More 'More Moore'

Something quite satisfying there is about a solid, good condition, 400 page hardback. It feels substantial and, on the subject of Marianne Moore with a supporting cast of all those pioneer American modernists, it is.

Unlike pop singers and musicians, poets are not generally glamorous young gunslingers. For every Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Rosemary Tonks, Mina Loy or Christopher Marlowe there is any number of Larkins, Emily Dickinsons, Stevie Smiths or Christina Rossetti and Marianne Moore belongs with those of the more withdrawn nature,

With her mother beside her, Marianne 'sat back in her chair'...a Marco Polo stayed at home, twisted to silence by some strange repression.  

Life for such people is elsewhere and for poets it is in their poems, not that life isn't often also elsewhere for non-poets.

The most consistent theme through all the reviews is that her poems come from the head rather than the heart.....'Emotion in her is calcined to a thin ash', wrote an appreciative one.

So strongly did Moore feel misjudged on this point that she henceforthdefended the presence of 'gusto' in her own writing...

In 'Novices', ...the suave young sophisticates dismiss as boring 'the detailless perspective of the sea'. Little do they suspect what lurks beneath that placid surface

but they aren't the first or last to struggle to fully appreciate her art. 

Part of the ever-elusive charm of 'poetry' is surely some elusive quality in the best of it. That which submits to easy summary and explanation without suggesting more beyond is unlikely to survive the repeated readings that good poetry encourages.

A poet's selectiveness must have 'more elasticity than logic'...and yet it 'knows where it is going' as surely as electricity flies along to 'areas that boast of their remoteness'

 

It was a good idea to extend C20th further into America rather than just include those Americans who came to Britain. It isn't just to baulk it up a bit in order to make it closer to book length. Before writing anything vaguely coherent, one has to do a bit of reading and check it out. I thus now have a clearer idea of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and even Robert Frost by looking again with some purpose in mind. C20th might not prove all that useful to anybody who ever reads it but it's been of use to me to write it.

And so the wider enquiry into what is exactly going on when one person writes something and others read it continues.

Beasley Street Remembered

 The columnists in the Saturday Times are like old friends. They are always there, you've become accustomed to them but they mostly say the same thing and you don't always have to listen. I can talk. This website kicked off, replacing the previous one, in January 2009. And a lot of it is the same old stuff. Even saying that a lot of it is the same old stuff is now part of the same old stuff.

Giles Coren has outlived his contrary purpose, Matthew Parris continues to deliver good sense, Robert Crampton is the most repetitive but Caitlin Moran remains worth a look. We saw her once in Trafalgar Square. She noticed us noticing her but it was hardly her fault if she wasn't sufficiently up on the Portsmouth poetry scene to know who I am. There's only one thing better than being famous and that's not being famous.

But poor young Caitlin has got rats in her house. It's precious little comfort to find people worse off than oneself. The refurbishment of my glorious 'blue room' here solved the mouse problem by sealing off the places they got in through but they can still be seen in the kitchen sometimes. However, they now seem more like a blessing than an affliction when the sort of house a Times columnist can afford has it so much worse. It reminds me of Beasley Street, part of John Cooper-Clarke's vision of slum Britain in which the rats were as big as cats but perhaps it's no longer a dystopia, it is here and now.

 

Only very tangentially related are thoughts related to the Post Office scandal, only now being looked at properly because it's been a TV drama. Is that how governments find out about things now. I would by no means suggest that anything I suffered in any such institution is in anyway comparable but I had been thinking of making a list of resentments a while ago and now would be a good time to consider which of them to take legal action over.

Certainly school wasn't as good as it claimed to be. Some of the teaching, most memorably in Chemistry but in A level History and certain teachers in French, Latin and Art - not that that mattered much- was pitiful but by far my biggest claim for compensation would be for the two or three years of compulsory rugby union. Not all of us feeling like brawling for brawling's sake. I was a talented footballer and did much of it by instinct and those instincts told me that rugby consists of handball, handball, foul, foul, throw in, over the bar. I was a fool to myself, though. We were expected to try and so I did. I'd have done better if I'd been deliberately useless at it. I still don't entirely understand it but don't have to. It's taken them fifty years to realize it's dangerous.

In work I spent a few years working for the retail industry's answer to Mr. Bean whose sole purpose was his own financial gain. There must be easier ways of achieving that than opening a chain of High Street shops but maybe it's okay if badly treated staff do all the hard bits for you and, as one middle aged manager, beleaguered in his dead-end branch, told me, it was all run on fear. That is no way to live.

But bigger organisations need frameworks, ways of working and a system. I am eternally grateful for the 34 years I had but traumas come flooding back now in retirement. Pacesetter will suffice as a paragon example, presented as a great new reform, a new Jerusalem, it's snappy name appearing to imply it was go-ahead, no nonsense and aspirational whereas the pace it set was glacially slow, overburdened with more, not less, administration and like a Soviet thing, replaced the actual job by making observance of its heavy-handed processes the over-riding priority.

But enough's enough. Both of it then and brooding on it now.

-- 

All that is over and one can spend more time with one's books, like Holding On Upside Down, the Life and Work of Marianne Moore by Linda Leavell. Exactly the sort of thing one wants to know about, not least a key to understanding this austere poet's work.

Oh, I see. Her overly close relationship with her mother led her to write about free, natural animals in the wild that perhaps aren't as free as they'd like. And, mother, what a mother, she surely wore them out, her children. The brother was told he should refer all letters from his girlfriends to her for vetting.

Stay tuned for more Moore.  

 

On such territory, C20th, my little effort on the English language poetry on the period will have a chapter on America in it, after T.S. Eliot. I don't think can be left without acknowledging Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost. The ladies were already in place with reference to the superstar, Elizabeth Bishop, but despite some lack of enthusiasm for them, I think the men should get a mention.

Which reminds me of a complaint against the Victorian Literature course at university and having to write an essay on Vanity Fair. And the 'correctness' as it was then of the Intentional Fallacy, the waste of time that our allocated professor made of Elizabethan Lit seminars and the outrageousness of how little input it took to achieve a 2:1 at the taxpayers expense.

Look where such standards led us. 

Perhaps it's best to look forward, not back. Chichester Cathedral lunchtimes recommence next week, We plan to be at Newbury the week after. There's a gathering of Rosemary Tonks devotees in Soho in February and later on a couple of Menuhin Room concerts brought at least in part about by me so they will be great. There isn't really anything for me to complain about.

More Moore

 One collateral benefit of writing C20th, my overly ambitious attempt to provide my account of the poetry in English of the period, has been the discoveries, and re-discoveries, found along the way. It's actually much harder work than it looks and a perfect illustration of Homer Simpson's maxim that if something's hard to do it's not worth doing. But if the end result doesn't justify the time spent on it then re-engaging with the 'major' names and concocting reassessments of them has been enlightening for me.

Next year will begin with Marianne Moore for me, prompted by putting in a paragraph or so on the relationship- friendship-  Elizabeth Bishop had with her. If poetry really was the competitive sport that competitions and lists of 'greatests' sometimes make it appear to be, then it is the adorable and paragon example of Elizabeth Bishop that wins the C20th for me. I think Auden and Larkin are in a photo-finish for second place. But even if it is only on the strength of two poems, Poetry and The Steeple-Jack, I thought Ms. Moore was the ideal candidate for further enquiry once the last Stevie Smith book is put on the shelf and so I ordered the Complete Poems, the biography and Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell by David Kalstone. I checked the shelves to confirm that I don't already have the last of those but it wasn't until out this afternoon that I remembered I do, of course, have the Collected Ms. Moore. I hope my attempt to cancel that order gets noticed in time. I am becoming increasingly vague about what I have and what I don't. If I were to live into old age I'd quite possibly end up with shelves of multiple copies of books I was never sure whether I had them or not. 

The first week or so of a New Year can seem to be like emerging bleary-eyed into some sort of new beginning but it's not. Years could be said to begin on one's birthday, or at Rosh Hashanah, and I see that the Islamic New Year is in July but whether we need one at all is open to question. Reading more Marianne Moore represents no sort of new start, she's just next off the taxi rank for a more detailed look and fits well with this profile of less than gregarious figures, like Stevie, Elizabeth and Larkin, who saw fit to devote themselves to their solitary art at least as much as they did to imposing themselves on others. 

I'm sorry that Stevie didn't get an index label to the postings on here regarding her but, strictly speaking, those labels are for poets and it is her prose fiction I've been concerned with. Thus, we'll set one up for Ms. Moore because poetry was what she did, in the hope that there will be more, much more about Moore, to say.