One of the gifts I got for Christmas this year was The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman. It is, above all else, a great addition to the availability of major modernist poetic texts. But it also seems a problematic book, only in part for the ways in which Moore herself was a problematic poet.

 

I also received what I would characterize as a less direct gift in the form of an angry (more rhetorically than personally, I hope) email from Curtis Faville, railing at the ongoing idiocy of dividing the world of American poetry into two traditions, whether it’s the New Americans vs. the School of Quietude (SoQ) Edgar Allen Poe identified in the 1840s or more recent variations such as mainstream vs. New American, avant-garde vs. traditional or, as I prefer, post-avant vs. the descendants of Poe’s School of Quietude. “I thought about how angry and disgusted I would be if I imagined that I were one of the poor souls relegated to the exile of the ‘School of Quietude’," Curtis wrote. And I would agree with him to the degree that any characterization of any poet is déjà toujours a mischaracterization. And that both traditions are ensembles of diverse (and sometimes directly conflicting) literary tendencies. But it’s hardly my imagination that such social phenomena exist. One need only read Yusef Komunyakaa’s introduction to the 2003 edition of The Best American Poetry to gauge just how militant conservative poets can be when roused. We have not come all that terribly far since Norman Podhoretz penned “The Know-Nothing Bohemians” nearly fifty years ago.

 

Mostly, though, the School of Quietude’s response to whatever it poses as its Other has been a strategic one of benign neglect. Treating all forms of new or innovative work rather like the madwoman in the attic, in hopes that no one will notice. One sees this behavior most clearly in the various awards short lists that the SoQ promotes via trade publishers and daily newspapers. But it extends to jobs, publication and a wide range of ancillary phenomena that are not poetry per se, but have a lot to do with its social reproduction.

 

Marianne Moore’s relation to all this is, in part, one aspect of her unique contribution to American poetry & poetics – more than any other major modernist, she attempted her entire to life to broker & negotiate the space between these two traditions of poetry. It’s worth contrasting her relationship to The Dial with, say, Ezra Pound’s approach to the problem. In moving to the United Kingdom, one of the things Pound sought to opt out of was precisely this division within American letters (one can read his poem to Whitman in just such terms). Going to work for Yeats certainly was calculated to position Pound well within one side of the mainstream of the British Isles, even as Pound himself was re-inventing a post-Whitman alternative to the SoQ, first with Imagism, later with Vorticism, finally with anyone who would listen. Nor is it an accident that Pound’s most effective social move, really over his entire life, was to colonize what was already an SoQ publication, Poetry magazine. For roughly twenty years – from his placement of H.D., Imagiste, in its pages through Zukofsky’s Objectivist issue in 1931, Pound’s fingerprints are all over Poetry’s contributions to modernism. While it is true that many who followed him in through the door to that venue stayed & made their own independent additions to this phenomenon, the larger truth is that, sans Pound, Poetry would always have been unreadably bad – save for that one curious blip in the second half of Henry Rago’s tenure as editor in the 1960s – and almost certainly would have gone the way of other SoQ ventures into the dustbin of history long ago.

 

Moore on the other hand always appears to have held herself at a personal distance from both literary traditions, although she actively used her position as editor &, later in life when she had become one of the hallowed elders of verse, to quietly promote the work mostly of her friends the modernists. It’s easy (& I think largely accurate) to read Moore as a modernist, but it’s also possible to read her as one of the finest examples of the School of Quietude – right alongside, say, Hart Crane (whose relationship to all this is another long story) before the long decline that starts with Lowell & Wilbur and which continues to this day. To all of this Moore contributes her own layer of obfuscation by publishing, in her lifetime, a Complete Poems that was anything but, with its infamous epigram “Omissions are not accidents.”

 

Schulman’s volume is some 180 pages long before it really even begins to engage the work contained in Complete Poems, starting a poem composed when the poet was just eight years old. It is in this sense that Schulman’s Moore is not unlike Jenny Penberthy’s Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works, a triumph that radically opens up the oeuvre of a major artist.

 

Yet at the same time Schulman is herself a poet deeply connected with the School of Quietude at its quietest. A longtime poetry editor of The Nation whose major contribution has been to narrow down that publication’s aesthetic reach from the days when prior editor Denise Levertov regularly included the likes of Robert Duncan, Paul Blackburn & even Louis Zukofsky, as well as the former director of the 92nd Street Y poetry program, one of the most conservative in the nation, Schulman’s qualifications for editing this volume are two: (1) she was a family friend of Moore’s dating back to her days as a young teenager; and (2) she did her doctoral dissertation on Moore. Ironically, her introduction to the Moore volume recalls in modest detail Moore’s own attempt to question, if not dissuade, Schulman from getting a Ph.D.

 

I have no doubt that Schulman has gone about her task here lovingly & with a great sense of commitment to Moore as a poet. And there are works here that absolutely demand our attention that we would not have had without this new book. Yet I wonder if, twenty or fifty years from now, we won’t find some future Susan Howe writing her own My Marianne Moore, rescuing the work from a long tradition of conservative, conformist editing. Schulman opens herself to just such a charge when she characterizes her editing process as “In the end, I chose what I loved best by a method I can only describe as ‘conscientious inconsistency.’” That’s a claim that casts a huge question mark right at the center of this otherwise delicious act of literary excavation.