Twenty-First Century Marianne Moore

Essays from a Critical Renaissance

Elizabeth Gregory, Stacy Carson Hubbard, Elizabeth Gregory, Stacy Carson Hubbard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319651088
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319651095
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Examines fresh biographical information and archival material to update current scholarship on Marianne Moore

Considers Moore's participation and influence on modernist movements and communities

Explores Moore's lesser-known post-World War II career

Part I
Moore’s Methods

© The Author(s) 2018

Elizabeth Gregory and Stacy Carson Hubbard (eds.)Twenty-First Century Marianne MooreModern and Contemporary Poetry and Poeticshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65109-5_2

Begin Abstract

Marianne Moore’s Gustatory Imagination

Robin G. Schulze¹

(1)

University at Buffalo, SUNY, Buffalo, USA

End Abstract

I have to admit that, while I love Linda’s Leavell’s 2013 biography of Marianne Moore, Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore , I also find it disturbing. While I knew that Moore had made certain sacrifices in order to pursue her life as a poet in the company of her mother, Mary, I don’t think any of us imagined the extent of the deprivations involved. Mary held the money. Every penny that Moore made, whether from salary, poetry, or prizes, went to savings that Mary never touched. The basement apartment that the two women shared after they moved to Greenwich Village was tiny and afforded Moore neither mental nor physical privacy. Mary supervised Moore’s bedtimes, personal hygiene, and meals, which consisted of meager fare prepared on a hot plate that Moore ate sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Thanksgiving dinner one year, Leavell writes, consisted of leftover sardines. Moore internalized her frustration and anxiety by not eating. Leavell charts the frightening fluctuations in Moore’s weight. Healthy and robust at 130 pounds at best, she frequently dropped below 90. ¹ When Moore became attached to a stray kitten the two had taken in, Mary chloroformed it, ostensibly to save the cost of feeding it (2013, 206–207).

Food, Glorious Food

While reading any work of art through the artist’s biography has its pitfalls, Leavell’s revelations have led me back to Moore’s poems with food on the brain. Leavell’s book prompts the question of Moore’s frequent use of eating as a metaphor. ² Indeed, throughout her career, many of Moore’s favorite terms in relation to the production and consumption of art—fastidiousness, taste , distaste, disgust, and gusto —are terms rooted in food and appetite . In many of her verses, Moore uses gustatory metaphors to encourage her readers to eat up—to ingest new things and avoid the narrowness of appetite that defines “good taste ” as a matter of exclusion. On the other hand, Moore’s poems appreciate, at times, those who eat little or nothing at all, adapting themselves to live on “every kind of shortage.” So how to make sense of Moore’s metaphors of eating? How do Moore’s poems look different in light of Leavell’s revelations about Moore’s problematic relationship with food ?

A good place to start to answer this question is Moore’s poem “Critics and Connoisseurs .” “Critics and Connoisseurs ” is, in essence, a poem about food . Or, more precisely, a poem about consuming art that figures this process in terms of eating. Moore first began taking notes that she would shape into “Critics” in 1914. She did not begin to work on the poem in earnest, however, until after her now famously transformative ten-day trip to New York City with the Cowdrey sisters in December of 1915. In a letter to her brother, Warner, Moore referred to her journey as the equivalent of Moses’ journey across the Red Sea—a passage of pure emancipation, during which she acquired Alfred Kreymborg , the irrepressible editor of Others: A Magazine of Verse , as a mentor, visited Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, and hobnobbed with members of the New York artistic avant-garde. ³

The trip buoyed Moore at a critical time in her life. In the previous year, Moore had stepped away from her job teaching at the Carlisle Indian School and her mother Mary had lost her job as a teacher at the Metzger Institute. These events, Leavell reports, led to distinct changes in household habits that put stress on Moore. While a teacher at Metzger, Mary boarded her family at the school and did none of the cooking. Once she began to cook at home, frugality became the order of the day. “Priding herself on the thrift of her meals rather than their heartiness,” Leavell writes, “[Mary] learned that she could get five meals per week out of one chicken or duck and eat cheese or bacon for the other two.” Vegetables became a “luxury.” As Mary reported to Warner , the disruptions led Moore to lose her appetite . “Rat,” she wrote, using Marianne’s family nickname, “hates his food ” (2013, 128–129).

In the face of new regimens, Moore devoted her energy full time to her poems and, throughout 1914 and 1915, began to write with a new sense of professional purpose and drive. The trip to New York was part of a spiritual and bodily renaissance. Released into a new space of freedom and possibility, Moore consumed new art of all kinds, an aesthetic smorgasbord that led her to rethink both the form and the content of her verse. She also, it seems, ate new foods . As she reported to her brother, she went one day to lunch at a Turkish restaurant called The Constantinople. “We had soup and pieces of meat roasted on skewers and meat fried in grape leaves and rice and pastry and ice cream,” she gushed to Warner (Moore 1997, 103). The shish kebab and dolmades were clearly novel and exotic treats.

A product of Moore’s trip to New York and her concerted efforts to change her poetic style, “Critics and Connoisseurs ” strikes most readers as a bridge to Moore’s mature verse. The poem hinges on two terms, “unconscious fastidiousness” and “conscious fastidiousness,” and the images that define them. ⁴ “There is a great amount of poetry,” Moore begins, “in unconscious/ Fastidiousness.” At first pass, the statement seems to be an oxymoron. To be fastidious, in the word’s modern sense, is to be overly nice, exacting to the point of annoying, proper in ways that are inhibiting. To be fastidious is to be disdainful and prideful and over think just about everything—the utter antithesis of unconsciousness. Moore clarifies her terms, however, by offering examples of what unconscious fastidiousness looks like:

Certain Ming

Products, imperial floor coverings of coach

Wheel yellow, are well enough in their way but I have seen something

That I like better—a

Mere childish attempt to make an imperfectly ballasted animal stand up,

A determination ditto to make a pup

Eat his meat on the plate. (Becoming 215)

Beautiful carpets notwithstanding, the soul of “unconscious fastidiousness” lies in the act of training—or trying to train—a puppy. The idea of getting a wee dog to walk on hind legs and eat from a plate seems absurdly fussy. Yet, Moore suggests, the activity is elementally different from a conscious effort to maintain propriety that is rooted in disdain. Teaching a wobbly little dog table manners is a “mere childish” diversion, an inconsequential, playful, silly expression of affection. Such attention to detail is loving and not meant, as Moore would write in another poem about taste and distaste, to “set people right.” Moore’s best example of “unconscious fastidiousness” is also one of feeding and being fed. The owner of the pup offers up food that the pup, it seems, is all too eager to eat. The puppy is the opposite of fussy. Puppy appetite constitutes a counter-force to any effort to exact fastidious control over life’s imperfections.

Indeed, as the next three stanzas of the poem reveal, the very notion of “conscious fastidiousness” that Moore wants so badly to critique is best imagined in the body of a picky eater:

I remember a black swan on the Cherwell in Oxford

With flamingo colored, maple-

Leaflike feet. It stood out to sea like a battle-

ship. Disbelief and conscious fastidiousness were the staple

Ingredients in its

Disinclination to move. Finally its hardihood was not proof against its

Inclination to detain and appraise such bits

Of food as the stream

Bore counter to it; it made away with what I gave it

To eat. I have seen this swan and

I have seen you; I have seen ambition without

Understanding in a variety of forms. Happening to stand

By an ant hill, I have

Seen a fastidious ant carrying a stick, north, south, east, west, till it turned on

Itself, struck out from the flower-bed into the lawn,

And returned to the point

From which it had started. Then abandoning the stick as

Useless and overtaxing his

Jaws with a particle of whitewash, pill-like but

Heavy, he again went through the same course of procedure.

(Becoming 215–216)

In the image of the Oxford swan, Moore conflates a closed mind that won’t accept new ideas with an unadventurous palate that won’t try new food . Moore’s speaker offers up food to a bird that stands “out to sea like a battleship,” actively defending itself against anything that it doesn’t immediately recognize as its usual fare. The swan, Moore states, is a creature of “staple ingredients,” the routine stuff of a standard diet. While Moore depicts the puppy as an “imperfectly ballasted” ship, a bundle of spontaneous energy bound to capsize, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Introduction
• 1. Moore’s Methods
• 2. Early Days/Poetic Roots
• 3. Middle Period
• 4. Late Phase
• 5. Scholar/Activists: Looking Back on Forwarding Moore Studies
• Backmatter