Marianne Moore*

Marianne Moore (1887―1972) was raised for the first few years of her life in the manse of the First Presbyterian Church in Kirkwood, Missouri, since her grandfather was pastor there, and since her father, whom she never met, was not on the scene. In 1918 Marianne and her mother moved to Greenwich Village; here she was able to interact with such poets as E.E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams.

Her second book, Observations, won The Dial Award in 1924, and then from 1925 to 1929 she served as editor for The Dial. Her awards include: the Helen Haire Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bollingen Prize. She once said that her favourite poem was the Book of Job.

At the Yankee's 1968 season opener, at age eighty, Marianne Moore threw the opening pitch. In her poem “Baseball and Writing” she expressed:
------Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting
------and baseball is like writing.
------------You can never tell with either
---------------how it will go
---------------or what you will do…

Her Christian faith informed and influenced her poetry significantly. The following poem is identified in a Wendell Berry poem in his book Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013—2023.

What Are Years

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, —
dumbly calling, deafly listening—that
in misfortune, even death,
encourage others
and in its defeat, stirs
the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.
So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.

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

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams (1883―1963) ― a significant imagist poet ― was also a family physician practicing in northern New Jersey. Though not a churchgoer, he respected the faith of those he encountered through life and art. He admired Francis of Assisi for his poetic originality, his love of the natural world, and as a model of forgiveness and generosity.

In his poem “The Catholic Bells” Williams said, “Tho’ I’m no Catholic / I listen hard when the bells / in the yellow-brick tower / of their new church // ring down the leaves…”

His parents had been active members of the Rutherford Unitarian Society ― and his father read Dante and the Bible to his sons. Williams applied the Unitarian phrase “Nothing that is not true” to his imagist approach to poetry. He sought truth in the natural world, and the lives of his patients living in the tenement houses he visited. His wife, Flossie, said, “the people there expanded his imagination, and I noticed over the years how much they healed him.”

From his poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” Williams is frequently quoted as saying:
-----------------------------------------------"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
------------------------yet men die miserably every day
-------------------------------------------------for lack
of what is found there."

The following poem is William Carlos Williams’ declaration of his belief in the incarnation.

The Gift

As the wise men of old brought gifts
---guided by a star
------to the humble birthplace

of the god of love,
---the devils
------as an old print shows
retreated in confusion.

---What could a baby know
------of gold ornaments
or frankincense and myrrh,
---of priestly robes
------and devout genuflections?

But the imagination
---knows all stories
------before they are told
and knows the truth of this one
---past all defection

The rich gifts
---so unsuitable for a child
------though devoutly proffered,
stood for all that love can bring.

---The men were old
------how could they know
of a mother's needs
---or a child's
------appetite?

But as they kneeled
---the child was fed.

------They saw it
and
---gave praise!

------A miracle
had taken place,
---hard gold to love,
a mother's milk!
---before
------their wondering eyes.

The ass brayed
---the cattle lowed.
------It was their nature.

All men by their nature give praise.
---It is all
------they can do.

The very devils
---by their flight give praise.
------What is death,
beside this?

---Nothing. The wise men
------came with gifts
and bowed down
---to worship
------this perfection.

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, third 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.

Paul Mariani*

Paul Mariani is an emeritus professor of English at Boston College. He holds a unique place as a biographer of poets — including having written books about Wallace Stevens, John Berryman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Lowell. His biography of Hart Crane, The Broken Tower, is the basis for the James Franco biopic of the same name, which was released in 2012.

He has had seven volumes of poetry published, including Epitaphs for the Journey: New, Selected, and Revised Poems (Poiema Poetry Series/Cascade Books) — on which I served as Paul’s editor. In September, he is to receive the inaugural Flannery O'Connor Lifetime Achievement Award at Loyola University in Chicago.

Mariani has published other significant books as well, including the spiritual memoir Thirty Days: on Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius (2003, Penguin). His most recent book, The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernism, is newly published by Paraclete Press.

The following poem recently appeared in America.

What Happened Then

Do we understand what happened then?
The few of us in that shuttered room,
lamps dimmed, afraid of what would happen
when they found us? The women back
this morning to tell Peter what they’d seen.
Then these two back from Emmaus.
And now here he was. Here in the room with us.
Strange meeting this, the holes there
in his hands and feet and heart.
And who could have guessed a calm like this
could touch us. But that was what we felt.
The deep relief you feel when the one
you’ve searched for in a crowd appears,
and your unbelieving eyes dissolve in tears.
For this is what love looks like and is
and what it does. “Peace” was what he said,
as a peace like no other pierced the gloom
and descended on the room.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Paul Mariani: first post, second 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.

Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov (1923—1997) was born in England. After the war she married an American, moved to New York and became an American citizen. In the US, she came under the influence of William Carlos Williams and other American poets. She, in turn, was significant in the advancement of Margaret Avison’s career — even though Avison had recently embraced Christian faith, and Levertov remained unconvinced.

Levertov’s conversion came in 1984. In 1997 she put together her selection of poems on religious themes — drawn from seven earlier collections — The Stream & the Sapphire. In the foreword she says the book traces her “own slow movement from agnosticism to Christian faith”. She put the book together “as a convenience to those readers who are themselves concerned with doubt and faith”.

Flickering Mind

Lord, not you,
it is I who am absent.
At first
belief was a joy I kept in secret,
stealing alone
into sacred places:
a quick glance, and away—and back,
circling.
I have long since uttered your name
but now
I elude your presence.
I stop
to think about you, and my mind
at once
like a minnow darts away,
darts
into the shadows, into gleams that fret
unceasing over
the river's purling and passing.
Not for one second
will my self hold still, but wanders
anywhere,
everywhere it can turn. Not you,
it is I am absent.
You are the stream, the fish, the light,
the pulsing shadow,
you the unchanging presence, in whom all
moves and changes.
How can I focus my flickering, perceive
at the fountain's heart
the sapphire I know is there?

This is the first  Kingdom Poets post about Denise Levertov: second post, third post, fourth post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Marianne Moore

Modernist American poet Marianne Moore (1887–1972) was a devout Presbyterian all her life. She experimented with rhythm — using a syllabic count rather than traditional metre — and avoided traditional poetic allusions. She became extremely influential as editor of The Dial in the 1920s. Her poetry was promoted by such poets as H.D., William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

She demonstrates her honesty and humility in her poems by frequently using quotation marks. When Donald Hall asked her about this, in an interview, conducted for The Paris Review in 1960, she replied, “I was just trying to be honorable and not to steal things. I’ve always felt that if a thing had been said in the best way, how can you say it better? If I wanted to say something and somebody had said it ideally, then I’d take it but give the person credit for it.”

In her famous poem "Poetry" she says:
------“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...”

Her Collected Poems (1951) received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize.

Rosemary

Beauty and Beauty's son and rosemary —
Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly —
born of the sea supposedly,
at Christmas each, in company,
braids a garland of festivity.
------Not always rosemary —

since the flight to Egypt, blooming differently.
With lancelike leaf, green but silver underneath,
its flowers — white originally —
turned blue. The herb of memory,
imitating the blue robe of Mary,
------is not too legendary

to flower both as symbol and as pungency.
Springing from stones beside the sea,
the height of Christ when thirty-three,
it feeds on dew and to the bee
“hath a dumb language”; is in reality
------a kind of Christmas tree.

The above quotation is from Sir Thomas More. Marianne Moore’s own notes on the poem tell us of a Spanish legend in which Mary threw her cloak over a rosemary bush, while resting on the flight into Egypt, and the flowers turned blue; another source says that rosemary, after 33 years, will not grow further in height — “the height of Christ”.

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

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Paul Mariani

Paul Mariani is a contemporary American poet, who was born in New York City. He holds a Chair in Poetry at Boston College, and is known for the biographies he’s written of poets, such as William Carlos Williams (for which he was a finalist for the American Book Award), John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and, most recently, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Paul Mariani has written six collections of poetry, including his latest — Deaths & Transfigurations (Paraclete Press, 2005). The following poem comes from his collection, The Great Wheel (W.W. Norton).

The Cistern

In the limestone cistern
beneath St. Peter Gallicantu
in Jerusalem, my back against
the wall, try as I might,
I could not keep from weeping.
I am a man gone down into the pit,
we listened to Fr. Doyle reading,
a man shorn of his strength,
one more among the dead,
among those You have forgotten.

And did he call upon the psalms
to warm him in his need?
The night before he died
they dragged him here to try him.
What answers he could give
lay shattered on the pavement.
Later his quizzers grew tired
and impatient. Let others try him
in the morning. Enough for now
to knot a rope across his chest
and drop him into darkness.

Hanging by his wrists, Eli
he would cry out, Eli, and again
they would misread him, thinking
he was calling on Elijah.
As each of us will be alone,
friends scattered to the winds.
Except for one out in the courtyard
growing cold, poised now to deny him.
Darkness, the psalmist ended.
The one companion left me.

*This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Paul Mariani: second post, third post.

(Posted with permission of the poet)

Read my Books & Culture review of Paul Mariani's poetry collection
Deaths & Transfigurations here

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca