Here’s a project. Twenty-six poets take one letter of the alphabet each & write a poem that is supposed to last, when read aloud, no more than two minutes. Each piece also is to focus upon an exhibit, one for each letter, of items from the permanent collection of the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia in celebration of its 50^th anniversary. The museum was the home of rare book dealer A.S.W. Rosenbach and his brother Philip & was created to house & present their personal collection of mostly literary treasuries. Such as the manuscript for Ulysses. Or — and this is the crowning jewel — Marianne Moore’s Greenwich Village living room, completely recreated in this museum that is no larger than a duplex.

 

The poets involved are a diverse lot, to say the least — Linh Dinh & Paul Muldoon, Bob Perelman & Karl Kirchwey, Susan Stewart & W.D. Erhart, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Daisy Fried, Nathalie Anderson, Mytili Jagannathan, even yours truly. My letter is J as in “J is for Juvenile,” and all the objects in my exhibit relate to youth:

 

·         A “pap boat” that looks like small silver gravy dish, intended to feed the young or infirm

·         A “battledoor,” literally an early mode of badminton racquet that was turned in this instance by Jacob Johnson, a Philadelphia printer circa 1810, into a kind of art book children’s alphabet

·         An oil portrait of a child by an unknown artist, circa 1780

·         A photograph of Alice Liddell (the muse of Alice in Wonderland) with her sisters Lorina & Edith taken by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) that ripples with Dodgson’s sense of preteen eros — Alice is literally holding a cherry over the open mouth of a sister.

·         And this, Marianne Moore’s first poem, written at age eight, copied by hand with illustrations not once, but twice:

 

This Christmas morn

You do adorn

Bring Warner a horn

And me a doll

That is all.

 

You can see one of these holographs (the lower one I think) on the page facing page 1 of the new The New Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman.

 

Rachel Blau DuPlessis has “K is for Kinship” & rumor has it that Bob Perelman got “B is for Baseball,” a collection that includes a ball autographed for Ms. Moore by Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle. The terms themselves are all quite quirky — Y is next to D in the exhibit, no doubt because one stands for Yankee, the other for Doodle. Alongside each selection, in Lucite display cases upon pedestals of varying heights, is, most often askew, one or two pages from the American Heritage Dictionary on that letter. For J, for example, there is part of the page that contains the term juvenile as well as the first page, which informs us of the evolution of the letter itself, derived ultimately from the Phoenician yōdh, meaning hand & voiced as the modern y as in boy. The dot over the lower case j turns out to have been imported literally from its neighbor i & save for that detail, what stands out graphically for me is how much the sign itself is characterized by a single stroke of the pen.

 

These poems will all be assembled for a reading on the 28^th of April, joining together the Rosenbach & the National Poetry Month. Some sort of publication is planned as well, tho I doubt it will appear on a battledore.

 

Looking at my own collection, I am taken with how much tension & desire seems apparent in these “innocent” objects, Moore’s desire for toys for her brother & herself, Dodgson/Carrol’s obvious desire for the girls, the anonymous child whose only evidence of having lived might well be this painting. Even the book created from a piece of sports equipment and the feeding dish, which, being silver, was actually given to memorialize a birth, seem caught between dual uses. What I see is a sense of childhood as a place in which everything is defined by what it is not, what it doesn’t have, what is not there.

 

Moore’s rhythms speak to me — they remind me at once of cadences Robert Creeley has used & those also of children’s books. This reminds me also that this museum holds the largest extant collection of the work of Maurice Sendak, whose presentation of the dark side of childhood stands as a polar opposite to the sunny tales of Dr. Seuss. It seems curious that none of the Sendak pieces are among my “juvenile” materials. But those rhythms & that sense are enough to spark something. It goes like this:

 

J is for Juvenile

 

This April eve
you do deceive
with a sign of youth
as an open mouth

or a book laid wide
& a wish supplied
anonymous as a stare
that cried “I was there”

with my silver boat
& a mouth my moat
so never mourn
the boy his horn

 

one stroke to score
his battledoor