Marianne Moore’s poetry for me has always posed the question of the line. Or, perhaps more exactly, the line’s intersection with language, most often speech. I’ve noted before that the line remains the most problematic formal component of contemporary poetry. Yet it is poetry that has recognized & acknowledged that, even prior to the invention of writing, the line is implicit in all language – without it, even an individual spoken word would lack beginning, middle & end. One might well argue that poetry is precisely that medium which foregrounds the presence of the line in language, even if it does so with no great consensus as to what a line might be.

 

Since the age of Wordsworth & Blake, virtually all of the new thinking on the line – which is to say on form at all – has tended to come through various literary tendencies that typically get grouped together under the broader umbrella of the avant-garde. The prose poem, free verse, Projectivism all can be read as discourses on the function of the line in the poem.

 

Moore’s use of the line is distinct for several reasons. Although she often employs rhyme, she does so in an unsentimental mode that often makes clear to the reader that the reiteration of sound is at best incidental:

 

A Roman had an
artist, a freedman,
   contrive a cone – pine-cone
   or fir-cone – with holes for a fountain. Placed on
      the prison of St. Angelo, this cone
      of the Pompeys, which is known

 

now as the Popes’, passed
for art. A huge cast
   bronze, dwarfing the peacock
   statue in the garden of the Vatican,
       it looks like a work of art made to give
       to a Pompey, or native

of Thebes. Others could
build, and understood
   making colossi and
   how to use slaves, and kept crocodiles and put
      baboons on the necks of giraffes to pick
      fruit, and used serpent magic.

 

The positioning of rhyme in the four sentences here in the opening section of “The Jerboa,” is such that it calls attention to the eye, but far less to the ear & pointedly bears no visible correlation to syntax – rather, it denies such a relation – or to pauses that, for Olson or the early Creeley, would have been sharply enunciated enjambments. The result is not only the slightest linebreak known to contemporary poetry, but an ability to write what amounts to good, clean normative prose – it’s a revisitation of what I think of as Alexander Pope’s inversion of the prose poem, formal verse that is in fact (or more especially in spirit) prose. One might even call it silent rhyme.

 

This is not the only kind of rhyme Moore used, nor did she always employ the device, but it is I think her most characteristic formal feature, one well served by her second major distinctness – the use of a vocabulary startlingly large and precise. Thus in “The Fish,” we get a sentence such as the following

 

          The water drives a wedge
   of iron through the iron edge
      of the cliff; whereupon the stars

pink
rice-grains, ink-
   bespattered jellyfish, crabs like green
   lilies, and submarine
      toadstools slide each on the other

 

which hinges on bespattered setting up not only jellyfish but even more critically the caesura that occurs at that comma. It’s a surprising word at that moment & that surprise is crucial to its affect. Moore’s poems are filled with such moments as this.

 

The antimodernist claim to Moore rests in good part on her use of rhyme. Yet the other tradition has often also made use of the device, from Zukofsky & Creeley & Duncan to, more recently, Lee Ann Brown. Like all literary devices, it by itself is neutral & takes no position. Its meaning differs almost use by use, so that the question I always want to pose before Moore’s work (or, for that matter, anyone’s) isn’t of the does-she-or-doesn’t-she variety, but rather to what end? Most often I think she is demonstrating an obsessive degree of control within what might otherwise appear to be “merely prosaic” or even casual language. This in turn makes me wonder what, precisely, is being guarded against, not merely in the poem but in larger terms as well. It’s a question worth considering.