A.F. Moritz*

A.F. Moritz is one of Canada’s leading poets. He was born in Ohio, and teaches at Victoria College, University of Toronto. He has lived in Toronto since just before his first collection Here (1975) appeared. Since that time he has published 21 further poetry books, including his most recent collection, Great Silent Ballad (2024, Anansi). Three times he has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, and in 2009 he was awarded the Griffin Prize.

In October, I attended a reading Al Moritz shared at King W. Books in Hamilton (along with John Terpsta and Brian Bartlett) where he read exclusively from this new book. Moritz opened with “Dead Skunk in the Road”, a poem reviewer Colin Carberry says, “makes it clear that he knows that life does not end at death, and those who believe that it does are forced to bear the burden of their erroneous belief.”

In an interview, from the time when Sparrow: Selected Poems appeared, Moritz spoke of his interactions with various poets, particularly Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ashbury, in fine-tuning his world view and his expression of it. He said:
----“In dark times, poetry has to be under the sign of hope. And with
----hope, thinking is really from the end, not the beginning. It's
----realizing that the always possible beginning is the permanent,
----if hidden, presence of the good end in every moment. 'Origin'
----really means not so much any past but the fact that, in a time
----of evil and hope, the structure of existence is this: a beginning
----toward the good that is always possible and always needing to be
----made possible again.”

He underlined these thoughts with lines from Hopkins’s poem “God’s Grandeur” — which he says he always keeps before him — a poem of hope that acknowledges “man’s smudge” but declares “nature is never spent”.

The following poem is from Great Silent Ballad.

The Gift

I’ve long given up the dream
of having something to do
with the coming of the good kingdom.
Just let it be coming and let me live
over to one side
and then when it arrives let me live
in one of its rooms off one of its alleys.
It will be plenty simply finally
not to fear my own filth, the puzzle
of the whereabouts of food, the rain
of muddy plaster spheres always falling
a little late, mirroring beneath my ceiling
the pure rain after it starts hitting
the porous tar above. It will be plenty
not to meet, whenever I go out, the random
knives into my eye on the sidewalks,
the random onset of blindness, the lying
waiting to be scraped up. Plenty
not to feel the noise of the sirens
screeching nearer as relief. It will be plenty
and undeserved just to be alone
and the least known beneficiary.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about A.F. Moritz: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Marianne Moore*

Marianne Moore (1887―1972) is a Presbyterian whom the Poetry Foundation calls, “One of America’s foremost poets." In 1918 she moved to New York City, and became an assistant at the New York Public Library. Her poems had started appearing in journals, and then her first collection, Poems (1921), was put together and published by H.D. without her knowledge.

She was widely admired by other poets. In 1925 William Carlos Williams wrote an essay about her, saying that through her particular focus, “in looking at some apparently small object, one feels the swirl of great events.”

T.S. Eliot, wrote in the introduction to her Selected Poems (1935), “Living, the poet is carrying on that struggle for the maintenance of a living language, for the maintenance of its strength, its subtlety, for the preservation of quality of feeling, which must be kept up in every generation … Miss Moore is, I believe, one of those few who have done the language some service in my lifetime.”

And John Ashbery, expressed on the back of the Penguin edition of her Complete Poems (1967), “More than any modern poet, she gives us the feeling that life is softly exploding around us, within easy reach.”

The following poem arises from the opening of Psalm 1.

Blessed Is The Man

who does not sit in the seat of the scoffer―
-------the man who does not denigrate, depreciate, denunciate;
-------------who is not “characteristically intemperate,”
who does not “excuse, retreat, equivocate; and will be heard.”

(Ah, Giorgione! there are those who mongrelize
-------and those who heighten anything they touch; although it may
-------------------well be
-------------that if Giorgione’s self-portrait were not said to be he,
it might not take my fancy. Blessed the geniuses who know

that egomania is not a duty.)
-------“Diversity, controversy; tolerance”―that “citadel
-------------of learning” we have a fort that ought to armor us well.
Blessed is the man who “takes the risk of a decision”―asks

himself the question: “Would it solve the problem?
-------Is it right as I see it? Is it in the best interests of all?”
-------------Alas. Ulysses’s companions are now political―
living self-indulgently until the moral sense is drowned,

having lost all power of comparison,
-------thinking license emancipates one, “slaves who they themselves
-------------------have bound.”
-------------Brazen authors, downright soiled and downright spoiled, as
-------------------if sound
and exceptional, are the old quasi-modish counterfeit,

mitin-proofing conscience against character.
-------Affronted by “private lies and public shame,” blessed is the author
-------------who favors what the supercilious do not favor―
who will not comply. Blessed the unaccommodating man.

Blessed the man whose faith is different
-------from possessiveness―of a kind not framed by “things which
-------------------do appear”―
-------------who will not visualize defeat, too intent to cower;
whose illumined eye has seen the shaft that gilds the sultan’s tower.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Marianne Moore: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

John Clare

John Clare (1793—1864) is known as the "Peasant Poet", because his parents were illiterate, and his father a farm labourer. He is known for poems praising the natural world and God as creator. His 1820 book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, carried him from obscurity to the attention of London literary society. For a time his work even outsold that of his contemporary John Keats.

As may be sensed in the following poem, he suffered from depression and even delusions, which eventually confined him to an asylum for the final 26 years of his life.

His poetry soon slipped into obscurity; however in recent years, the admiration of poets such as Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, John Ashbery, and Seamus Heaney has helped to restore his reputation. He is now considered by many to be one of the most important poets of the 19th century.

I Am!

I am — yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes —
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live — like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange — nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below — above the vaulted sky.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about John Clare: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.