Poems

Re: "Poetry" and the thankless work of the textual editor

HAP — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:45:50 GMT

Hi Paul, I did as you recommended. I looked up a Donne poem, in “old spelling”. I enjoyed reading it and found it was very easy to read and understand. Of course, that’s pretty much howe I spell, before spell check.

Re: "Poetry" and the thankless work of the textual editor

Robert Pinsky — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:38:34 GMT

As A. Scher points out, Moore in her deadpan way deploys imaginary or mostly-imaginary or figurative raised hair in the context of real behavior by bats and other creatures-- bridging the real and figurative or imaginary with the horse and the critic . . . adding to the list, as though she weren't transforming it, baseball fans and statisticians (a Brooklyn Dodger fan, she must have known that most people in the first category also tend toward the second).

Josh Kellar, the interesting idea raised by Paul Breslin and others is that Moore contrives not to "annihilate" really-- she annihilates with the right hand that puts the comically reduced incarnation in the front and restores in the Notes, with the adjective "original." (Not "old" or "formal.")

Ps

ascherr — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:43:02 GMT

Ps. Come to think of it, all her examples of things we can't understand, like a bat holding on upside down, are known facts that you neither understand or fail to understand, you simply accept them as fact, like entries in an encyclopedia. So I guess what I'm struck by is how she's undercutting--deviously, hilariously-- the very case she's making for poetry even as she's making it. ~Apollinaire

"Poetry" undoes itself in itself, even w/o the textual varia

ascherr — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:35:43 GMT

I love this line from Robert's intro essay: "Such pranks and ambushes allow a lively uncertainty into Moore's art..." and think it applies to the poem itself, as he points out, as much as to the way she laid out her various versions.

For example, what to make of her including in her list of things "genuine" (does she even believe in this idea, or is she jumping the gun: assuming what she needs to argue for?), she includes, "hair that can rise" which of course it can't do--that's not even a literalism of the imagination at this point, it's just a plain old cliche (and I'm sure she knows it--and is doing what the nice fastidious ladies she doesn't want to be confused with do all the time, which is create a caricature of the dotty self everyone takes them for so they can remain--what? safe? unknown? Am not sure).

Anyway, I wonder if anyone else thinks of the hair standing on end phrase when you get to the "useful" things that "become so derivative as to become unintelligible," but which in fact, she insists, have as much truth in them as "a bat holding on upside down"? After all, what's the difference between a bat holding on and a phrase holding on until it's a cliche when a real toad can exist in an imaginary garden?

~Apollinaire

Re: "Poetry" and the thankless work of the textual editor

josh kellar — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:56:01 GMT

Sorry to be late to the discussion today, but one of the virtues is to be able to mull over all the other comments that have popped up. Like Paul Breslin and Zeus-Boy, I do think it is critical to view these two poems as being in dialogue with each other (certainly the later revision is), but I also find it critical to talk about it in relation to the topic Marianne (almost wrote MaryAnn - been reading too many poetry fray comments!) Moore is discussing: namely the ubiquitous dislike of poetry.

I find it amusing that the poem seems capable of inducing, even in its relative brevity, the same accusations of naval-gazing, elitism, and obfuscation of meaning that Moore rails against in the original version.

The most striking thing to me about the entire exercise is what all this commotion seems to draw out of Moore - namely an urge to annihilate the former poem for all its inadequacies, real or perceived. If it weren't for the fact that, as I believe Zeus-boy said in another thread, that Moore gets to have her cake and eat it too by having both these versions, I would say the second version is a somewhat gloomy sentiment: She didn't replace her percieved inadequacies from the first with lines more in tune with whatever aesthetic she found later, but rather she sliced and erased almost to nothingness.

Re: "Poetry" and the thankless work of the textual editor

MaryAnn — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:06:51 GMT

The 1967 version has to be read as an ironic self-critique of the 1924 text, without which it would be of little interest.

Exactly.

Re: "Poetry" and the thankless work of the textual editor

Paul_Breslin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:57:03 GMT

I think the 1967 version depends on the existence of the 1924 version. By 1967 Moore is a very well-known poet, and "Poetry" is a familiar chestnut to her readers. So they open the new collected poems and find that 9/10 of the chestnut is missing, banished to the appendix. The 1967 version has to be read as an ironic self-critique of the 1924 text, without which it would be of little interest.

Re: "Poetry" and the thankless work of the textual editor

MaryAnn — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:13:07 GMT

Paul, I like your comparison to Monet's various haystacks.

For me, the 1967 version is all garden and no toads, all abstraction with no reference back to the genuine details. It's like those "business documents and / school-books" -- important but "not poetry."

"Poetry" and the thankless work of the textual editor

Paul_Breslin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:49:25 GMT

Equipped with our sleekly-edited Norton Anthologies, we can easily forget how heavily-mediated the texts of poems we read may be. (Try an old-spelling edition of Donne and you'll see what I mean.)

In this case, the poet is her own editor. By retaining her early version as an appendix, she upsets the old cardinal rule of textual editing: that the last known intention of the author is the version to be preferred. By making a "both-and" choice, Moore challenges the assumption that only one version of a poem can be legitimate, reducing all others to the subordinate status of drafts. Why in principle shouldn't a poem have multiple versions that can be read in relation to each other, more or less the way Monet's paintings of a cathedral facade or a haystack at different times of day can be seen in relation as a series?

She also makes us reflect on the question of who "owns" a poem once the poet has let it go out into circulation. The phrase "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" is probably the best-known of any that Moore ever wrote. Once it has imprinted in the minds of readers, does she have the power to take it back?

W. H. Auden excluded "September 1, 1939" fom his collected poems later in life on the grounds that he no longer agreed with its ethical pronouncements. People nonetheless go on reading and quoting from "September 1, 1939" and reprinting it in poetry anthologies. (Auden also cut about half of "At the Grave of Henry James," a case that raises another question:are the poet's last intentions necessarily an improvement on earlier intentions? Mightn't a poet over time lose touch with an earlier poem and make it worse by revision?)

As Auden himself wrote in his elegy for W. B. Yeats, "the words of a dead man [or woman] / Are modified in the guts of the living.

"Poetry," said the not-very-famous poet Richard Pevear, in a little chapbook long out of print, "is memorious speech." (Someone "borrowed" the chapbook from me and never returned it, and I haven't seen a copy since, but I go on quoting this remark and thus circulating it among friends, colleagues, students.) What lodges in memory and gets passed along is in this sense "published" past anyone's taking it back.

If forced to choose, I do have the usual preference for the 1924 version. Try this thought experiment: imagine the three-line version as the 1924 text. Would people have made a big fuss over that? Somehow I doubt it. But why do we assume we have to choose? Read together with the 1924 text, the 1967 cut becomes a provocative commentary on the claims of inclusion and exclusion, extravagance and understatement.