Friday, October 8, 2010

Process & Perception: Moore & Williams


this is taken from a response written for a class focused on the work of Marianne Moore & Mina Loy

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Moore’s criticism presents another dimension to a very particular way of seeing that we encounter in her poems – a statement in prose on the ways in which a poetic self encounters its world. Of particular interest to me are Moore’s pieces on Williams, in which a tone of friendship and mutual admiration facilitate at once a generous and favorable reading of the doctor-poet and a remarkable projection of Moore’s own approach to poetry, both of which contribute to a deepened understanding of the perpendicularity of Moore’s own verse.

In her review of Kora in Hell, Moore notes the “life[…] in the ability to see resemblances in things which are dissimilar” that characterizes Williams’ work. One senses, thanks to Moore’s reading, the modified mimesis of Williams’ poetry, and it’s in her admiration of his ability to represent his world – a world of Place, of Thing – that we find not so much praise of the poetry but instead of a poetic method, a process through which Williams makes poetic his perceptions. In another piece on Williams, Moore positions him as “essentially not a ‘repeater of things second hand,’” rather a poet capable of “contemplating with new eyes, old things, shabby things, and other things.” It seems to me that this reading of Williams is easily applicable to Moore, whose own poetry manages just such a newness of vision. Williams himself, in his “Marianne Moore,” notes in Moore a coming-at-the-familiar from a “new angle as to throw out of fashion” the poetic conventions of their shared predecessors. Closing the essay in praise, he declares: “This is new! The quality is not new, but the freedom is new, the unbridled leap.” This mutual recognition of remarkable newness, of a clarity and precision of poetic seeing, speaks to a connection between the two poets – that of their shared approach to perception. What is liberating in Williams is equally liberating in Moore: that spark of the novel observation, that making-new of the old and already-seen.

We find the observation of newness also in Moore’s reviews of H.D. and Pound, an almost ecstatic praise of the appearance of a new way of seeing the ancient and the inherited facts of modern culture. With Pound, it’s a newness that comes through textual interpretation, revitalizing the history upon which his poetry is built; with H.D., a radical vision of the so-called natural world that eventually calls into question the gender binary used to define woman-poets in opposition to their male counterparts. It becomes clear, then, that Moore is chiefly concerned not with what is seen, but with how it’s seen, and the ways in which that seeing breathes life into the apparently stagnant, makes interesting the banal.

It’s not so much the emphasis on the new that strikes me as novel, but instead Moore’s particular way of reading the work of her contemporaries. Moore does not ask what or why in her criticism – she asks how. This is not to say that the objects and phenomena central to the work are forgotten or neglected – it’s in fact the opposite. In her criticism, Moore manages to engage in a process almost identical to that which occurs in her poetry: the enactment of a particular method of perception serves to emphasize process while simultaneously illuminating its object.