MODERNMooreNotes3

Feminist literary criticism has been able to discuss the significance of a woman writer’s gender to her literary production most propitiously by analyzing its representation of gender and of gender issues. But for women writers, such as Moore, who refuse to make gender a central subject of their writing, this approach offers limited insight. And yet, gender is a crucial determination of Moore’s poetic production, and much of her poetry, especially her earlier poetry, can be seen as a creative, and feminist, response to that determination.

Moore’s poetry written before 1935 is marked by her paradoxical quest to give expression to a universality and also to herself as a women. A writer whose work is shaped by beliefs in the transcendence of art, Moore seeks to realize in her poetry many of the effects of a transcendent art. Yet at the same time, she works to modify the pervasive masculine bias that forms much art that has been deemed great. Refusing to write from the position of the “second sex,” even to inveigh against her second-rate status, Moore instead produces a poetry which is subversive of existing meanings--a richly ambiguous and multivalent art. (11-12)

Surely, the tradition of lyric poetry with its dependence on mirroring relations between an “I” and a “you” or an “other” only intensifies this specular bias of language and women’s problematic subjectivity. Moore, who claims to call her work “poetry because there is no other category in which to put it,” attempts to subvert the specular propensities of lyric poetry and to establish a poetry of her own “self-affection.” (12) [The quote is from Donald Hall, “The Art of Poetry: Marianne Moore. An Interview,” in Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Charles Tomlinson. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969) 27.

Heuving calls Moore’s “refusal of the forms of hierarchy inherent in specular writing” her greatest commitment as a poet, a criticism of poetry that confuses transcendence with domination. As do the more formalist critics we’ve read so far, Heuving places Moore’s most significant resistance to hierarchical forms not in the content of her early poems, but in their forms-- “in quotation of statements from insignificant and anti-poetic sources, in subversion of meanings based on hierarchical dualities, in refusal of singular or climactic resolutions, and in representation of the otherness of others. Moore’s early use of syllabic verse may well be an effort to give each word and syllable significance apart from structures which unify them.” (12)

...I focus...not on theories of critical response but on imagining the grounds of Moore’s positioning and construction of a (female) poet’s authority; in other words, while I recognize that authority inheres both in a writer’s felt and enacted entitlement to speak and in the changing receptions of that writer’s work through successive generations, I focus on the former. I do so by tracing Moore’s negotiations among the several configurations of poetic agency and authority available to her at various points during her lifetime and by examining the language, structures, and arguments of her poems. To summarize my argument briefly, I see Moore as determined to establish in her writing a communally focused authority that avoided egocentric and essentialist assertions of a subjective self while also avoiding the self-erasure which is their opposite and double. (i)

Moore’s poetic, she argues, “questions authority by exploring constructions of subjectivity, lyric agency, and cultural empowerment through its forms as much as in the themes of its work.” This is a poetic shared by other 20th century (women) poets--not confessional or autobiographical; not overtly political in subject matter, yet nonetheless “marking” political issues in their discourse; and “while not so determinedly experimental as to require a specialized audience, it self-consciously uses the structures and traditions of poetry to construct alternative relationships of power between poet and tradition, poet and speaker, poet and reader, and reader and poem... Moore may not be the first woman and poet to construct such a personal/impersonal, gendered/ungendered, disjunctive, experimental and oppositional but not openly revolutionary poetic. She is, however, I believe, the most widely celebrated poet of this century to write in such a mode, and hence plays a central role in the fashioning and reception of such a poetic for later writers.” (viii) [ In her last chapter, Miller briefly discusses the work of Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Heather McHugh, Cynthia Macdonald, Susan Howe, M. Nourbese Philip, and Alice Fulton in relation to Moore’s poetic. --ST]

This poetic is implicitly (and for some poets explicitly) feminist in its manipulation of received truths abut identity and authority and yet, in its rejection of a self-focus and of binary categorizations, is more apt to strive for a nongendered or multiply gendered positioning than for a distinctly female subject matter or presence or the kind of simple oppositionality (us/the, female/male, black/white) that characterizes much openly political poetry. (ix)

more interested in gender as a social and political construction than in gender as an expression of self, more interested in constructing an alternative authority than in the poet’s identity. It desires an open communicability while at the same time constructing a surface of sufficient complexity to make structure or style an equal bearer of poetic meaning with the poet’s subjects of focus or semantic formulations themselves. Because of its tendency toward abstraction and concern with the physicality of poetry and of language, it is not a poetry of “voice”; although it indeed presents tones and perspectives unusual in poetry, it does not primarily record either private experience or self/group assertion. As a consequence of these several mixed features, this poetic is conservative to the extent that work which focuses on changing patterns of thought and desire rather than on changing behavior is inherently so. (x)

However, in her earlier poetry, alert to the problematical nature of representational conventions, Moore means far more than she can express; whereas in her later poetry she expresses more than she can mean. Her earlier poetry of understatement enacts Moore’s difference from dominant forms of meaning, while her later poetry largely capitulates to them. In her later poetry, Moore no longer attempts the paradoxical quest of writing as a woman and as a universal representative of her culture, as an implied “I”, but rather assumes the position of a generalized and far more conventional, implied “we.” (14)

I question both of these assumptions by foregrounding the problematical nature of Moore’s, or any woman’s, self-expression. Indeed, even if she wished Moore could not produce a poetry according to the “boys’ rules” (much less a neuter or neutral poetry), for it would never be received that way. Furthermore, Moore, like any poet, is not simply expressing her emotion or sexuality, but is engaged in a meaning-making activity that occurs within and through language and representational conventions which are themselves implicated in and productive of gender differences.... In order to assess Moore’s imaginative activity, then, a critic must first attend to the ways she can “mean” within her culture--how she can “make meaning”--as different from the ways that her male Modernist peers can “mean” or “make meaning.” For Moore, a practice of reserve in her writing is bound up both in what she cannot and what she refuses to say. (19)

[B]ecause she works against the forms and meanings of existing representational orders, her meanings are rarely conclusive. Moore’s notoriously difficult poetry may best be viewed as inconclusive encounters with a literary tradition and larger system of representation which modify and disrupt these orders. The term “encounter” is particularly appropriate for a discussion of Moore’s poetry as it suggests its inconclusiveness born out of her engendered difference from the dominant literary tradition and its frequently affliliative and combative postures....Moore’s poems as seeming worlds unto themselves often cannot be interpreted through a single heuristic, but mean on many levels at once, and in non-congruent ways.

Throughout this study, I will be emphasizing the ways Moore’s “reserve” or “reticence” is as recognition of how an important part of the meanings she can make are unrepresentable. While at times in her critical writing, Moore merely seems to be urging what Gerard Genette calls “plausible” silences and I all articulate silences--the “Pleasure...derived from the reader’s ability to keep the allegory out of sight” [ellipsis in this quote is Heuving’s]--at other times she suggests that something inarticulate or unrepresentable is at work... Moore’s poetic quest--as I will be developing at some length--is doubly paradoxical: to write a universal poetry which includes her perspective as a woman and to construct a universal consciousness out of a “direct treatment of the ‘thing.’” (20-21)

[f]or Moore, both the modes of contrariety and of the fantastic open up a play of meanings which enable her to encounter and engage in symbolic discourse while maintaining a position “elsewhere.” That is, Moore can engage the meanings of the larger literary tradition and system of representation without having to assume a singular or identificatory (specular) stance. Moore’s modes of contrariety and of the fantastic are highly inventive attempts to construct textual reality that bespeak her and to address corresponding troubling psychological dilemmas--her anxiety at becoming an author. Indeed, much of Moore’s “adverse” poetry concerns itself, on the one hand, with the uses and misuses of language, and on the other hand, with those persons and power structures which inspire and prohibit her expression. Frequently, then, Moore’s poetry of contrariety provides a critique of the system of representation and a way of situating herself within it. Her poetry of the fantastic manifests more directly her psychological discomfiture at assuming a position of authority within a literary tradition that discourages, when it does not prohibit, women’s accession to powerful speaker and writer roles. (51-52)

Moore partially resolves the difficulty between a mediated and an unmediated seeing--between an adverse and agreeing perspective--in her poetry of lists and collage, methods employed in many of her most significant poems... Unlike earlier poems in which Moore establishes her difference through singular speakers promulgating a barrage of languages, in these poems Moore establishes her difference, her “elsewhere,” by playing language against language more variously--utilizing a range of voices and intensities. She can simultaneously affirm phrases that have been “said in the very best way” and relativize them through ironic juxtapositions that deliberately misuse or misread them. That is, Moore can attain the very expansiveness and agreeableness of one situated within a “universal” poetics while investigating and expressing her own alienation from its centrist vision. (85)

That is, while Moore wants to keep the edges of phenomena and their defining attributes visible, she also contradictorily desires her reader to see what these edges enclose--the middles or insides. Certainly Moore’s focus on the usual as well as the unusual, rather than on the powerful, is a choice of those objects and qualities which are relatively free from overdetermined and reified valuations that overwhelm more fluid realities and possibilities. (100)

[while] her earlier poetry enunciates Moore’s difference from dominant cultural meanings, her late poetry largely capitulates to them. For the first extended time in her poetic career, Moore promotes only one side of a proposition, wiring a poetry of thematic and symbolic unity. Indeed, Moore re-enlists many of the hierarchical dualisms carefully subverted in her earlier poetry, frequently promoting the conventionally privileged or valued term. (141)

Moore’s juxtaposition of illocutionary, directly interactional and vernacular elements of verse with others that lean toward unintelligibility, representing the poem as artificial, constructed, a product of convention. Combining these elements constitutes another of her several tactics for restructuring the lyric poem so that it directly engages an audience in a mode reminiscent of conversation without invoking an authority of personal presence, natural voice, or iconic elevation. (62)

Structures of speech that depend for their meaning upon interaction with an audience--rather than, for example, upon truth-value, narrative development, or providing information--are called illocutionary, and the speech-like or interactional element of Moore’s poetry stems primarily from such structures. 67)

...while Whitman seems almost to instruct his audience how to hear and “read” his voice, Moore plays syntax against lineation in ways that make reading (and especially reading aloud) an adventure One must continually decide whether to mark written aspects of the verse (rhyme, line-endings) vocally and hence disrupt the syntactic flow, or to forgo vocalizing any aspect of lineation, and hence read the verse like prose. Moreover, some of Moore’s syntax is so complex and so bereft of the clearly lineated rhetorical parallelism of Whitman’s complex sentences that one can unravel all its parts only after prolonged study, if at all, and the voice alone cannot carry the syntactic embedding and parallelism.

The poet’s craft reveals itself in precisely this play, in her ability to place words appropriately within the severe limits of such a logically unpredictable form--for example, giving “defiant edifice” a line of its own; suspending he sentence-concluding adjective “dead” across a stanza break; or, earlier, dividing the alliteratively lovely phase “sun,/split like spun/glass” among three lines to slow the reader’s movement though it. And this crafted enjambment of the syntax against the abstract grid of syllables indicates how fundamentally arbitrary that grid is. Playing counted syllables against syntax depends on a process of reading, not hearing, the poem. (76)

Like Moore’s stanzas, her rhyme highlights the craft of her poetry and the static conventionality of verse in which rhyme sounds occur with a regularity that might be mistaken for natural. In a brilliant use and parody of this convention rhyme occurs with visual regularity in much of Moore’s verse but, because of the uneven line lengths of a syllabic stanza, varying lapses of time and stress occur between rhyme sounds and hence the ear does not know when to anticipate the end of a line, or a rhyme: it might be after one syllable or after twenty-eight. Moreover...Moore’s end-rhymes are often syntactically unstressed. Moore may also pun on conventional terminology for rhyme as either masculine (strong, full, perfect) or feminine (unstressed polysyllabic, weak) through her typical reliance on “feminine” rhymes in combination with obviously artificial constructions of “masculine” rhyme... For example, returning to “The Fish”, the technically masculine rhyme of “ac-” and “lack” calls attention to the wrenching of the word necessary to fulfill this convention. The mixed rhymes of “all/external” and “dead./Repeated” are more typical of Moore’s rhyme combinations of all styles and classes of words. Moore is also one of the great experimenters with rhyme in English, rhyming monosyllables with mid-word syllables, and creating a variety of consonantal, homophonic, sight, and two-syllable rhymes. (76-77)

Moore never describes such a middle ground, let alone identifies it with feminism, the appearance of Eve, or her own prose-like revision of traditional “feet,” yet the poem powerfully suggests these associations. Here Moore identifies truth with a process of negation, contradiction, and modification, all verbal characteristics in distinct contrast to Adamic language or Lacan’s symbolic, with its representation in the law. Moore’s truth lies in a world of complexity rather than of name-giving. By calling attention in the first line to Eve’s absence from Adamic isolation and clarity, Moore suggests that the complexity of her art may be identified with the presence of women--not as essentialized beings but insofar as their presence represents the inclusion of otherness, “complexity,” or the murky world in which both men and women live, speak, and create.(82-83)

Moore’s choice of both “gusto” and “idiosyncrasy” as key terms defining artistic excellence signifies the importance of [playfulness] to her poetic. “Gusto” fits exactly the singular associative leaps, puns, and word play that characterize Moore’s verse...This is not the playfulness of a romantic idealization of childhood or of Freudian socialization and repression of asocial tendencies; nor is it a play-acting of disguise. Instead idiosyncrasy, gusto, an appreciation of the humorous even in contexts far from funny establishes a site of creative possibility, opens a space beyond fixed truths, conventions, perfection... Moore defines creativity broadly as ‘a kind of mental playfulness’...Play serves Moore as a field where knowledge, art, personal inclination, and the duty of the public speaker combine. Or, to return to Moore’s vocabulary, it combines ferocity and grace with gusto in maintaining the communicative openness she sees as crucial to responsible art. (91)

This involves not just the interactive effect of repeated illocutionary structures but a redefinition of poetry, or art, as accessible, open, imperfectly beautiful or polished, and playful. In such a poetry, the poet’s authority results not from expressions of genius, passages of lyric loveliness, personal experience and attributes, or demonstrated knowledge of a tradition or the tools of a craft, but instead from the poet’s degree of success in engaging the reader profoundly and actively in the concerns and the construction of her poems. Such a poetry draws a reader not to identify, sympathize, or simply enjoy, but to figure out just where the poet stands--when is complexity a crime? why do poets fuss, and why shouldn’t they?--and through that process to understand more about her or his own positioning. (91-92)

ENG LISH 660: 002	Modernist Women Poets: Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Lorine Niedecker
Marianne	Moore: instructor's notes: Susan Tichy
spr ing 20 05 GEO RGE MAS ON UNI VER SITY	Gender & Authority / Heuving / Miller Quotations from Moore's Complete Prose One recognizes here, the artist--the mind which creates what it needs for its own subsistence and propitiates nothing, willing--indeed wishing to seem to find its only counterpart in the elements; yet in this case as in the case of any true artist, reserve is a concomitant of intense feeling, not the cause of it. 80 Review of H.D.’s Hymen, 1923 Also, we have that inner world of interacting reason and unreason in which are comprehended, the rigor, the succinctness of hazardous emotion. 112 Review of H.D.’s Collected Poems, 1925 The avowed artist must also, unless we are to have fads rather than individuality, be an artist in refusing. 161 Untitled comment on two editions of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 1926 In making works of art, the only legitimate warfare is in the inevitable warfare between imagination and medium... 177 Untitled comment, 1926 “Thousands of people can talk,” Ruskin says, “for one who can think; but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.” A special kind of seeing, “mental strife,” “rapture and labour,” are characteristic of few persons indeed... 184 Untitled comment on Blake, 1927 ...[T]he poet would have us believe that rat poems are the result of the poet’s “opposite” image--an expression of what the poet is not. I think this opposite, and not his little everyday thoughts and actions, is the poet... 40 Review of Old and New Masters in Literature by Robert Lynd, 1919 Scholastically, it is “concentrating the past on the present,” as T.S. Eliot says; rhetorically, it is certitude; musically, it is range with an unerring ear. 272 Review of Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos, 1931 Gender & Authority in Moore: Jeanne Heuving & Cristanne Miller Three critical questions frame most discussions of gender and authority in Moore’s poems. The first--which her biographer Charles Molesworth argues is central to how we read all her poetry--is thematic: Is she caged? or does she use armor and self-protection in ways that are positive and assertive? The second--which we have already begun to consider--is formal: How can poetic authority be achieved by a fragmented, quoting, qualifying and attributing speaker? And how does the construction of such a speaker reflect or inscribe gender? The third question is the most fundamental: Is gender a primary or a belated factor in a crucial reading of Moore’s poems? Is she first and foremost a “poet-as-poet,” as Harold Bloom suggests, whose gender should be considered “only after the aesthetic achievement is judged as such”? Or does gender structure her “aesthetic achievement” at such a deep level that no reading of her poems can be accurate without this category of inquiry? Of the many critics writing on gender in Moore’s work, we will consider two--Jeanne Heuving & Cristanne Miller. On this page you will find brief introductions to their thinking, followed by more detailed notes from their books. For Heuving, I have outlined the book’s arguments leading to the late chapter that is a recommended reading for next week. For Miller, you will read an early chapter this week. I have outlined one other, on the construction of voice in Moore’s poems. How each reader answers the questions above may partly depend on what period of Moore’s work is privileged. Jeanne Heuving is one of the most decisive critics placing Moore’s significant work at the beginning of her career, in the poems in which method communicates meaning; she is also an advocate of a strongly gendered reading of Moore. Specifically, Heuving is interested in how Moore’s early poems criticize hierarchy, refuse specularity, and inscribe her experience as a woman without writing about that experience. In the introduction to Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender and Authority in Marianne Moore (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992) Heuving writes: Feminist literary criticism has been able to discuss the significance of a woman writer’s gender to her literary production most propitiously by analyzing its representation of gender and of gender issues. But for women writers, such as Moore, who refuse to make gender a central subject of their writing, this approach offers limited insight. And yet, gender is a crucial determination of Moore’s poetic production, and much of her poetry, especially her earlier poetry, can be seen as a creative, and feminist, response to that determination. Moore’s poetry written before 1935 is marked by her paradoxical quest to give expression to a universality and also to herself as a women. A writer whose work is shaped by beliefs in the transcendence of art, Moore seeks to realize in her poetry many of the effects of a transcendent art. Yet at the same time, she works to modify the pervasive masculine bias that forms much art that has been deemed great. Refusing to write from the position of the “second sex,” even to inveigh against her second-rate status, Moore instead produces a poetry which is subversive of existing meanings--a richly ambiguous and multivalent art. (11-12) Heuving begins her study of Moore with the “theoretical assertion that a woman cannot write as a man because of her position in her culture and in language.” (12) She explores Lucy Irigaray’s critique of the specularity of discourse, which systematically reflects men but does not reflect women, who are positioned as “other” within language. Surely, the tradition of lyric poetry with its dependence on mirroring relations between an “I” and a “you” or an “other” only intensifies this specular bias of language and women’s problematic subjectivity. Moore, who claims to call her work “poetry because there is no other category in which to put it,” attempts to subvert the specular propensities of lyric poetry and to establish a poetry of her own “self-affection.” (12) [The quote is from Donald Hall, “The Art of Poetry: Marianne Moore. An Interview,” in Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Charles Tomlinson. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969) 27. Heuving calls Moore’s “refusal of the forms of hierarchy inherent in specular writing” her greatest commitment as a poet, a criticism of poetry that confuses transcendence with domination. As do the more formalist critics we’ve read so far, Heuving places Moore’s most significant resistance to hierarchical forms not in the content of her early poems, but in their forms-- “in quotation of statements from insignificant and anti-poetic sources, in subversion of meanings based on hierarchical dualities, in refusal of singular or climactic resolutions, and in representation of the otherness of others. Moore’s early use of syllabic verse may well be an effort to give each word and syllable significance apart from structures which unify them.” (12) Heuving spends a chapter comparing Eliot’s and Pound’s “portrait of a woman” poems with Moore’s poems, especially “Those Various Scalpels.” This is an important analysis because male Modernists also resisted and attempted to overthrow some features of 19th century symbolic and specular poetry. Heuving and other critics have convincingly demonstrated the differences between Moore’s poetics and what she calls “a kind of erased Romantic lyric” written by her male peers. (p. 13 & all of chapter two, “Moore’s ‘High Modernism’.”) The rest of Heuving’s book is a chronological study of Moore’s poems, stressing the differences between an earlier poetry of understatement and a later poetry, beginning in the 1930s, of overstatement. In her Preface to Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) Cristanne Miller writes ...I focus...not on theories of critical response but on imagining the grounds of Moore’s positioning and construction of a (female) poet’s authority; in other words, while I recognize that authority inheres both in a writer’s felt and enacted entitlement to speak and in the changing receptions of that writer’s work through successive generations, I focus on the former. I do so by tracing Moore’s negotiations among the several configurations of poetic agency and authority available to her at various points during her lifetime and by examining the language, structures, and arguments of her poems. To summarize my argument briefly, I see Moore as determined to establish in her writing a communally focused authority that avoided egocentric and essentialist assertions of a subjective self while also avoiding the self-erasure which is their opposite and double. (i) Moore’s poetic, she argues, “questions authority by exploring constructions of subjectivity, lyric agency, and cultural empowerment through its forms as much as in the themes of its work.” This is a poetic shared by other 20th century (women) poets--not confessional or autobiographical; not overtly political in subject matter, yet nonetheless “marking” political issues in their discourse; and “while not so determinedly experimental as to require a specialized audience, it self-consciously uses the structures and traditions of poetry to construct alternative relationships of power between poet and tradition, poet and speaker, poet and reader, and reader and poem... Moore may not be the first woman and poet to construct such a personal/impersonal, gendered/ungendered, disjunctive, experimental and oppositional but not openly revolutionary poetic. She is, however, I believe, the most widely celebrated poet of this century to write in such a mode, and hence plays a central role in the fashioning and reception of such a poetic for later writers.” (viii) [ In her last chapter, Miller briefly discusses the work of Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Heather McHugh, Cynthia Macdonald, Susan Howe, M. Nourbese Philip, and Alice Fulton in relation to Moore’s poetic. --ST] This poetic is implicitly (and for some poets explicitly) feminist in its manipulation of received truths abut identity and authority and yet, in its rejection of a self-focus and of binary categorizations, is more apt to strive for a nongendered or multiply gendered positioning than for a distinctly female subject matter or presence or the kind of simple oppositionality (us/the, female/male, black/white) that characterizes much openly political poetry. (ix) As gendered, or feminist, writing, this poetic as Miller understands it is more interested in gender as a social and political construction than in gender as an expression of self, more interested in constructing an alternative authority than in the poet’s identity. It desires an open communicability while at the same time constructing a surface of sufficient complexity to make structure or style an equal bearer of poetic meaning with the poet’s subjects of focus or semantic formulations themselves. Because of its tendency toward abstraction and concern with the physicality of poetry and of language, it is not a poetry of “voice”; although it indeed presents tones and perspectives unusual in poetry, it does not primarily record either private experience or self/group assertion. As a consequence of these several mixed features, this poetic is conservative to the extent that work which focuses on changing patterns of thought and desire rather than on changing behavior is inherently so. (x) Miller’s first chapter (which you will read) introduces the framework of her discussion. Her second chapter (outlined in these notes, below) discusses Moore’s strategies for constructing authority through the dual features of impersonal information and idiosyncratic perspective. Miller’s third chapter demonstrates how Moore is able to address her audience about moral and political issues without making herself personally the expert. The remaining chapters turn to biographical, historical and cultural discussions of authority in Moore’s verse, placing her strategies for authority more firmly in their historical and cultural contexts. Notes from Jeanne Heuving: Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender and Authority in Marianne Moore (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992): In both broad phases of her career, Heuving maintains, Moore is concerned with what can be said. However, in her earlier poetry, alert to the problematical nature of representational conventions, Moore means far more than she can express; whereas in her later poetry she expresses more than she can mean. Her earlier poetry of understatement enacts Moore’s difference from dominant forms of meaning, while her later poetry largely capitulates to them. In her later poetry, Moore no longer attempts the paradoxical quest of writing as a woman and as a universal representative of her culture, as an implied “I”, but rather assumes the position of a generalized and far more conventional, implied “we.” (14) This is easily demonstrated by a comparison of “Poetry” (of the 1920s) with “In the Public Garden” (of the 1950s). In her first chapter, “An Artist in Refusing” Heuving takes issue with the critical stereotype (perpetuated by feminist critics as various as Adrienne Rich and Carolyn Burke, as well as by others) of Moore as sexless, passionless, possessing but a “narrow range of feeling” (Burke) and a “maidenly” reticence around her male peers (Rich). Heuving argues that Moore’s writing is “an active response to her engendering that enables her to express her will and desire.” She questions two assumptions implicit in portrayals of Moore as neuter or withheld -- that her poetry inscribes a lack of self-expression and would be more vital if she opened up, and that in the absence of “self-expression” Moore’s poetry must therefore be written “according to the boys’ rules.” I question both of these assumptions by foregrounding the problematical nature of Moore’s, or any woman’s, self-expression. Indeed, even if she wished Moore could not produce a poetry according to the “boys’ rules” (much less a neuter or neutral poetry), for it would never be received that way. Furthermore, Moore, like any poet, is not simply expressing her emotion or sexuality, but is engaged in a meaning-making activity that occurs within and through language and representational conventions which are themselves implicated in and productive of gender differences.... In order to assess Moore’s imaginative activity, then, a critic must first attend to the ways she can “mean” within her culture--how she can “make meaning”--as different from the ways that her male Modernist peers can “mean” or “make meaning.” For Moore, a practice of reserve in her writing is bound up both in what she cannot and what she refuses to say. (19) Heuving gives examples of some Modernist poems Moore couldn’t write: e.g., a lament for her inability to represent her culture (i.e. Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, Prufrock...) would be oxymoronic, since women have never presumed themselves able to do so; a “portrait of a gentleman” which at once elevates her subject and establishes her own dominance over him (the normal effect of “portrait of a woman” poems) would render herself less womanly and her subject less manly, by cultural norms--an effect quite opposite that of the genre. What Moore could do but refuses to do is to make her experiences as a Woman the subject of her poems. She will not write a blues or plaint, assume a position of abandonment, or “enact the conditions of her second-rate status even to complain about them.” What Heuving stresses, and what I also consider essential to an understanding of Moore’s early poems, is that although she rarely writes directly about women, she always writes as a women. (20) [B]ecause she works against the forms and meanings of existing representational orders, her meanings are rarely conclusive. Moore’s notoriously difficult poetry may best be viewed as inconclusive encounters with a literary tradition and larger system of representation which modify and disrupt these orders. The term “encounter” is particularly appropriate for a discussion of Moore’s poetry as it suggests its inconclusiveness born out of her engendered difference from the dominant literary tradition and its frequently affliliative and combative postures....Moore’s poems as seeming worlds unto themselves often cannot be interpreted through a single heuristic, but mean on many levels at once, and in non-congruent ways. Throughout this study, I will be emphasizing the ways Moore’s “reserve” or “reticence” is as recognition of how an important part of the meanings she can make are unrepresentable. While at times in her critical writing, Moore merely seems to be urging what Gerard Genette calls “plausible” silences and I all articulate silences--the “Pleasure...derived from the reader’s ability to keep the allegory out of sight” [ellipsis in this quote is Heuving’s]--at other times she suggests that something inarticulate or unrepresentable is at work... Moore’s poetic quest--as I will be developing at some length--is doubly paradoxical: to write a universal poetry which includes her perspective as a woman and to construct a universal consciousness out of a “direct treatment of the ‘thing.’” (20-21) In both cases, but for different reasons, Moore is working within and against a symbolic or specular form of expression. (24) As a woman, Moore encounters a poetic tradition which claims to consist of the universal expression of strong speakers when it is in fact structured by a masculine specular economy in which woman as other subtends the representation. (25) Note how that last sentence opposes not only two “claims” re: what the poetic tradition consists of, but also two critical vocabularies. Just as masculist prose can define woman’s position without ever addressing the subject directly, so too can a critic denigrate another’s claim on levels other than that of statement. Heuving uses Irigaray to underwrite her position that lyric poetry, especially Romantic and Post-Romantic poetry, are particularly dependent on a specular aesthetic, “a sense that the speaker is reflected in some unique way by the poem’s representation of that which is outside of or other than the speaker.” And though many women poets take part in this aesthetic, it is “made problematical for a woman by her own figuring as the ultimate other, the ‘projective map’ that ‘guarantees the system.’” (25) Thus Moore does not, probably cannot, completely refuse to take part in specular conventions, but she can and does use her poetry to critique those conventions. Heuving discusses the extent to which all Modernist poetry was engaged in such a critique in its attempt to “free” the “thing” from the abstract and symbolizing language of the 19th century, but her comparison of Moore to a few of her contemporaries (in the next chapter, “Moore’s ‘High Modernism’”) makes clear the more intensive and extensive nature of Moore’s critique. What is less clear is the extent to which these functions of Moore’s early work were intended. I say “functions of” because there is no doubt the poems elicit these thoughts and analyses in many readers. Heuving suggests that Moore’s reticence may have been motivated less by needs for self-protection than by “unwillingness to reinscribe existing gender determinations. She rather elected to address her engendered difference primarily through the subtleness of the poetic medium itself, , for as Moore herself stated: ‘in making works of art, the only legitimate warfare is the inevitable warfare between imagination and medium.’” (27) [This quote is from a 1926 comment on artists in The Dial, which begins “’It is seldom that the professed grounds correspond with the real motives of a war,’ we are told...” Note Moore’s typical deflection of attribution in making this statement. It is worth thinking about the extent to which critics are forced to ransack Moore’s prose writings on other subjects in order to construct her positions on poetry. In the 692 pages of the Complete Prose, fewer than half a dozen pieces could be classed as essays on poetry per se, though many more are reviews of poetry and thus contain both direct and indirect expressions of poetic value. She is not slow to criticize, in the prose or in letters, the gendered excesses of her male peers -- she once asked if the view of women in Pound’s Cantos was not “older-fashioned than that of Siam and Abyssinia” -- nor did she flinch from rebuking women poets who assumed their assigned gender roles too eagerly. --ST] What may be of equal relevance, though, is Moore’s uneasiness with self-consciousness. Heuving reminds us of this by quoting “Feeling and Precision,” a late essay on poetry -- “Voltaire objected to those who said in enigma what others had said naturally and we agree; yet we must have the courage of our peculiarities.” [Note the attribution, the affirm-and-deny maneuver, and the lack of an assertive “I.” --All signatures of Moore’s complex construction of authority without dominance.] Heuving goes on to caution us, however, that to equate this uneasiness with “discomfort with an actual ‘self,’” is simplistic and discounts the complex conditions of her poetic expression. (29) From “Adverse Ideas” to “Agreeing Difference” Heuving’s third and fourth chapters trace Moore’s development from an early poetry of “adverse ideas” to a phase (in some of the poems of Observations) of “agreeing difference.” The phrase “adverse ideas” captures the various oppositional stances of Moore’s pre-1918 poetry. Heuving suggests that Moore’s apparent lack of relation to the literary tradition that preceded her [a view of Moore that persists, despite her voluminous reading and specific engagement with a large number of writers] results from her inability to write as a man and her unwillingness to write from a secondary subject position as Woman within the male tradition. The early poems are not free of tradition, but are, in fact, adversarial responses to it.# Heuving attributes Moore’s development from terse, early poems to the “rich, verbal complexity” of her best early work to her discovery of two rhetorical modes-- the modes of contrariety and of the fantastic. The term “contrariety” denotes for Moore the desirable condition in which two opposing terms or both sides of a contention are equally true. The word appears first at the bottom of a manuscript page, where Moore typed: “The place where contrarieties are not equally true is nothing to me.” (50) Unlike Blake’s “contraries”, which may have contributed to her concept, Moore’s “contrarieties” do not “articulate and empower one another,” but more often result in “paradoxes and conundrums--in self-canceling or “duplicitous” speech, disclosing unresolvable contradictions.” (51) The mode of the fantastic creates a comparable play of meanings by “creating uncertainty as to whether the events of her poems are to be taken as natural or supernatural and whether their languages are to be read on a literal, allegorical, or symbolic level.” (51) Heuving cites Tzevtan Todorov’s contention (in The Fantastic) that the fantastic (which causes a reader to “hesitate” between possibilities when interpreting a text) is limited to the 19th century, before psychoanalysis replaced “its troubling darkness.” She sides, however, with Christine Brooke-Rose, who argues in A Rhetoric of the Unreal that our 20th century crisis in which “‘reality’ is increasingly difficult to locate and define is itself a form of the fantastic. “For Brooke-Rose, the reader’s hesitation does not occur only with respect to whether an event is natural or supernatural, but whether to read texts on a literal, allegorical, or symbolical level.” (51) This extension of the definition of “the fantastic” is important to much 20th century literature, and specifically to Moore because [f]or Moore, both the modes of contrariety and of the fantastic open up a play of meanings which enable her to encounter and engage in symbolic discourse while maintaining a position “elsewhere.” That is, Moore can engage the meanings of the larger literary tradition and system of representation without having to assume a singular or identificatory (specular) stance. Moore’s modes of contrariety and of the fantastic are highly inventive attempts to construct textual reality that bespeak her and to address corresponding troubling psychological dilemmas--her anxiety at becoming an author. Indeed, much of Moore’s “adverse” poetry concerns itself, on the one hand, with the uses and misuses of language, and on the other hand, with those persons and power structures which inspire and prohibit her expression. Frequently, then, Moore’s poetry of contrariety provides a critique of the system of representation and a way of situating herself within it. Her poetry of the fantastic manifests more directly her psychological discomfiture at assuming a position of authority within a literary tradition that discourages, when it does not prohibit, women’s accession to powerful speaker and writer roles. (51-52) Adoption of these modes allows Moore to avoid a singular critical stance toward that which she dislikes or refuses. She can enter into the play of meanings “which articulate and define her existence, whether she likes them or not. Moore, inharmoniously situated within the larger literary tradition, is seeking a means of writing a poetry of harmonious equilibrium. However, in order to do so as a woman, she establishes forms of ambiguity which disclose and confound, rather than blend and unify, differences. (53) Heuving marks the change from “adverse poems” to those of an “agreeing difference” in 1917-18, when Moore begins to move from poems of address (and of praise & blame) to poems of description. These new poems have a more agreeable tone and more ordinary language and they seem to pursue an unmediated seeing--always problematical, but especially so for Moore. Indeed, the defining paradox of this phase of her work seems to be that between “unmediated seeing” and problems of perception and perspective--such as are addressed in “In the Days of Prismatic Colour” and “A Grave.” Put in her own terms, it is a conflict between a seeing that arises in adversity and yet wishes to express “the genuine”-- a conflict perfectly expressed in the original, longer version of “Poetry”. (83-84) Moore partially resolves the difficulty between a mediated and an unmediated seeing--between an adverse and agreeing perspective--in her poetry of lists and collage, methods employed in many of her most significant poems... Unlike earlier poems in which Moore establishes her difference through singular speakers promulgating a barrage of languages, in these poems Moore establishes her difference, her “elsewhere,” by playing language against language more variously--utilizing a range of voices and intensities. She can simultaneously affirm phrases that have been “said in the very best way” and relativize them through ironic juxtapositions that deliberately misuse or misread them. That is, Moore can attain the very expansiveness and agreeableness of one situated within a “universal” poetics while investigating and expressing her own alienation from its centrist vision. (85) Another reason for situating the change in Moore’s work in 1917 is her new emphasis at that time on not “entangling herself” in the negative. She wrote her last “fantastic poem of simple contempt” in 1916. Also in that year, her prose begins to assert that neither the thing contemplated nor the consciousness of the artist should attempt to overpower the other--she nicks authors under review for errors in either direction. (85-86) In her own poems of this time, Moore uses a single “thing” as the focus of each poem, thus establishing a nominal coherence and authority. Where the earlier poems often used direct address to establish coherence and authority (as a kind of framework on which she constructs her rants) she now pays “proper attention” to an object or subject, reducing the stress on her own subjective response to it. This reduction of point of view and elevation of the object frees her from “those demands for discursive coherence that confine her poetry to existing thought and argument. She thereby, in Williams’ words, is able to increase the ‘multiplication of impulses that by their several flights, crossing at all eccentric angles, might enlighten.’” (86) Or, to mingle the terminology of French feminists with Moore’s own figures, she creates a “fluid écriture--a sea of shifting with no weather side.” (87) Heuving categorizes the poems of 1918-21 as “meditations on perspective and artistic vision” and “direct seeings.” She discusses in this context “Poetry,” “In the Days of Prismatic Colour,” “The Fish,” “An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish,” and “A Grave.” (87-99) The poems of 1920-22 are distinguished as a transition phase, in which list poems begin the transformation toward collage. Here Heuving deals with “England,” “When I Buy Pictures,” “New York,” “The Labours of Hercules,” and “People’s Surroundings.” These poems, too, establish authority via a nominally unified subject, while at the same time approaching “the fluid writing of a feminine écriture as described by Cixous.” They are distinguished from the latter, however, by a commitment to “a kind of quotidian or ‘middling’ consciousness” and the “palpability of phenomena.” That is, while Moore wants to keep the edges of phenomena and their defining attributes visible, she also contradictorily desires her reader to see what these edges enclose--the middles or insides. Certainly Moore’s focus on the usual as well as the unusual, rather than on the powerful, is a choice of those objects and qualities which are relatively free from overdetermined and reified valuations that overwhelm more fluid realities and possibilities. (100) The poems themselves refer to this fluid aesthetic, and, even when unstated, the metonymic function of this aesthetic is plain: no one thing is defined in isolation but is modified through its association with many other things. Heuving addresses the difficulties of ending such a poem by examining three endings for “When I Buy Pictures.” (See Moore’s Prosody, in this workbook) (103-104). In her fifth chapter, “No Weather Side”, Heuving examines the poems she considers the peak of Moore’s achievement: the collage poems. She begins with a discussion of “Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers, and the Like” as a poem that stands on the threshold of full collage technique, a transition poem between list and collage, which achieves its authority via a “mere illusion of unity caused by the intense drama of the interacting parts.” (114) This poem makes up the third strand in Moore’s original notebook entries for what became “Marriage” and “An Octopus”. These notes are “part of a query into the relationship between gender and forms of representation and thought.” And while they do not strictly speaking make up a triptych, their shared origin encourages us to consider them as a unit. (“Novices” and “Silence” are also worth reading as part of this cluster, particularly as the aesthetic thematized on “Novices” becomes in the later poems the principle of composition.) (115-120) Where in “Marriage” Moore treats the problem of heterosexual union and criticizes “relationships of hierarchical dualities,” in “An Octopus” and “Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns” she turns to the broader problem of unities and opposites. “Indeed, much of the work of the poems seems to be to destabilize and confound such hierarchical dualities as unity and diversity, depth and surface, original truth and representation, simplicity and complexity, and sublime and picturesque.” (121) Heuving’s last chapter, “Overstatement: The Later Poems and a Diminished Vision” argues that [while] her earlier poetry enunciates Moore’s difference from dominant cultural meanings, her late poetry largely capitulates to them. For the first extended time in her poetic career, Moore promotes only one side of a proposition, wiring a poetry of thematic and symbolic unity. Indeed, Moore re-enlists many of the hierarchical dualisms carefully subverted in her earlier poetry, frequently promoting the conventionally privileged or valued term. (141) This paragraph could describe many critics’ evaluation of Moore’s late work; what is unusual in Heuving is that she applies this description not only to work of the late 1940’s onward, but to some of the 1932-1944 poems much valued by other readers. She prefaces her demonstration by pairing early and late poems on similar subjects (e.g. “The Fish” and “What Are Years”, “Silence” and “Propriety”). She then examines two groups of poems from the later work--the animal/self-portrait poems of the 1930s and poems of the 1930s through the 1950s promoting “feminine” attributes. Notes from Cristanne Miller: “An ‘Unintelligible Vernacular’: Questions of Voice.” From Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) pp 61-92: Miller heads this chapter with two quotations from Moore-- Poetry is an unintelligible unmistakable vernacular like the language of the animals--a system of communication whereby a fox with a turkey too heavy for it to carry, reappears shortly with another fox to share the booty. --”Ideas of Order”, Complete Prose 329 And America... the wild man’s land; grass-less, links-less, language-less country--in which letters are written not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand but in plain American which cats and dogs can read! -- “England”, Complete Poems, 19 As she argues in her first chapter (which you have read), Miller reads Moore as displaying both Modern and Postmodern traits. Moore is modern, she argues here, in her belief that “both accurate observation and communication on topics of moral importance are possible, even if ultimately inadequate.” (61) In her early essay, “The Accented Syllable,” Moore defines voice in terms of tone and argues that “voice is dependent on naturalistic effects”--a Modernist sentiment. Yet in the review quoted above [and elsewhere in her prose] she veers toward the postmodern. Thus, Miller’s chapter focuses on Moore’s juxtaposition of illocutionary, directly interactional and vernacular elements of verse with others that lean toward unintelligibility, representing the poem as artificial, constructed, a product of convention. Combining these elements constitutes another of her several tactics for restructuring the lyric poem so that it directly engages an audience in a mode reminiscent of conversation without invoking an authority of personal presence, natural voice, or iconic elevation. (62) [Spokenness and “Natural” Voice] Postmodern critics, including Marjorie Perloff, whom Miller quotes, have argued that “one generation’s innovative constructions become the “natural” voice of the next generation and that “all notions of ‘nature’ in verse are constructed, that all concepts of authenticity, or authentic voice are fictions constructed by dominant critical voices. “Verbal formulas and poetic structures (colloquial idiom, ‘free’ verse, the fiction of immediacy) gain authority as representing the natural or sincere even though they are no more than conventions agreed upon by literary and critical communities.” (62-63) Moore’s relations to natural or personal voice are complex. Miller quotes Kenner in a Homemade World asserting that for Moore “the poem is a system, not an utterance, though one can trace an utterance through it. A thing made, then, not a thing said.” [A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (Random House, 1974) 102]. Yet her subjects include animals and plants, and her poems often eulogize the “natural”. In interviews she consistently insisted on her desire to be clear, plain, and to write “in straight order, just as if I had not thought it before and were talking to you. Unstrained and natural.” [To Grace Schulman, quoted in Schulman’s Marianne Moore: The Poetry of Engagement, University of Illinois Press, 1986. 21, 45-46. Schulman argues that Moore’s poetry is “natural” and speech-like.] What many critics ignore, Miller points out, is that in these statements “natural” is nowhere defined. If it has to do with speech--as Moore’s use of the word seems to do--then what is “natural” is contingent on the upbringing, education, and temperament of the speaker. Also important to remember is that when Moore speaks of naturalness she frequently inserts an oxymoronic qualifier--as in “unintelligible...vernacular.” (63) In the longer version(s) of “Poetry”, the poetic voice is not the natural voice: raw material is distinguished from the imaginary garden. What Moore is truly famous for is not a “natural voice” at all, but what Miller calls a “naturalistic...effect within an ostentatiously constructed form. In her oft-quoted description of how her syllabic stanzas were made, Moore revealed, in fact, that in each poem only one originary stanza was composed “organically.” The others were then patterned after it. (64) Thus Moore’s “naturalistic” effect is constructed from a combination of “natural” and “artificial” elements--a tension that parallels the tension between spoken, engaging tones and those that are more distancing. “The stress here is not on authenticity or naturalness in an imitative sense but on a process of thought. Moore’s verse indeed follows the rhythms of syntax, but these are not necessarily the rhythms of speech.” (65) If anything, her “speech” (as Robert Pinksy has pointed out) sounds like a parody of social discourse--including both “male assertion” and “female charm”. # [Illocutionary Effects] Miller takes this a step further, arguing that Moore’s way of communicating is structured on implied dialogue or response, a trait she links to Moore’s study of not only Henry but William James--who (in Psychology and elsewhere) championed scientific empiricism & precision in language. Another of Moore’s early influences was Gertrude Buck, a Vassar College professor who argued against dominant ideas of rhetoric as battle, in which opponents maintain fixed positions until one is proven false & must be abandoned. Instead, Buck substituted a model of rhetoric as an activity of social dependence and emotional interaction. (65-66) Miller then touches on recent theories of language structure, particularly those emphasizing dialogue and a co-operative principle. Structures of speech that depend for their meaning upon interaction with an audience--rather than, for example, upon truth-value, narrative development, or providing information--are called illocutionary, and the speech-like or interactional element of Moore’s poetry stems primarily from such structures. 67) Illocutionary speech acts “cannot carry out what they say without the willing involvement of a listener or reader.” (68) Direct Address/Questions/Correcting Herself: The most obvious and powerful illocutionary form is the direct address--frequent in Moore. Questions also imply dialogue with an audience. (Moore’s use of the direct “you” in early poems addressed to a particular subject (Browning, Blake, Disraeli, Yeats, Biblical heroes, the steam roller, etc.) is not illocutionary because “you” is clearly not the reader: we merely eavesdrop. Miller speculates that this may be one reason Moore dropped the usage.) (69) Moore’s address is seldom that of apostrophe--if we agree with Miller to use that term only when the poem conforms to romantic conventions of distance and exaltation, sublimity, and revelation of the perceiving self. Nor is her “I” engaged in soliloquy--it merely reveals a preference or state of mind. Use of the present tense contributes to a sense of immediacy and presence, as do instances of the speaker making promises or vows toward her readers (as in “Bowls”) or correcting herself. Miller claims this very-present and sometimes interactive “I” distinguishes Moore’s work from the “promotional prose” model taken for it by some critics. This is especially so when the “I” is gratuitous, in constructions such as “He said--and I think I repeat his exact words” (in The Past Is the Present) or “as/I have said” (in “The Plumet Basalisk”). Moore creates an even stronger interactive fiction--the fiction that the composition process is still going on, is coterminous with our reading of the poem--when she inserts correctives to herself and directions to the reader. (69-70) In the 1920s and 30s, Margaret Holley has pointed out, Moore rarely used “you” or “I” in any personal sense. Instead, “we” asserts her closeness to readers, without necessarily invoking a context of exchange or response. (71) Negative Constructions: Other tags suggesting speech include Moore’s frequent use of negative constructions--negation implying the pre-existence of another person’s affirmation: that is, argument. Moore’s negative constructions are often emphasized by placement at the head of a line or stanza, diction, line break, syntactic inversion, or use of double negatives. She sometimes combines explicit negation with the implied negative of a conjunction such as “but,” “although” or “yet.” (71-73) Beginnings & Endings: Illocutionary endings are also common in Moore, and Miller notes that illocutionary beginnings and endings often make the poems speech-like even when the diction is primarily technical or formal within and when not a single sentence of the poem might actually have been spoken. The poem... announces a speaker’s presence at the outset, as it were, and then moves on to what is to be said. (73) [The Spoken vs. the Made] All of which links Moore to Whitman, as does the accumulation of detail, the broad range of dictions, and the long lines incorporating prose rhythms. Their similarities, though, also serve to highlight their differences--such as Whitman’s end-stopped, line-based prosody and his continuing reliance on the fiction of his own natural presence. And thus Miller arrives at a key element in the making of Moore’s voice: ...while Whitman seems almost to instruct his audience how to hear and “read” his voice, Moore plays syntax against lineation in ways that make reading (and especially reading aloud) an adventure One must continually decide whether to mark written aspects of the verse (rhyme, line-endings) vocally and hence disrupt the syntactic flow, or to forgo vocalizing any aspect of lineation, and hence read the verse like prose. Moreover, some of Moore’s syntax is so complex and so bereft of the clearly lineated rhetorical parallelism of Whitman’s complex sentences that one can unravel all its parts only after prolonged study, if at all, and the voice alone cannot carry the syntactic embedding and parallelism. In Moore’s poetry, syntax or phrasing, and hence any sense of “voice” or form as an extension of the physical body (Whitman’s revolutionary version of organicism), functions in tension with lineation and stanza form rather than in harmony with them. (74) Miller quotes James Scully again on the cultural and historical contexts of a poet’s formal choices and notes that in the context of the Modern preference for the “natural” free verse line Moore has assumed a marked responsibility for her structures and for what Scully calls the “social transaction” of her texts. (74-75) [Stanza & Rhyme] Miller then discusses Moore’s uses of meter and rhyme--the primary elements marking her verse as artificial and “made.” In “The Fish” for example, no line and no stanza is self-contained, every sentence, every major phrase and even some words are enjambed. The syllabic count bears no relation to the words--except so far as we can imagine a wave-like action in the alternation of long and short lines. Moore’s form in such a poem is playful. The poet’s craft reveals itself in precisely this play, in her ability to place words appropriately within the severe limits of such a logically unpredictable form--for example, giving “defiant edifice” a line of its own; suspending he sentence-concluding adjective “dead” across a stanza break; or, earlier, dividing the alliteratively lovely phase “sun,/split like spun/glass” among three lines to slow the reader’s movement though it. And this crafted enjambment of the syntax against the abstract grid of syllables indicates how fundamentally arbitrary that grid is. Playing counted syllables against syntax depends on a process of reading, not hearing, the poem. (76) Like Moore’s stanzas, her rhyme highlights the craft of her poetry and the static conventionality of verse in which rhyme sounds occur with a regularity that might be mistaken for natural. In a brilliant use and parody of this convention rhyme occurs with visual regularity in much of Moore’s verse but, because of the uneven line lengths of a syllabic stanza, varying lapses of time and stress occur between rhyme sounds and hence the ear does not know when to anticipate the end of a line, or a rhyme: it might be after one syllable or after twenty-eight. Moreover...Moore’s end-rhymes are often syntactically unstressed. Moore may also pun on conventional terminology for rhyme as either masculine (strong, full, perfect) or feminine (unstressed polysyllabic, weak) through her typical reliance on “feminine” rhymes in combination with obviously artificial constructions of “masculine” rhyme... For example, returning to “The Fish”, the technically masculine rhyme of “ac-” and “lack” calls attention to the wrenching of the word necessary to fulfill this convention. The mixed rhymes of “all/external” and “dead./Repeated” are more typical of Moore’s rhyme combinations of all styles and classes of words. Moore is also one of the great experimenters with rhyme in English, rhyming monosyllables with mid-word syllables, and creating a variety of consonantal, homophonic, sight, and two-syllable rhymes. (76-77) [Quotation & Allusion] The dense interweaving of quotation and allusion also stress the writtenness of Moore’s verse. The speaking voice could never recreate the pitch, tone and other distinctions between what is and is not borrowed [though the reading-aloud voice has a good time trying!]. Moore’s notes to many poems also contribute to a background of intertextuality, an emphasis on selection and compilation, against which the spoken aspects of her craft play their counterpoint. (77) [Diction & Syntax/Aphoristic Phrases] Moore’s diction creates a similar tension between the highly constructed and the apparently natural. Polysyllabic, Latinate diction dominates the more colloquial. Static “to be” and “have” verbs dominate active ones. And a phrasal structure of parallel noun series and appositive phrases dominates the syntax. Miller reads as emblematic of the whole technique Moore’s practice of embedding aphorisms between or within long and complex sentences. Readers seize on such phrases as “ethical crystallizations” (Richard Howard) or “slogans” (Marie Borroff) -- which Miller points out is merely a way of clinging to temporary clarity in a sea of complexity and detail. “[I]t seems unreasonable,” she says, “to read such phrases as isolated moments of forever stable truth. Instead, they provide a temporary clarifying function... To be fully understood they must be returned to the complexity of the context in which they are embedded, so that their aphoristic clarity becomes a prismatic rather than a lazer-like ray for illuminating various aspects of their context.” (78) There follows a reading of “In the Days of Prismatic Colour”. (78- ) in which she concludes: Between the purity of crystalline light and the sophistication of Apollonian art lies shadow, the place where “complexity is not a crime” and some things may yet be “plain.” Moore never describes such a middle ground, let alone identifies it with feminism, the appearance of Eve, or her own prose-like revision of traditional “feet,” yet the poem powerfully suggests these associations. Here Moore identifies truth with a process of negation, contradiction, and modification, all verbal characteristics in distinct contrast to Adamic language or Lacan’s symbolic, with its representation in the law. Moore’s truth lies in a world of complexity rather than of name-giving. By calling attention in the first line to Eve’s absence from Adamic isolation and clarity, Moore suggests that the complexity of her art may be identified with the presence of women--not as essentialized beings but insofar as their presence represents the inclusion of otherness, “complexity,” or the murky world in which both men and women live, speak, and create.(82-83) Miller places this poem at one end of Moore’s scale of variation in the interplay of speech and artifice. There is nothing colloquial or informal in its tone or surface. Its illocutionary effects are minimal (concentrated at the beginning and end), its lines and stanzas appear to be arbitrary in shape, the end-rhyme is unobtrusive. Its speaker makes her presence known, however, in seeming to be at odds with the world, exasperated with the world that values Adamic clarity over “the nuance of shadow or complexity linked with Eve.” Thus the poem seems to carry on an argument despite its lack of a “speaking” voice. (83) In such a poem, Miller tells us, as in many of Moore’s poems, “one looks to the contrasting or odd statement rather than to the dominant tone for a key to the poem’s tonal riddle.” (86) [Humor] After a discussion of a poem of 1947, “Voracities and Verities Sometimes Are Interacting”, Miller turns to a discussion of Moore’s humor, a feature “that may be both tonal and structural, idiomatic and formal... While not illocutionary, Moore’s wit functions interactively: a barbed remark or innuendo depends on the assumed presence of a listener who will share the fun.” Humor also distinguishes Moore’s poems from the romantic lyric and the sentimental lament--two modes that tend toward the solemn. (90) Playfulness also suggests a possible response--a counteractive to the tendency of language [especially written language] to create one-way communication. Moore’s playfulness not only invites a reader into the poem, it also creates a position for her own responses to literary tradition and patriarchal culture. By emphasizing, through play, the artificial and arbitrary nature of all literary convention, Moore can “puncture any hierarchical elevation of poet over reader, or poetic over critical response.” (91) Moore’s choice of both “gusto” and “idiosyncrasy” as key terms defining artistic excellence signifies the importance of [playfulness] to her poetic. “Gusto” fits exactly the singular associative leaps, puns, and word play that characterize Moore’s verse...This is not the playfulness of a romantic idealization of childhood or of Freudian socialization and repression of asocial tendencies; nor is it a play-acting of disguise. Instead idiosyncrasy, gusto, an appreciation of the humorous even in contexts far from funny establishes a site of creative possibility, opens a space beyond fixed truths, conventions, perfection... Moore defines creativity broadly as ‘a kind of mental playfulness’...Play serves Moore as a field where knowledge, art, personal inclination, and the duty of the public speaker combine. Or, to return to Moore’s vocabulary, it combines ferocity and grace with gusto in maintaining the communicative openness she sees as crucial to responsible art. (91) [Reader Participation] What is, finally, the most illocutionary of effects in Moore is her ability to bring the reader into the process of thinking, or weighing and considering, of contending. This involves not just the interactive effect of repeated illocutionary structures but a redefinition of poetry, or art, as accessible, open, imperfectly beautiful or polished, and playful. In such a poetry, the poet’s authority results not from expressions of genius, passages of lyric loveliness, personal experience and attributes, or demonstrated knowledge of a tradition or the tools of a craft, but instead from the poet’s degree of success in engaging the reader profoundly and actively in the concerns and the construction of her poems. Such a poetry draws a reader not to identify, sympathize, or simply enjoy, but to figure out just where the poet stands--when is complexity a crime? why do poets fuss, and why shouldn’t they?--and through that process to understand more about her or his own positioning. (91-92) [That this participatory effect is in clear tension with the difficulties of the surfaces of the poems, including their form, remains unstated. What is more interesting, though, is that for the right readers this difficulty is not off-putting but involving. It creates what Charles Bernstein has called a “souped-up poetic engine” to absorb us into the poem, thus creating a stronger ultimate response than would a simpler poem. --ST] In subsequent chapters, Miller “turns away from the structures of the poems themselves to ways in which Moore’s responses to contemporary social issues--particularly politicized concepts of gender and race--both figure in and shape this poetic that attempts to construct and to share a nonhierarchical authority.” (92) She then concludes by touching briefly on the work of more recent women poets who participate in what she sees as a similar aesthetic. If you are interested in thinking about Moore’s themes in depth, you may want to read Miller’s latter chapters and John Slatin’s The Savage’s Romance, which makes particularly interesting arguments about her poems of the 1930s and early 1940s.