with the mulberry tree I strode through summer,
its youngest leaf
shrieked.

I have no idea what that means! Nevertheless, impressions and images arise, recreating a mood and interesting experience.

For another example of this and of the composite words I mentioned earlier:

THREADSUNS
above the grayblack wastes.
A tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.

Incidentally, both of those examples present the complete poems, which consistently remain sans title. Interesting, too, both of the poems begin or end with levity, belying the “shriek” and “grayblack wastes.” So, even if we’re pretty sure what’s going on here, we’re never really sure of either the mood or the experience.

The same can be said for poems offering a visual encounter:

EVENING, in
Hamburg, an
endless shoelace – at
which
the ghosts gnaw –
binds two bloody toes together
for the road’s oath.

The city can be seen. The shoelace can be pictured. The ghosts can jump to life as they gnaw, but are they gnawing the toes bloody or were they already oozing when the shoelace bound them together? And how does this influence a road to make an oath?

Again, I have no earthly or ghostly idea what this means, but I have impressions of how ongoing hardships – bloodying hardships – can bind together people who normally might not be going in the same direction, but now have a similar goal or purpose they vow to accomplish before the road ends.

We'd better hurry, though, as it’s already evening, and the dark will soon be upon us. We might need a flashlight, but I hope you'll read these poems until the darkness lightens and impressions arise to appreciate, ponder, and recall.


© 2015, Mary Harwell Sayler has authored many traditionally published books in all genres, including poetry


Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan, hardback



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