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Modernist Women Poets:
Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Lorine Niedecker
SPRING 2005 / SUSAN TICHY / THURSDAYS 7:20-10:00 / EAST BUILDING 134
Marianne
Moore: weeks 2-5
RGE
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week 4: Feb 17: Gender & Authority
Today you must turn in a draft of either your Moore paper or the introduction to your Moore anthology.
Our discussion this week will take up some specific issues of gender and writerly authority in Moore’s poems and will culminate with a discussion of "An Octopus." We will start by looking at a selection of Moore’s poems through DuPlessis’ critical lens, reading them as critiques of the foundational notions of lyric and as poems of a new (“New Woman”?) subject position. From there we will extend to Cristanne Miller’s discussion of the various ways Moore creates and negotiates poetic authority. Both discussions should point us to the other major theme of Moore’s 1920s work, the un-seducible “self-ness” of art and beauty, and all three should feed into a thorough romp on the slopes of Mt. Ranier.
REQUIRED READING & REREADING:
Poems of Marianne Moore:
Little Magazines: To A Steam Roller 92, To Statecraft Embalmed 93, Those Various Scalpels 116, Sojourn in the Whale 119, In the Days of Prismatic Color 136, Picking and Choosing 138
The Dial Years: England 141, When I Buy Pictures 144, A Grave 145, New York 146, People's Surroundings 149, Novices 152, Silence 163, An Octopus 167, To a Snail 174
Lyrics & Sequences: The Hero 187, The Plumet Basilisk 196, Bird-Witted 217, Virginia Britannia 212
World War II & After, 1940-1956: The Paper Nautilus 238, He Digesteth Hard Yron 243
The Magic Flute, 1956-1965: Blessed Is the Man 294
Reading Packet from the book store:
DuPlessis, “Corpses of Poesy”
Cristanne Miller, “’Inquisitive Intensity’ in Marianne Moore”
On Line Reading:
Instructor’s Notes: Quotes from Moore's prose, Notes on the criticism of Jeanne Heuving & Cristanne Miller
Reading at the JC Reserve Desk:
Marianne Moore, Complete Prose: Untitled comment p. 176, beginning “It is seldom that the professed grounds correspond with the real motives of a war...” ; “Emily Dickinson,” p. 290
RECOMMENDED READING:
At the JC Reserve Desk:
For examples of content-based feminist criticism of Moore, see Sandra Gilbert: “Marianne Moore as Female Female Impersonator,” and/or Alicia Ostriker: “Marianne Moore, the Maternal Hero, and American Women’s Poetry,” both in Marianne Moore: The Art of a Modernist, ed. Jay Parisi.
Joanne Felt Diehl: “Marianne Moore: Toward an Engendered Sublime,” and “The ‘Piercing, Melting Word’: Moore’s ‘Octopus’,” both in Diehl’s Women Poets and the American Sublime. Look at these if you are interested in the Sublime or in Moore in relation to American Romanticism. She also discusses the notebook passages from which these poems evolved.
