When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
Oh, Marianne Moore. I go straight to her and flip around. Rereading her, drawing my finger across a line, is like gulping water in a way that kind of hurts. I never know what she’s up to, but I also do, I very much do, and I’m consistently dazzled and confused by her. Simply, her extra texts and facts and exquisite digging into something so deeply that she leaves it entirely—you forget what the hell it is she’s even talking about because she’s left it for an encyclopedic elsewhere… oof. Secretly, my favorite poem of hers is a short, early one: “To a Stiff-winged Grasshopper.” In April I read Natalia Cecire’s Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge which includes a chapter on Moore and the idea of “precision,” touching on the perception of Moore’s “coldness” or lack of feeling as it relates to her poetry’s precision, particularly her appeal to scientific fact. Cecire writes, “The subterranean feelings that presumably underlie precision thus seem only to reverse the direction of causality and reveal precision to be the source of the feelings that are the source of precision”—and I could live in that ouroboros forever.
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