Posts tagged as:

poetry

To An Artificer

January 19, 2010

Marianne Moore Not of silver nor of coral
But of weather-beaten laurel
Carve it out.

II
Make a body long and thin
And carve hairs upon the skin.
Make a snout.

III
On the order of a tower
Faintly wrinkled like a flower
On the paws

IV
Carve out heavy feline toes
Make each claw an eagle’s nose.
Carve great jaws.

—Marianne Moore

Bonus: this from a letter Marianne Moore wrote to Robert McAlmon on September 2, 1921, found on page 179 of her Selected Letters:

You are right; the intellect has not the last word today—any more than it ever had.  Sophistication is no match for nature and as I have written Bryher, I have a respect for nature, blind or conscious.  The blind instinctive behavior of old fashioned unenlightened society has many advantages over our conscious behavior today; psychoanalysis is a fascinating study and in some ways a useful one but it pre-empts too much of the mind and people tend to feel that a situation analyzed is a situation solved.  In rapping marriage on the head as it sometimes does, it is unscientific—when you consider the evolution of the marriage relation and the instinctive tendency to idealize it, and to explain religion away is ludicrously superficial.  Religious conviction, art, and animal impulse, are the strongest factors in life, I think, and any one in the ascendant can obliterate the others.  We see different phases of them, for example, Bryher’s interest in education and in securing freedom to the race, are a tangent of religion.  Religion may be pigeonholed as a transference but religious conviction in operation has always made room for itself over the head of every obstacle.  It is apparent that sincerely religious people are contented and are not easily at their wit’s end.

Tagged as: animals, intellect, marianne moore, nature, poetry, poets, psychoanalysis, religion

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Forces, The Will & The Weather

September 30, 2008

At the time of nougats, the peer yellow
Sighed in the evening that he lived
Without ideas in a land without ideas,
The pair yellow, the peer.

It was at a time, the place, of nougats.
There the dogwoods, the white ones and the pink ones,
Bloomed in sheets, as they bloom, and the girl,
A pink girl took a white dog walking.

The dog had to walk. He had to be taken.
The girl had to hold back and lean back to hold him,
At the time of the dogwoods, handfuls thrown up
To spread colors. There was not an idea

This side of Moscow. There were anti-ideas
And counter-ideas. There was nothing one had. There were
No horses to ride and no one to ride them
In the woods of the dogwoods,

No large white horses. But there was the fluffy dog.
There were the sheets high up on older trees,
Seeming to be liquid as leaves made of cloud,
Shells under water. These were nougats.

It had to be right: nougats. It was a shift
Of realities, that, in which it could be wrong.
The weather was like a waiter with a tray.
One had come early to a crisp cafe.

by Wallace Stevens

nougat

Tagged as: poetry, wallace stevens

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Two Essays

September 16, 2008

Two essays for thought…

1.) “Is Poetry a Job, Is a Poem a Product?” by Murat Nemet-Nejat

Not your typical why-can’t-poets-make-money type of whiny essay, he draws some really cool parallels between poetry and money, observations about class, and audience.

2.) “Sucking” by Ariana Reines

Went to see her read this past week, and came across this essay when I googled her beforehand. Intelligent, funny, personal. I like what she says about shit. And the French.

Tagged as: essays, poetry

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