Birthday: Marianne Moore, baseball, and the conjuration of cars

Marguerite Zorach, Marianne Moore and Her Mother, 1925

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

Poet

A good, sound Presbyterian all her life, was Marianne Moore. Granddaughter of the manse, we’d have said in my childhood; her mother was a minister’s daughter, and they lived with him after Moore’s father had a psychotic episode and was put in an asylum.

Mother and daughter were practically inseparable, living together until Mary Warner Moore died in 1947. Marianne graduated Bryn Mawr in 1909, with a degree in history, politics and economics. She taught at an Indian school for a few years, and for a private club at Lake Placid organized by Melvil Dewey, the creator of the decimal system.

She was remarkably attractive to men and women but never seems to have a had a serious relationship, and never married. Bryher, the partner of the poet H.D.- who was a college classmate of Moore’s for a year, likened Moore to a heraldic pterodactyl.

Mother and daughter moved to New Jersey, then to Greenwich Village in 1918. Moore worked part-time as a librarian; her first books, in 1921 and 1924, won her much acclaim. She edited a literary magazine, The Dial, from 1925 to 1929. She was also a great collector of friends: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound, from World War I on; by letter with the reclusive Joseph Cornell through the 1940s and ‘50s.

She was known for innovative expression within strict form and line counts; she often drew on her Presbyterian faith, writing about issues of strength and adversity, as well as the experimental forms of the British poet Edith Sitwell. Many critics dismissed her work as witticisms for intellectuals, but Eliot- who wrote the preface to one of her collections, said she was one of the masters of modernism, and history has upheld his verdict.

She lived in Brooklyn for 36 years, and wrote poems about the Dodgers. When they left town, she became a Yankees fan, and threw the opening day pitch for them in 1958. Her love of sports was not narrow: she adored Muhammed Ali, and, at 76, she wrote the liner notes for a spoken word album he produced, I’m The Greatest.

After Moore’s mother- a truly odd character who constantly oversaw her daughter’s work and proved an erratic critic- died, Moore, then 60, came into her own. Honors began to shower her. Her 1951 Collected Poems won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The Bollingen Prize came in 1953. Honorary degrees abounded. With her retro look- a cape and tricorn hat- she made good copy, and great TV. She appeared on The Tonight Show With Jack Paar. She took the young poet Elizabeth Bishop under her wing. Her 1954 translation of the fables of La Fontaine, nine years in the making, was a great success.

Perhaps her most unique experience, in a life filled by them, came in 1955. A Ford Motor Company executive wrote, asking her to help them name a new car line:

We should like this name to be more than a label. Specifically, we should like it to have a compelling quality in itself and by itself. To convey, through association or other conjuration, some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design. A name, in short, that flashes a dramatically desirable picture in people's minds.

Moore took Ford at its word. Between October and December Moore sent Ford a number of lists, totted up by Lists of Note to contain forty-three names in all:

The Ford Silver Sword

Hirundo

Aerundo

Hurricane Hirundo (swallow)

Hurricane Aquila (eagle)

Hurricane Accipter (hawk)

The Impeccable

Symmechromatic

Thunderblender

The Resilient Bullet

Intelligent Bullet

Bullet Cloisoné

Bullet Lavolta

The Intelligent Whale

The Ford Fabergé (That there is also a perfume Fabergé seems to me to do no harm, for here allusion is to the original silversmith)

The Arc-en-Ciel (the rainbow)

Arcenciel

Mongoose Civique

Anticipator

Regna Racer (couronne a couronne) sovereign to sovereign

Aeroterre

Fée Rapide (Aerofee, Aero Faire, Fee Aiglette, Magi-faire) Comme Il Faire

Tonnere Alifère (winged thunder)

Aliforme Alifère (wing-slender a-wing)

Turbotorc (used as an adjective by Plymouth)

Thunderbird Allié (Cousin Thunderbird)

Thunder Crester

Dearborn Diamanté

Magigravure

Pastelogram

Regina-Rex

Taper Racer

Varsity Stroke

Angelastro

Astranaut

Chaparral

Tir á l'arc (bull's eye)

Cresta Lark

Triskelion (three legs running)

Pluma Piluma (hairfine, feather-foot)

Adante con Moto (description of a good motor?)

Turcotinga (turqoise cotinga—the cotinga being a South-American finch or sparrow) solid indigo.

Utopian Turtletop

Ford rejected them all, and christened the car the Edsel. Moore outlived it by twelve years.

Once, she wrote a poem called “Poetry.” This is what she thought:

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all

this fiddle.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one

discovers in

it after all, a place for the genuine.

Hands that can grasp, eyes

that can dilate, hair that can rise

if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because

they are

useful. When they become so derivative as to become

unintelligible,

the same thing may be said for all of us, that we

do not admire what

we cannot understand: the bat

holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf

under

a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that

feels a

flea, the base-

ball fan, the statistician--

nor is it valid

to discriminate against 'business documents and

school-books'; all these phenomena are important. One must

make a distinction

however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the

result is not poetry,

nor till the poets among us can be

'literalists of

the imagination'--above

insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', shall

we have

it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,

the raw material of poetry in

all its rawness and

that which is on the other hand

genuine, you are interested in poetry.