Synthesizing Gravity by Kay Ryan

Author:Kay Ryan [Ryan, Kay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802148193
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2020-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. Grace Schulman (Viking, 2003)

Fidget and Gnash

“The handkerchiefs almost frighten us by their perfection.” Who but Marianne Moore could possibly have written this? Her Selected Letters (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997) offers up a ridiculous sublimity of letter-writing in which nothing, not the least gift of handkerchiefs, escapes meticulous apostrophe. We are not just talking precision of expression here; we are talking the very torments of rapture and the characteristic strain they put on the fabric of Moore’s sentences: “Even a bungler must see that maintained rectangles in drawn-work so tenuous and complicated, required genius and many years’ apprenticeship; and the fineness of the material is to begin with a constant wonder.” Everything all the way around the unassailable fact of Marianne Moore’s genius strikes one as slightly, well, slightly comical. We bounce off a truly original mind like rubber balls. Even Elizabeth Bishop, in “Efforts of Affection,” the beautiful memoir of her mentor, is deflected from the central mystery of such a person. Bishop can only gesture toward “the rarity of true originality and the sort of alienation it might involve” and then turn back to the pleasures of anecdote. It is hard not to limn Moore as an endearing character, a precious curio. But of course this is the paradox of Marianne Moore. In a sense her poems, also, are precious curios—which seems like the wrong thing to say about achievements so great and enduring. Marianne Moore compels us to a special discomfort: she represents a sort of sustained impossibility; we are bounced between awe and amusement.

Moore’s letters reveal how literal her poems are, how of a piece with her life. Everywhere is evidence of her darting, delicate, exacting, pan-interested mind. Detail is poetry to her. Throughout her life she receives exotic bric-a-brac from traveling friends. Her exquisite appreciations stimulate further gifts, and the cycle continues, object to object, pleasure irresistibly inviting pleasure, leapfrogging like her poems. She writes to Elizabeth Bishop, “It may be a mistake to pore over minutiae as I do but it makes such work as the carved capitals on the cards of the Madeleine, an active poem.” Nothing that is New York is alien to her—she loves the zoo, naturally, and the Natural History Museum, and all the other museums, but she also loves the ill-attended lecture by an authority on pears, and the rodeo at Madison Square Garden where “one contestant wore carmine goat’s fur chaps with tufts of black goat’s fur inserted at regular intervals, on the principle of kings’ ermine.”

It takes a deep security to endure a life of such endless lightness, tangled delicacy, nearly mad fealty to serial perfections, almost comic probity. Less secure people have to be denser and more flat-footed. The letters help us see what made her so strong. Above all there was her family, which was nearly one creature. It was a small family, her awesome mother with whom she lived until Mrs. Moore died when Marianne was fifty-nine, and her navy chaplain brother, Warner.

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