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cryo_guy's review
4.0
“Poetry
I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one dis-
covers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.”
*
“The word France means
enfranchisement; means one who can
'animate whoever thinks of her.'”
from “Light Is Speech”
*
Hello dear readers!
I picked this one out as my “bathroom book” that I would let sit in the bathroom eschewing the need to always remember to take a book in with me; however, since then I've decided to give up on the idea of a bathroom book because it really isn't ever enough time to read as much as I would like. These poems actually worked out well according to the periods of time I spent in the bathroom, but I finally got to a point where I wasn't moving through the book quickly enough and wanted to finish things so I liberated the tome from the bathroom and did just that. So there's an update on my mundane reading habits. Anyway!
I found this volume at a garage sale in Astoria, OR. It was probably about a few months after I had read the stuff on WCW and had heard Moore mentioned and at around the same time was introduced to her poem “The Fish” by a poetry friend-now lost to the ages I'm afraid! (atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale). The seller up-charged me on it. Turns out this book isn't worth much at all, not that that matters. I wanted to read a nice collection of Moore's and here it was, presenting itself to me—what's seven bucks anyway?
So I brought it back from Oregon. I had been mightily impressed by “The Fish” which is really just a superb poem. But I also wanted to hear a woman poet's take on the period of American life I had gotten an earful from WCW about. Moore was influenced by imagists like Williams and more broadly she embodies the embracing of free verse so common in 20th century modernist American poets. She most often organizes her poetry around syllables and many of her poems indent lines to illustrate the syllabic scheme of her stanzas. Sometimes this makes for disjointed reading especially if one does not fall into the natural rhythm of each poem. Yet, to be generous, more often the rhythm is easy enough to grasp and either the diction, content, or deft use of figures of speech compensates. Now when that stuff doesn't compensate, her poetry gets a bit boring. Some poems the rhythm didn't capture me, on others I didn't quite grasp the social commentary if there were any. Early on in the collection I had the thought, “Well her poetry's pretty good when she isn't going on about some exotic reptile.” She does those exotic animals pretty well though. And, really, how many poets spin some fine words on pangolins, paper nautiluses, jerboas, frigate pelicans, and the like? For me Moore's all about the diction and wordplay, however.
So what then? Well, This is one collection where there are a handful of very excellent poems and the rest just sort of tap out the same tune in between. I wasn't super impressed by it as a whole, but some of her poems are too compelling to ignore as singular pieces. I've mentioned “The Fish,” alongside it is “No Swan So Fine” (excellent), “Poetry,” “In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance Is Good and,” “I May, I Might, I Must,” “Love in America?” (loove this one), “What Are Years?,” “The Student,” and “A Grave.” Check those out if you get a chance. I think her long poems go on a bit too long. I think her voice is a tad too aloof at times, up in the clouds-though in reality I love her manner of contemplating the mere ideas of things. I was a bit put off by the overuse of quotes in some of her poems. She explains that this is part of her process: that she finds some phrase well put and then works it into a broader poem. And I'll admit I do the same thing; the last poem I wrote was organized around a translated phrase from famed Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus. But I suppose what I really mean to say then is that I failed to grasp what many of her quotations attempted to mean. While I may have enjoyed them for their place in the euphony of the poem itself, they lacked a certain additional significance that I expected. Perhaps on further contemplation I would divine such things, but I've got too many other books to read!
It was interesting to read a full collection of Moore's (which this itself is an overview of her poetic periods-although I found it pretty cohesive as a whole), especially in light of WCW. There's some definite influence there, but also stark difference. Some her phrasing reminds me of Cummings too. In sum WCW is a committed imagist, while Moore is more traditional in a modernist way, i.e., goodbye meter, hello syllables. And while I'd love to discourse on the state of modernist poetry in the first half of the 20th century in America, I think you get the picture.
So...recommendations...hmm, I think I would recommend some of her poems, but can't speak to a full collection without knowing you've got some sort of American poetry agenda under your belt. So check out those poems I mentioned if any of this sounds like good poetry to you. I suppose the other thing is her gender, which I'd like to read other women poets from the 20th century. She's an exemplary figure in that regard.
And, since I can't resist, here's “Love in America?” which beat out “The Fish” and “No Swan So Fine” for my favorite:
Love in America?
Whatever it is, it's a passion—
a benign dementia that should be
engulfing American, fed in a way
the opposite of the way
in which the Minotaur was fed.
It's a Midas of tenderness;
from the heart;
nothing else. From one with ability
to bear being misunderstood—
take the blame, with “nobility
that is action,” identifying itself with
pioneer unperfunctoriness
without brazenness or
bigness of overgrown
undergrown shallowness.
Whatever it is, let it be without
affectation.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
~
I suppose I'm still a romantic at heart here. I love hearing her wax on what love is. And to reference Greek myth while operating under its presuppositions of the madness of love, to summon misunderstanding, blame, and nobility, to pair the “bigness of overgrown” with “undergrown shallowness”—Moore clearly is a very capable poet. The last 3 lines won my heart, shard of flint though it be.
I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one dis-
covers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.”
*
“The word France means
enfranchisement; means one who can
'animate whoever thinks of her.'”
from “Light Is Speech”
*
Hello dear readers!
I picked this one out as my “bathroom book” that I would let sit in the bathroom eschewing the need to always remember to take a book in with me; however, since then I've decided to give up on the idea of a bathroom book because it really isn't ever enough time to read as much as I would like. These poems actually worked out well according to the periods of time I spent in the bathroom, but I finally got to a point where I wasn't moving through the book quickly enough and wanted to finish things so I liberated the tome from the bathroom and did just that. So there's an update on my mundane reading habits. Anyway!
I found this volume at a garage sale in Astoria, OR. It was probably about a few months after I had read the stuff on WCW and had heard Moore mentioned and at around the same time was introduced to her poem “The Fish” by a poetry friend-now lost to the ages I'm afraid! (atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale). The seller up-charged me on it. Turns out this book isn't worth much at all, not that that matters. I wanted to read a nice collection of Moore's and here it was, presenting itself to me—what's seven bucks anyway?
So I brought it back from Oregon. I had been mightily impressed by “The Fish” which is really just a superb poem. But I also wanted to hear a woman poet's take on the period of American life I had gotten an earful from WCW about. Moore was influenced by imagists like Williams and more broadly she embodies the embracing of free verse so common in 20th century modernist American poets. She most often organizes her poetry around syllables and many of her poems indent lines to illustrate the syllabic scheme of her stanzas. Sometimes this makes for disjointed reading especially if one does not fall into the natural rhythm of each poem. Yet, to be generous, more often the rhythm is easy enough to grasp and either the diction, content, or deft use of figures of speech compensates. Now when that stuff doesn't compensate, her poetry gets a bit boring. Some poems the rhythm didn't capture me, on others I didn't quite grasp the social commentary if there were any. Early on in the collection I had the thought, “Well her poetry's pretty good when she isn't going on about some exotic reptile.” She does those exotic animals pretty well though. And, really, how many poets spin some fine words on pangolins, paper nautiluses, jerboas, frigate pelicans, and the like? For me Moore's all about the diction and wordplay, however.
So what then? Well, This is one collection where there are a handful of very excellent poems and the rest just sort of tap out the same tune in between. I wasn't super impressed by it as a whole, but some of her poems are too compelling to ignore as singular pieces. I've mentioned “The Fish,” alongside it is “No Swan So Fine” (excellent), “Poetry,” “In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance Is Good and,” “I May, I Might, I Must,” “Love in America?” (loove this one), “What Are Years?,” “The Student,” and “A Grave.” Check those out if you get a chance. I think her long poems go on a bit too long. I think her voice is a tad too aloof at times, up in the clouds-though in reality I love her manner of contemplating the mere ideas of things. I was a bit put off by the overuse of quotes in some of her poems. She explains that this is part of her process: that she finds some phrase well put and then works it into a broader poem. And I'll admit I do the same thing; the last poem I wrote was organized around a translated phrase from famed Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus. But I suppose what I really mean to say then is that I failed to grasp what many of her quotations attempted to mean. While I may have enjoyed them for their place in the euphony of the poem itself, they lacked a certain additional significance that I expected. Perhaps on further contemplation I would divine such things, but I've got too many other books to read!
It was interesting to read a full collection of Moore's (which this itself is an overview of her poetic periods-although I found it pretty cohesive as a whole), especially in light of WCW. There's some definite influence there, but also stark difference. Some her phrasing reminds me of Cummings too. In sum WCW is a committed imagist, while Moore is more traditional in a modernist way, i.e., goodbye meter, hello syllables. And while I'd love to discourse on the state of modernist poetry in the first half of the 20th century in America, I think you get the picture.
So...recommendations...hmm, I think I would recommend some of her poems, but can't speak to a full collection without knowing you've got some sort of American poetry agenda under your belt. So check out those poems I mentioned if any of this sounds like good poetry to you. I suppose the other thing is her gender, which I'd like to read other women poets from the 20th century. She's an exemplary figure in that regard.
And, since I can't resist, here's “Love in America?” which beat out “The Fish” and “No Swan So Fine” for my favorite:
Love in America?
Whatever it is, it's a passion—
a benign dementia that should be
engulfing American, fed in a way
the opposite of the way
in which the Minotaur was fed.
It's a Midas of tenderness;
from the heart;
nothing else. From one with ability
to bear being misunderstood—
take the blame, with “nobility
that is action,” identifying itself with
pioneer unperfunctoriness
without brazenness or
bigness of overgrown
undergrown shallowness.
Whatever it is, let it be without
affectation.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
~
I suppose I'm still a romantic at heart here. I love hearing her wax on what love is. And to reference Greek myth while operating under its presuppositions of the madness of love, to summon misunderstanding, blame, and nobility, to pair the “bigness of overgrown” with “undergrown shallowness”—Moore clearly is a very capable poet. The last 3 lines won my heart, shard of flint though it be.
shanviolinlove's review against another edition
2.0
I wanted so much to like these poems, as I've come across Moore's work intermittently. But her language is far too clunky for my taste. Lines like "Finally its hardihood was / not proof against its / proclivity to more fully appraise such bits ...", "One by one in two's and three's," or "those things into which much that is peculiar can be"; as well as forced enjambments such as "ac- / cident--lack"
launch me out of the poetic register and into syntactical acrobatics. The potential for powerhouse imagery and evocative or creative language is lost with such proper use of grammar, that it reads like prose (and boring prose at that).
That said, poets I do like have praised her work, so perhaps I'm missing something here, but this poet is just not my cup of tea.
launch me out of the poetic register and into syntactical acrobatics. The potential for powerhouse imagery and evocative or creative language is lost with such proper use of grammar, that it reads like prose (and boring prose at that).
That said, poets I do like have praised her work, so perhaps I'm missing something here, but this poet is just not my cup of tea.
mlindner's review
3.0
I feel very stupid in regards to this book.
Moore uses, in her own words, a "hybrid method of composition" (262). She uses lots of (unattributed) quotes; takes a sort of sidelong glance at things, be they animals, objects, people or events; refers a lot to animals, especially more exotic ones; and breaks lines somewhat oddly for emphasis and play; amongst other issues.
I got about 90% of the way through this--constantly wondering who was being quoted or what was being alluded to--before I realized that there are notes to the poems in the back; approx. 255 pages of poetry and 35 pages of notes. While they certainly leave a lot unexplained, they do help. But what I truly feel stupid about--not the not expecting there to be notes on the poems, as how often does that happen?--but that a few months before I began this I came across a citation to this book regarding a child's drawing that had influenced one of the poems. I got up, found the book on the shelf, found the image and poem cited in the book and read it, told myself I ought read this soon, and went back to the book with the reference to it that I was reading. The thing is, the drawing is in the notes section! I guess I forgot. ::sigh::
Anyway, not sure what I think of Moore's poetry. There is so much here. Aspects of it certainly spoke to me, but very few of the poems in their entirety did. A few days ago I was thinking I would weed this once I finished it but now I think I'll hold on to it for now and perhaps re-read it in a year or two and make better use of the notes.
Moore uses, in her own words, a "hybrid method of composition" (262). She uses lots of (unattributed) quotes; takes a sort of sidelong glance at things, be they animals, objects, people or events; refers a lot to animals, especially more exotic ones; and breaks lines somewhat oddly for emphasis and play; amongst other issues.
I got about 90% of the way through this--constantly wondering who was being quoted or what was being alluded to--before I realized that there are notes to the poems in the back; approx. 255 pages of poetry and 35 pages of notes. While they certainly leave a lot unexplained, they do help. But what I truly feel stupid about--not the not expecting there to be notes on the poems, as how often does that happen?--but that a few months before I began this I came across a citation to this book regarding a child's drawing that had influenced one of the poems. I got up, found the book on the shelf, found the image and poem cited in the book and read it, told myself I ought read this soon, and went back to the book with the reference to it that I was reading. The thing is, the drawing is in the notes section! I guess I forgot. ::sigh::
Anyway, not sure what I think of Moore's poetry. There is so much here. Aspects of it certainly spoke to me, but very few of the poems in their entirety did. A few days ago I was thinking I would weed this once I finished it but now I think I'll hold on to it for now and perhaps re-read it in a year or two and make better use of the notes.
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