Alice Quinn on Marianne Moore, “the stealth weapon of American poetry”

Alice Quinn pays tribute to Marianne Moore
at the New York Writers Hall of Fame gala
Ryan Brenizer Photography

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Alice Quinn’s tribute to the poet Marianne Moore. Poetry editor of The New Yorker from 1987 to 2007, Quinn is Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America and an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s graduate School of the Arts. She is the editor of Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop.

It is an almost fantastic honor to be offering a few remarks upon the induction of Marianne Moore into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, especially in the presence of so many contemporary writers whose work I love who are present tonight to be inducted, too.

I can close my eyes and see Marianne Moore’s picture in nooks and crannies and on the walls of the Gotham Book Mart, where I felt inducted into the literary life of the city in the early 1970s, guided by the writers who frequented that place and whose books the founder, Frances Steloff, would keep in stock at any cost.

In a new, wonderful book of essays entitled My Poets about her relationships to the poets she loves best, the young poet and critic Maureen McLane calls Marianne Moore “the stealth weapon of American poetry, with a ferocity and a lacerating intelligence few poets have matched.” And further on, “Her pointed social satires remind one of Jane Austen, her baroque syntactical devastations reminiscent of Henry James.”

All of her great contemporaries admired her—W. H. Auden and William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and I am certain Gwendolyn Brooks.

Moore, the great Modernist poet—who gave so much of herself from age 30–34, from 1925–29, as an editor of the manifestly supreme literary journal, The Dial, bringing along such writers as Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce—was a poet of such originality that her peers were always striving to characterize her achievements in the highest terms. Randall Jarrell noted, “She is, sometimes, as tersely conclusive as Grimm” . . . “Or as wise as Goethe” . . . “Or as beguiling, as full of propriety, as Beatrix Potter” . . . “Or as elevated as the Old Testament” . . . “Or as morally and rhetorically magnificent as St. Paul” . . . .

When Elizabeth Bishop first met her, in the spring of 1934, the year she graduated from Vassar, she wrote to a friend,

“A couple of weeks ago I met Marianne Moore . . . Frani, she is simply amazing. She is poor, sick, and her work is practically unread, I guess, but she seems completely undisturbed by it and goes right on producing perhaps one poem a year and a couple of reviews that are perfect in their way. I have never seen anyone who takes such ‘pains.’ . . . She is really worth a great deal of study.”

And in this way Moore definitely became a model to Bishop, who fourteen years later wrote of this poet she appreciated from such an early age,

“The precocious child is often embarrassed by his own understanding and is capable of going to great lengths to act his part as a child properly; one feels that Miss Moore sometimes has to make things difficult for herself as a sort of noblesse oblige, or self-imposed taxation to keep everything ‘fair’ in the world of poetry.”

Moore—a resident for many years of Brooklyn, which she described as “this city of freckled / integrity” and a passionate Dodgers fan and co-author with (then) Cassius Clay of some pretty charming verse, would have been delighted with this honor. In her poem, “New York,” she identifies what it is she feels is best about the place,

it is not the dime-novel exterior,
Niagara Falls, the calico horses and the war-canoe;
it is not that ‘if the fur is not finer than such as one sees others wear,
one would rather be without it’—
that estimated in raw meat and berries, we could feed the universe;
it is not the atmosphere of ingenuity,
the otter, the beaver, the puma skins
without shooting-irons or dogs;
it is not the plunder,
but ‘accessibility to experience.’

I think we New Yorkers would all agree lo these many years later that this is so. Randall Jarrell, in summing up his appreciation for her beautiful poem, “Armour’s Undermining Modesty,” expressed what I feel about so many of the poems I love most:

“I don’t entirely understand it, but what I understand I love, and what I don’t understand I love better.”

Thank you for the opportunity to praise this unique and absolutely admirable American poet.

A generous selection of Marianne Moore’s poetry can be found in volume #115 of the Library of America series, American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume One.

At its June 5 ceremony in midtown Manhattan, The Empire State Center for the Book formally inducted 14 writers into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, which it established in 2010 to recognize New York-based poets, novelists, journalists, and historians who have made an indelible mark on our culture. The class of 2012 included E. L. Doctorow, Pete Hamill, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates, all of whom attended. Also honored were John Cheever, Hart Crane, Edna Ferber, Washington Irving, Henry James, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, Barbara W. Tuchman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Wright.

Previous posts from the Hall of Fame ceremony:
Jessica Tuchman Mathews on Barbara W. Tuchman
Langdon Hammer on Hart Crane

Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop go to the circus

On Anecdotal Evidence Patrick Kurp recently discovered some helpful advice on how to deal with out-of-control students in an article Marianne Moore wrote for Seventeen Magazine in 1963:

Example is needed, not counsel: but let me submit here these four precepts:

Feed imagination food that invigorates.

Whatever it is, do it with all your might.

Never do to another what you would not wish done to yourself.

Say to yourself, “I will be responsible.”

Put these principles to the test, and you will be inconvenienced by being overtrusted, overbefriended, overconsulted, half adopted, and have no leisure. Face that when you come to it.

The article features Moore’s typically eclectic menagerie of references: quotations from Confucius, filmmaker Jean Renoir, and Robert Frost, as well as “Mr. William Longendecker, an amateur of rhinoceros language,” and boxer Floyd Patterson, whose just published memoir Moore found “explicit, vivid, modest.”

Commenting on Kurp’s post, a reader wrote “I love The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore [which includes the Seventeen article]. I read it as one might read Scripture for several years in the early '90s. It is just that good.” Moore, whose birthday is today, has that effect on readers, whether they encounter her prose, her letters, or what Frank Kermode has called her highly praised “strange poetry.”

Above all there are the poems, so accurately written, and with such disciplined pleasure, yet so inexplicably and repeatedly revised. Anything could get into them, including all the chosen pleasures of her life, the ballgames and prize fights, the paintings and the exotic animals. To an extraordinary degree she did, though with great labour, exactly as she liked.

Her long life and her regimen of daily letter writing—she could write up to fifty letters a day—has made her correspondence, in editor Bonnie Costello’s words, “the largest and most broadly significant collection of any modern poet.” More than two hundred of those letters were sent to Elizabeth Bishop. When they first met, in 1934, Bishop was a twenty-three-year old Vassar student, Moore a forty-seven-year-old prize-winning poet. In “Efforts of Affection,” her remembrance of Moore, Bishop writes of their first meeting: “she began to talk. It seems to me Marianne talked to me steadily for the next thirty-five years.” As Kermode has observed, “Bishop is the poet closest to Moore in temperament, her rival as a letter-writer, and also as a devotee of the accurate.”

Edward Byrne has blogged about that first meeting, at the end of which Bishop invited Moore to go see the circus with her, not realizing that Moore always saw the circus. Two weeks later Moore greeted Bishop with “two huge brown paper bags” filled with stale brown bread for the elephants. Moore had a plot. Her cherished elephant-hair bracelet had lost a strand. Elephant hairs grow only on the tops of the heads of very young elephants. Bishop’s task: to distract the mother elephants with the bread while Moore used her “strong nail scissors” to “snip a few hairs from a baby’s head, to repair her bracelet.”

I stayed at one end of the line, putting slices of bread into the trunks of the older elephants, and Miss Moore went rapidly down to the other end, where the babies were. . . out of the corner of my eye I saw Miss Moore leaning forward over the rope on tiptoe, scissors in hand. Elephant hairs are tough; I thought she would never finish her hair-cutting. But she did, and triumphantly we handed out the rest of the bread and set off to see the other animals. She opened her bag and showed me three or four coarse, grayish hairs in a piece of Kleenex.

Of related interest:

• Read the poem “Baseball and Writing,” in which Moore memorializes the line-up of the 1961 New York Yankees
• In 1957 The New Yorker published the exchange of letters that resulted when the Ford Motor Company requested Moore’s help in naming the car that would become the Edsel (not one of her names)
• Read Teri Tynes’s blog post about Marianne Moore’s days in Greenwich Village

Related LOA works: American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, volume one: Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker (includes thirty poems by Marianne Moore); Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (includes her memoir “Efforts of Affection,” an essay on Moore’s poetry, and several letters to Moore)