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Siobhan Phillips on Marianne Moore ("Armor's Undermining Modesty")
1.5k Plays25 days ago
"What is more precise than precision? Illusion." I talked with my friend, the scholar Siobhan Phillips, about Marianne Moore's poem "Armor's Undermining Modesty."
Siobhan Phillips is a professor of English at Dickinson College, where she teaches courses on American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, food studies, and creative writing. She is the author of The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse (Columbia UP, 2010) and the novel Benefit (Bellevue Literary Press, 2022). Her essays have appeared in such journals as Contemporary Liiterature, Journal of Modern Literature, Modernism/modernity, Literary Imagination, Twentieth-Century Literature, and PMLA. Her essay on Marianne Moore and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was published on the website of the Poetry Foundation.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I am your host, Kamran Javadizadeh, and I'm very happy today to have my friend Siobhan Phillips on the podcast to talk about Marianne Moore, um a wonderful poet, poet that we haven't.
00:00:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
um featured yet on this podcast and and whose um whose place in the podcast I've been missing and and um and yearning for. And Siobhan is an awesome person to be talking to about more.
00:00:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
The poem that Siobhan has selected for today's conversation is called Armour's Undermining Modesty. um And I will make sure that a text, a link to the text of the poem is available for you in the episode notes so that you can follow along if you want to be looking at that while we talk.
00:00:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Let me tell you a bit more about Siobhan Phillips. She is a professor of English at Dickinson College. where um I had the good luck to ah visit recently and and give a talk and saw what a lovely community of scholars and students Siobhan works with there at Dickinson.
Kamran and Siobhan's Academic Journey
00:01:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
um She teaches American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, food studies and creative writing. Siobhan is the author of two books, one a scholarly monograph called The Poetics of Everyday Life.
00:01:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah or Sorry, it's called The Poetics of the Everyday, rather. um And it has chapters on poets like Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill. That was published by Columbia University Press in 2010.
00:01:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Siobhan is also the author of a novel, a novel called Benefit, which was published by Bellevue Literary Press in 2022. And ah besides those two books, she has essays in various places, in including journals like Contemporary Literature, ah the Journal of Modern Literature, Modernism, Modernity, Literary Imagination, 20th Century Literature, PMLA.
00:02:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
pm a um One of the reasons why I'm i'm so thrilled to have Siobhan on the podcast is that um I have really learned so much from reading her work and have always felt like I've been in ah conversation with it.
00:02:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's funny, Siobhan and i went to school with each other and um and knew each other a little bit in school, and and um you know both in college and in graduate school, actually. and um And so there was this sense I had of this person doing this brilliant and interesting work um in in the same programs I was in.
00:02:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
um And then we've wound up teaching not so far from each other. Both of us are in Pennsylvania now, and I've been kind of tracking her writing as it's been coming out. And I have in in particular enjoyed a couple of pieces she's written um on a topic that is really close to my heart, and that's um the topic of epistolarity. So um the quality of writing that is...
00:03:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
that one finds in correspondence and letters um and in the relationship between epistolarity and poetry. Siobhan has really interesting essays on i'm both ah the the poet Elizabeth Bishop um and the poet James Schuyler, poets who are who have a kind of affinity, unlikely perhaps um though it may be, with each other and who are both really marvelous letter writers and whose poetry is both um in both cases informed by their letter writing. And Siobhan has been um brilliant in um in tracing the ways in which that is true.
00:03:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Her article on Schuyler and Episcolarity, which was published in the Journal of Modern Literature, contains the following sentence, ah quote, letters or letter poems or letter paintings.
00:04:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
require two artists, each of whom both create and receive, rather than one artist who composes and one who is composed." um I love that moment and um I love it for the light that it sheds on Skylar and the um the light by extension that it might shed on any poet or writer for whom the epistolary mode feels important.
00:04:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
um But I'm here to tell you that one of those writers is Siobhan Phillips. um She is clearly someone who writes with her reader in mind. and um And to read her writing is to feel in her company and is to feel um enlisted co-edited.
Marianne Moore's Letter Writing and Poetry
00:04:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
um co uh created as a composer and as a receiver um of her thinking and her writing um she writes with generosity she writes with openness she writes with real curiosity and she writes always with a kind of inclination to weave the work of literary criticism and of literature back into the world into the real um material ah conditions that have produced that writing and that will receive her writing um and and because of that and because i'm so excited to talk about maryann more with her i'm really happy to have you siobhan on the podcast today so welcome to close readings and um how are you doing today today
00:05:40
Siobhan Phillips
I'm doing really well. Thank you so much for that really generous introduction. And yeah, definitely. I have felt the same about your work and about epistolarity and as about the subject and as a method um in in all of this. I'm not sure if we'll get to epistolarity and conversation in talking about this poem, but actually I kind of think we might.
00:06:03
Siobhan Phillips
um So we'll see.
00:06:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, maybe.
00:06:04
Siobhan Phillips
But yeah, it's wonderful to hear.
00:06:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Moore is also, I mean, an interesting letter writer and of course had a fascinating correspondence with, among others, Elizabeth Bishop.
00:06:13
Siobhan Phillips
Yes, I think that correspondence, I don't think it's out yet, but i think it's being edited as we speak as a project.
00:06:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:06:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:06:20
Siobhan Phillips
And um yeah, Moore had really interesting letter writing relationships with several other writers and other people. um And I think she's one of those writers that had relationships that were mostly letters and then some that were both letters and in person.
00:06:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:06:37
Siobhan Phillips
And yeah.
00:06:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right. I guess there's a certain kind of um personality. I mean, there there are, of course, different kinds of letter writers, no doubt. um But there's a certain kind of personality where, like, if a person is... um has this interesting constellation of being a kind of private person, but sociable nonetheless. Or, you know, I'm thinking of what different as they are, say Moore or Bishop or Schuyler, what they have in common. These are all kind of difficult or kind of eccentric people of a kind um who value their privacy but also seem invigorated ah by contact with their social spheres such as they are or even a poet of course like Dickinson famously right
00:07:23
Siobhan Phillips
Absolutely. absolutely
00:07:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Well, okay, so I invited you on the podcast and and we've been we've been talking back and forth sort of more or less casually and then seriously about it since I think for quite some time.
00:07:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Part of our conversation, as with but almost all of my guests, has to do with like, all right, you pick the poet, you pick the poem. And I seem to recall you considering poets like um some of the poets maybe that were um you wrote you wrote about in your monograph. um Maybe we talked
Exploring Moore's Poetic Style
00:07:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
about the possibility of you coming out talk about Frost, which would have awesome. We could revisit that too.
00:08:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah But you settled on more. um And then you settled on this poem. And I wonder if you might just tell us a little bit more about what Marianne Moore has meant to you. Like, when did you do you do you recall when you first encountered her work or read it in a way that um has stayed with you or or seems like a a point of origin?
00:08:23
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. um I think that I really started reading more when I was in college. i I was reading poetry before then, of course, but I don't think I was reading more before then.
00:08:36
Siobhan Phillips
And i I think I encountered more first in creative writing, like craft classes um before, or that I really maybe grappled with more in those sorts of classes before I
00:08:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-mm.
00:08:51
Siobhan Phillips
thought about her in a really scholarly way, though those two things were very much intermixed, especially when I was an undergraduate. um In part, that's because, you know, one point of entry for Moore is her use of syllabics. And I think in a lot of craft classes or creative writing classes um more as this amazing example of um formal intricacy and skill in many things, but the most maybe obvious and exemplary for an undergraduate would be her use of syllabics. So, you know, she had this um approach to crafting her stanzas
00:09:31
Siobhan Phillips
and her lines ah that was so unique. And so I think I probably read some of her work, probably something like poetry, which is maybe her famous, most famous poem craft classes and then craft classes and then um just was so intrigued by Moore. And Moore is a poet that, you know, it's she's just so.
00:09:53
Siobhan Phillips
um she is an inviting poet, but not in the same way that you might think if you think about inviting poets poets who are inviting in the way like Skylar is in a sense.
00:10:06
Siobhan Phillips
We're just talking about Skylar. You know, that you really do have to kind of figure out what Moore is doing and it's almost impossible to do so, but she is doing so much and there's so much thought and intricacy and um constructedness in her work.
00:10:24
Siobhan Phillips
And yet there's also this emphasis in her work on, she talks about, you know, plainness and um honesty and clarity. There's lot of contradictions in what Moore is doing and those contradictions are just endlessly intriguing.
00:10:40
Siobhan Phillips
So I think from there it was just, I really liked reading Moore and, um uh this poem i i don't remember exactly when i came to this poem but as soon as i did i loved it and i mean this is a poem i think that's not one of her most like taught and or read poems We can speak more.
00:11:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah.
00:11:03
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah. ah So, i mean, in part, I chose it. There are other poems like we were talking about marriage, which is a great poem and maybe more as longest and too long for the podcast. And there are other poems, too. But in part, i chose it almost because of that, but also because I felt that in this poem, it's relatively late. It's 1950. And
00:11:24
Siobhan Phillips
and it does It does so much that it's so very, very more, but it also is revisiting a lot of things in her other poems, I think, or turning over some things from her other poems and doing and revealing new complexities and contradictions in them.
00:11:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:11:40
Siobhan Phillips
So that's... awesome. um But for me, this poem is just kind of imprinted itself on me um in an almost visceral way before and apart from anything I think about it intellectually, in what I know of more and just the sound of this poem and the rhythm and the construction of this poem just absolutely delighted me um from the time I read it.
00:12:05
Siobhan Phillips
You know, Moore has this essay, which we can maybe we'll come back to. It's she talks about um humility, concentration and gusto is the title of the essay. Moore has great titles, fabulous titles of everything.
00:12:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, I love it. ah soon By the way, as soon as you said the word essay, i was like, oh I hope this is going to be humility, concentration, gusto, because I i love that essay.
00:12:19
Siobhan Phillips
um
00:12:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
So yeah, talk talk about it.
00:12:26
Siobhan Phillips
Well, i we can have more.
00:12:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
Go with that.
00:12:28
Siobhan Phillips
I mean, there's because that a lot that that is essay, I should say, is often taken to be, and I think it was for Moore, one of her essays that explain what she's about kind of as a poet and a writer and a person.
00:12:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:12:42
Siobhan Phillips
There are others, too. um But... ah
00:12:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
These days we might call it like a craft statement or an artistic statement or something like that.
00:12:48
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, yeah, and yeah, and you know some, not all poets have them, but many do these little or not so little
00:12:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
Moore's Historical and Educational Context
00:12:58
Siobhan Phillips
pieces of prose that um help to reflect and and but and dissect or whatever their poetic work.
00:12:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm
00:13:05
Siobhan Phillips
Anyway, so and Anyway, my point here is that in that essay, like, gusto is the, is the culminating thing.
00:13:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
00:13:15
Siobhan Phillips
um And the hardest maybe to define, there are lots of examples, but whatever gusto is or maybe I feel it's here in this poem. And it's what just really delighted me about this poem. Like, um so, you know, in this,
00:13:30
Siobhan Phillips
the rhymes, we'll hear it in a second so I won't go through it, but the rhymes and the sound and the way, this is a very Morse, the way the poem looks on the page and sounds in your ear and your brain and your body really with the rhythms, there's a combination there that seems to me very much distinctive to poetry, like nothing else does that for me, and very much de distinctive to more.
00:13:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah yeah
00:13:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:13:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:13:52
Siobhan Phillips
So i don't, I may have, I think I may have um come to this because I think Randall Jarrell, who's, you know, great um poetry critic who admired more and wrote about her in some great ways, some ways we can understand.
00:14:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:14:09
Siobhan Phillips
quarrel with too. um But I think he, he, I know he mentions this poem and he, like many, like the critics who do mention this poem that I've seen, or um many that I've seen says, you know, I don't think I, I don't understand it.
00:14:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
Aha.
00:14:23
Siobhan Phillips
He says, you know, I don't understand it, but um I love it anyway. And there's a quotation, I'll get it wrong, but he's like, what I don't understand, I love even more. And I i felt that too, that this poem, before I even knew what was going on or tried to know what was going on, just the the sound of it was like, this is what I want from poems.
00:14:44
Siobhan Phillips
And um so, yeah, i kind of had this in the back of my mind for a long time, this poem, and it's not a poem that I have like taught or written about. I have taught Marianne Morris some of her earlier work and written about her work.
00:14:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:14:57
Siobhan Phillips
um I can say more about that too. so So yeah, Armors Undermining Modesty was there. And then i i did um study more of Moore in graduate school and as I was kind of refining my focus.
00:15:14
Siobhan Phillips
And then after that, I And there's been a kind of evolution, which is complex, we can get into it maybe, ah you like, about editions of Moore and editing of Moore, which is was really is really tricky, in part because Moore was a very ruthless and self-editor in her later life.
00:15:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:15:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:15:37
Siobhan Phillips
And so,
00:15:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
So there are multiple versions of poems and so forth. And, um, yeah, hard to know sometimes which variation, which variants are the authoritative ones or should be privileged in an edition of her work or whatever.
00:15:43
Siobhan Phillips
hard to know.
00:15:50
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, I mean, it's a great, lot of her work, many poems in her body of work are kind of interesting test cases for these big questions of editing and textual criticism and things because she
00:16:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:16:02
Siobhan Phillips
changed them and many people prefer the earlier versions. Anyway, so there were some additions that came out through the work of well Robin Schulte and Heather Cass White who have been these amazing examples, like we all owe them and other editors and scholars as well in this project, but those two especially. um Some additions had come out that were offering to the to readers a more accurate sense of Moore's work from the 1930s and how it changed. And so I did some, I did a review of one of those books. I love those works from the 1930s, those kind of middle period more, you could say.
00:16:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:16:38
Siobhan Phillips
and then um And then I moved to Carlisle, um Pennsylvania because I got a job at Dickinson College. And um when i moved to Carlisle, I knew that Marianne Moore had lived here for you know a good stretch of her life.
00:16:53
Siobhan Phillips
She lived in Carlisle from when she was a girl um to ah when she moved to New York in her twenty s Well, she moved first to New Jersey and then to New York.
00:17:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
who
00:17:05
Siobhan Phillips
That was the order.
00:17:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, and I should say, too, there was a brief time where she came to where I live, right? or
00:17:11
Siobhan Phillips
Oh, yeah.
00:17:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
You know, for college at Bryn Mawr, right?
00:17:13
Siobhan Phillips
Oh, exactly. Right. She was at Bryn Mawr for four years.
00:17:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
I mean, that's not exactly where I live, but close enough.
00:17:18
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, those four years were really important to her. I mean, biographers and I think everyone who's looked into it agree. And yeah, so she was in Carlisle. She went to college at Bryn Mawr, back to Carlisle.
00:17:30
Siobhan Phillips
And um then she moved to eventually to New York. and then to Brooklyn, she was in Manhattan and then Brooklyn. And um you know it's the New York years that we think about, when we think about like more as a modernist poet.
00:17:44
Siobhan Phillips
um
00:17:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:17:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:17:45
Siobhan Phillips
But those Carlisle years are really interesting too. And so when I moved to Carlisle, was like, huh, more in Carlisle. And I went to, there's a plaque where her house was. She lived with her mother there, of course.
00:17:56
Siobhan Phillips
um And then there's a really wonderful local bookstore here in Carlisle, Whistle Stop here in Carlisle, definitely stop by. um And the owner of Whistle Stop is a um wonderful, knows a lot about lots of writers and knows a lot about Moore.
00:18:11
Siobhan Phillips
And so he, um Jeff Wood, you know, helped me, took me around, showed me some of what the town was like when Moore was here and gave me more of a sense of that era in Moore's life. And one thing that was really interesting a big kind of question mark in ah and a, yeah, question mark for me was Moore's time with the um Carlisle Indian Industrial School. So the probably the most important you know historical, um what's the word, um
00:18:44
Siobhan Phillips
ah most important historical history
00:18:51
Siobhan Phillips
fact about Carlisle is the location here of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
00:18:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:18:58
Siobhan Phillips
And um I'm reading now, this is, ah I'm reading now from the, actually the land acknowledgement at Dickinson, right? So I'm talking to you, Cameron, right now from unceded territory of the Susquehannock peoples. And The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was a federal part of a federal effort, a federal program to take indigenous children from dozens of different nations, and they were forced or coerced into reprogramming established at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, I'm quoting now.
00:19:26
Siobhan Phillips
And that effort was, of course,
00:19:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
And what years would that that have been roughly?
00:19:30
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, that was from 1879 until 1917, I think.
00:19:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Wow.
00:19:36
Siobhan Phillips
So um the, I may be, I may, I can look up to make sure.
00:19:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, right.
00:19:41
Siobhan Phillips
I don't want to get the ah closing date wrong. um It was established in 1879 here. And then here and then
00:19:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
and And Marianne Moore is born in 1887. So just to give us a sense of the two timelines here.
00:19:50
Siobhan Phillips
Right. Yeah.
00:19:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay, go on.
00:19:54
Siobhan Phillips
So, yeah, the connection comes in because Moore, after she graduated from Bryn Mawr and she was back in Carlisle, she taught at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
00:19:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:20:03
Siobhan Phillips
It was a job and for her as a you know very young you know woman, a college graduate.
00:20:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah,
00:20:10
Siobhan Phillips
And she was actually teaching there um when the school shut down.
The Complexity of Syllabics in Moore's Poetry
00:20:16
Siobhan Phillips
And so um this was a ah brief period in her life, but it for me, it was like just this really kind of very interesting and also kind of like um needed to be explored.
00:20:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:20:29
Siobhan Phillips
um
00:20:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:20:30
Siobhan Phillips
And so I felt at that point, this was like, I don't know when exactly this was, maybe close to 10 years ago now. So I knew a little bit about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
00:20:40
Siobhan Phillips
And as I moved here, I obviously got more educated. And as part of being, living here and being here, I'm white.
00:20:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right. Yeah.
00:20:49
Siobhan Phillips
I'm not an indigenous person. This is a podcast. so um
00:20:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:20:53
Siobhan Phillips
ah But um you might not ah know that but I should acknowledge that anyway.
00:20:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:20:58
Siobhan Phillips
And... and um
00:21:03
Siobhan Phillips
So I felt like that was really important to um ah to learn more about that and to learn more about Moore's role there. And so i um
00:21:18
Siobhan Phillips
did some more research about Moore at that time period, what Moore was doing with that, um and what happened um during that moment in Moore's life.
00:21:29
Siobhan Phillips
And I wrote a brief essay about that, um how it might figure into Moore's poetics. um And so that was part of my kind of engagement with Marianne Moore.
00:21:40
Siobhan Phillips
And that's not maybe going to come in to the conversation here about Armors and Reminding Modesty, but it's part of like how I began to explore more about um what Moore's poetry meant and meant to me and then meant to me living in Carlisle as someone who moved here
00:21:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:21:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:22:01
Siobhan Phillips
was not from here um and really loved Moore's work and was learning about that and learning about my new home.
00:22:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
00:22:12
Siobhan Phillips
um Yeah, no.
00:22:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's, that's, that's fascinating, Sean. Sorry. Did you, did you have something you want to add?
00:22:16
Siobhan Phillips
no
00:22:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
Um, so, uh, uh, Yeah, ah you've given us a a lot of um really provocative and stimulating perspective on who Moore was and who she's been to you and what your experience as a reader of her has been like. um and And so I appreciate that. and i'm And I'm totally fascinated by this connection to Carlisle and your thinking through those issues. And though they might not come up...
00:22:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
directly in the poem that we're looking at, I think, I don't know, I i i feel as though there is something consistent or or there there must be some connection at a deep level between the kind of mind that we're about to encounter in this poem and the person who's had the experiences that you've been describing for us so far.
00:23:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
you know One thing I just wanted um to to maybe ask you to be a little more explicit about or expansive about, um because um ah it's it's a term that you introduced that may not be familiar to some of our listeners, is and it's something you said right at the outset of your account of how you became first interested in more, was that she wrote in syllabics, typically.
00:23:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
right so So what are syllabics and maybe how is that, how how are syllabics, I mean, obviously must have something to do with syllables, right? So, but how is that way of organizing poetry, ah maybe like or unlike um other other modes of um of formalizing poetry, um either historically or contemporary to Moore's own practice?
00:24:04
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, um that's a great question. We'll jump in here because this is could get to a lot of different areas of um poetics and ah I welcome all of it.
00:24:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
hey
00:24:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah sure let's but let's just give a little bit of ah a cut a sort of thumbnail yeah
00:24:14
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, yeah. So syllabics, so you look at a more, and' it's important to say that Moore is kind of well known for syllabics. I think if you look at like the entry for syllabics in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics, there's Marianne Moore, but I could be wrong there.
00:24:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah yeah
00:24:30
Siobhan Phillips
I'm i'm almost sure. but um But she wrote in lots of different It wasn't just syllabics, but this the syllabic strategy is she would start a poem and the lines would be directed, constrained.
00:24:46
Siobhan Phillips
The lines of a stanza would be directed, constrained based on how many syllables were in them. So for example, you have like a poem like To a Steamroller, another great title, but the poem, the stanza goes, there's four lines in the first stanza.
00:24:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:25:02
Siobhan Phillips
And those lines, there's five syllables, 12 syllables, 12 syllables, 15 syllables. And so, okay, then the next stanza also has five syllables, 12 syllables, 12 syllables, 15 stanzas, 15 syllables.
00:25:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:25:16
Siobhan Phillips
And then the third stanza has the same, five syllables, the first line, then 12, then 12, then 15. So it's and it's not as if um those syllable counts are consistent from poem to poem to poem.
00:25:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:25:31
Siobhan Phillips
It's that in in the poems that work this way, almost as if the poem discovers a syllabic architecture in the first stanza.
00:25:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:25:43
Siobhan Phillips
And one of her essays more actually, i think, talks about this as like a personality or talks about rhythm as like a personality. But the poem establishes a kind of architecture or or um set up in the first stanza.
00:25:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:25:56
Siobhan Phillips
And then every stanza after that um conforms to that architecture.
00:26:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, right.
00:26:02
Siobhan Phillips
And it is so, you know, we're used to hearing, know, in English language poetry, we're used to hearing um form, regularity and consistency in poetry come to us through stress and and in the rhythms of stresses and through rhyme.
00:26:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Right.
00:26:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:26:26
Siobhan Phillips
And so what syllabics does is it kind of buries that a little bit because when you have this um syllabic form, it is... very in very constraining, right?
00:26:39
Siobhan Phillips
And this is kind of why this often comes up in craft classes where it might be an assignment to write a syllabic poem and you realize how really difficult it is um to to work with this um this architecture after it's been set up.
00:26:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:26:56
Siobhan Phillips
ah So you have this really, really difficult and intricate and fixed form, but you don't hear it, right? And you don't, it's not immediately noticeable, not immediately audible, and even not always immediately um visible on the page, though you can, a more stanza, they often seem really intricate and they seem like they're repeating a kind of pattern.
00:27:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:27:23
Siobhan Phillips
You can see that maybe at first glance,
00:27:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Typically there's some, there's some kind of association between the, her manner of indentation and some aspect of the syllabic scheme that she's described, but you're so right because like right in what is often the poetry that, that, that's in meter that,
00:27:30
Siobhan Phillips
yeah.
00:27:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
that that works with stress and syllable count, which we you know we would call accentual syllabic, not just syllabic, but accentual syllabic. I mean, you can hear it, right? when You hear whose woods these are, I think I know.
00:27:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
You hear bum, bum, bum, and you know when you get to the end of the line. If all you're doing is counting syllables with paying no heed to stress, the lines can sound like of really different length. mean, it would take an unusual mind to hear the number of syllables in a line and not the
00:28:07
Siobhan Phillips
Absolutely.
00:28:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
the kind of rhythmic stress um patterns.
00:28:11
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, and and especially since more does also often use rhyme, but they are not rhymes.
00:28:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:28:16
Siobhan Phillips
So that's with the Frost poem, right? Who's with Zazar, think I know his house is in the village though.
00:28:21
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:28:22
Siobhan Phillips
Like you have the O-O rhyme and they're both, they both have and have a stress.
00:28:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:28:27
Siobhan Phillips
And so you hear the rhyme, it comes forward, but a more rhyme kind of often recedes a little bit because they're not given this rhythmic emphasis.
00:28:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:28:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:28:38
Siobhan Phillips
And when you hear or read a more poem, it can seem, and the syntax of it in some ways can seem more prosy.
00:28:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:28:46
Siobhan Phillips
But in fact, the more poetic, this is kind of the more aesthetic. um This is one of the things I find so wonderful about her work. It isn't prosy um because of this well you mean it i shouldn't say that as if prosy is bad or something but um but uh uh so yeah i mean these are all artificial um distinctions and separations anyway but uh it does not read as if it's just um again i shouldn't say just
00:28:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:29:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
you're You're a novelist.
00:29:22
Siobhan Phillips
disparagingly, but if that does not read um like a free verse stream of prose, you can sense this really um ah careful construction, but it's not obvious what the principles of the construction are.
00:29:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, right.
00:29:38
Siobhan Phillips
And that seems to me um philosophically important to Moore as well as just um important from a standpoint of craft.
00:29:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:29:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:29:47
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, but there are other more poems. I mean, there are many more poems that are syllabic. are other more poems that are not that are what we might call free verse.
00:29:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:29:52
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah. No. Mm-hmm.
00:29:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. And even I think in this poem, there is a kind of syllabic scheme to it. I mean, I have a little sheet of paper where I counted out syllables. Maybe we could talk about it in particular cases, but it's not like perfectly regular even in its, um and there are interesting departures from it, though there is a kind of scheme that emerges that
00:29:59
Siobhan Phillips
yeah
00:30:02
Siobhan Phillips
no
00:30:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
that there are certain sort of consistent things one could say about. I other thing would add to to to the beautiful account that you've given, Siobhan, or to sort of offer here, is that just to emphasize, in fact, something that I think you have said, which is that on the one hand, there is a kind of um ah freedom that more must...
00:30:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
have felt or seems to have felt in not being constrained by a kind of inherited um patterning or scheme as she writes that first stanza of a poem, but that once she's settled upon what that first stanza will be, it's as though she has now set the rules for the way the or the poem has set the rules for how it will operate and and the constraint is in some sense self-imposed.
00:30:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
or self-generated. You also said that as a poet or as a student writing you know in ah in a creative writing class, you discovered it's actually much harder to write a syllabic poem than than you would think. and And I would just sort of naively ask you or pose back to you like, well, why would that be? I mean, everybody can count. So you get to the number of syllables and you move to the next line.
00:31:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
The idea must be, well, what the what makes it hard is that you want the line and the line break to be sensible and meaningful as a line break and to satisfy that business of the counting, right? So how can how can you do both things at once, right?
00:31:30
Siobhan Phillips
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.
00:31:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:31:32
Siobhan Phillips
And it's you know it's that alchemy in which the formal choices become choices of content and vice versa in this interesting way.
00:31:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:31:44
Siobhan Phillips
And there are a couple of moments this ah this principle of imposing a discipline on oneself that one then must fulfill and finding purpose and even freedom in the fulfillment of that, that is a deeply Mauryan idea.
00:32:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:32:04
Siobhan Phillips
ah So, you know, and she talks about this in one of her very famous poems, What Are Years, which is ah another beautiful poem, and she talks about
00:32:11
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's what I was thinking of. It's funny. You can tell we went to the same school. It's like, yeah, I was like, I was thinking about what are years. Great. Brought up what are years.
00:32:18
Siobhan Phillips
Well, yeah.
00:32:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:32:19
Siobhan Phillips
I mean, What Are Years is like the late, there's an early and a late, well, there's many different moments when she talks about this, but she talks about um this with um the early poem, oh the past is the present.
00:32:33
Siobhan Phillips
um We can look at that one too.
00:32:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:32:34
Siobhan Phillips
But in What Are Years, she talks about the sea in a chasm, struggling to be free and unable to be in its surrendering finds its continuing. So that sense of a um this principle of like energy and freedom, but in ah in a constraint, right?
Moore's Themes of Constraint and Freedom
00:32:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:32:55
Siobhan Phillips
And that's what helps it continue.
00:32:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
And it's the constraint that produces that energy somehow.
00:32:58
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah.
00:32:59
Siobhan Phillips
And, you know, another many people listening to this may have read or heard or seen um the fish, right?
00:32:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:32:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:33:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:33:08
Siobhan Phillips
that poem, the end of that poem was a similar idea with the sea. But then, you know, in the past is the present, which is a much earlier poem. Let me see if I can find that. um Not much earlier, but it's pretty, it's earlier.
00:33:21
Siobhan Phillips
um Where she talks about, this is ah this is about poetry and prose and other things, but she says, there, ecstasy affords the occasion and expediency determines the form.
00:33:32
Siobhan Phillips
So it's like this push-pull, right, of
00:33:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Ecstasy the occasion, expediency the form.
00:33:38
Siobhan Phillips
expediency the form, like what has what you set for yourself to get it down on paper, and then the the kind of the, the combination, the mix of um energy, force, purpose, passion, um ecstasy, and then the form constraint um necessity.
00:33:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:33:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:33:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:34:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. And she she hit upon this early, right? I know there's that early famous early letter that she writes to Ezra Pound in which she describes this kind of um approach to form.
00:34:05
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah.
00:34:10
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah.
00:34:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Okay, this is also fascinating. We could keep talking about it, of course, at at a at a kind of... um abstract or general level or at a level of poetics and thinking about other poets and how this does and doesn't make sense to think of, you know, does doesn't seem surprising to think of a kind of modernist poet who's working in this way.
00:34:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
But um I want to make sure we have enough time to to talk about the poem and and to and to explore these ideas with um a good example right in front of us.
00:34:37
Siobhan Phillips
yeah
00:34:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
So we're going to listen to recording of more reading the poem aloud right now. She doesn't read the title. She launches right into the poem, which is um interesting. I don't, I, I'm not sure if that's just, ah to be honest, if that's just the recording or if that's what she did in this case.
00:34:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
um I think you said, Siobhan, right, that the poem, I can't remember if this is just something we talked about before we started recording or if you said it on the air as it were, but the poem was first published in the Nation magazine in 1950. So just to give people a so a rough sense of, um you know, dates and so forth. But, Here's Marianne Moore reading Armour's Undermining Modesty.
00:37:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
So that's Marianne Moore reading Armour's Undermining Modesty. Siobhan, I always like to, i mean, when we have a recording, and we're lucky enough to have a recording of the poem at issue in one of these episodes. I always like to ask the guest um sort of what, if anything, you can distill from the from the listening experience you just had of listening to that voice sort of over and apart from the the text of the poem as it appears to you on the page there. Is there Like, is there anything surprising to you or anything you found yourself thinking about in that encounter you just had with Marianne Moore's voice?
00:38:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:38:03
Siobhan Phillips
It's so wonderful to hear. um the matter of factness of it, um the way that she reads struck me.
00:38:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:38:12
Siobhan Phillips
And I was thinking a little bit about the, and one of the things we might talk about is the ambiguity of Armour's Undermining Modesty and then Armour's Undermining, and the title, and Armour's Undermining Modesty Instead of Innocent Depravity in the next to last stanza there.
00:38:31
Siobhan Phillips
which could have Which could be, okay, armor has a modesty, which is undermining. And it could also be armor is undermining modesty, as if, right?
00:38:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Aha, right.
00:38:42
Siobhan Phillips
So, um and those two might not be...
00:38:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
I had not considered the second option. That's interesting.
00:38:47
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, I mean, those two might not be a those two might not be as far apart as we think, or as might seem, but um in the context of that second last stanza where she says, I'd like to have a talk with, she says one of them, but talk with one about excess and armor is undermining modesty instead of innocent depravity.
00:38:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay. All
00:38:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
00:39:05
Siobhan Phillips
It could be that armor is undermining modesty instead of armor undermining innocent depravity, or armor has this modesty that's undermining instead of talking about innocent depravity, which is separate.
00:39:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
Uh-huh. Yeah. Right.
00:39:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:39:15
Siobhan Phillips
um So I was thinking about that when I heard her her tone of voice in that second to last stanza and I was thinking, huh, I still don't know. But it seemed like it was a live question for me, um how those two grammatical options fit together.
00:39:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:39:28
Siobhan Phillips
Does that make sense?
00:39:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, it does.
00:39:28
Siobhan Phillips
Or am I getting too, yeah.
00:39:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, yeah, I think, I mean, I think so. But, um and and i I mean, I think I know the kind of thing you're talking about. Just like for me, I had a moment where in reading the poem on the page in preparation for today, you know, rereading it, I got to a line like, this is in the third to last stanza.
00:39:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
I mean, we'll move back to the beginning in just a moment. ah But just to give you my example of I think the kind of thing you're talking about. that the The first line of that stanza, which is without any punctuation, these are the words in that line. They did not let self bar.
00:40:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
um And then it goes on it after that. They did not let self bar their usefulness. And it was hard for me to, I mean, I know all those words. I just didn't understand their grammatical relation with each other.
00:40:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
But... I found that in her reading of it, oh, it suddenly made sense. They did not let self, it's as though the word were in quotation marks or something.
00:40:23
Siobhan Phillips
Yes.
00:40:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
Like they did not let their notion of self bar their usefulness to and and suddenly it sort of resolved into sense for me there.
00:40:26
Siobhan Phillips
Mm-hmm.
00:40:31
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah.
00:40:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's one example in the way like when, you know, when when a poem is set on a page, it can retain a kind of ambiguity that any particular vocalization of it might be more likely to have to resolve in some way or another.
00:40:46
Siobhan Phillips
Totally, totally.
00:40:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. um And yeah, Moore is doing that here. Well, we've talked so much, Siobhan, just in the setup of the poem and then talking about Moore's poetics about what the work is, um what work is being done for her by the first stanza of her poem.
00:41:04
Siobhan Phillips
Mm-hmm.
00:41:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
so So for people who, by the way, for people who aren't looking, I mean, I can just hopefully usefully say this is a poem in stanzas. There are eight stanzas. The stanzas have this recurring pattern and until one a kind of obvious variation in the final stanza of the poem in which there are four lines that are indented.
Symbolism in Moore's Poetry
00:41:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
And since we've been talking about syllabics, I'll just say, ah I think, Siobhan, tell me if your accounting is different from mine, but in the first stanza, I have a line of six syllables, then eight, eight, then six.
00:41:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
And then flush left, there are two more lines, and it's it it in almost every case, it's one very long one and then one very short one. And in the case of the first stanza, it's 11 syllables and then three syllables.
00:41:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
um So there are eight stanzas that follow something like that pattern, though with variations that we can describe as we go along. But let's just take the first stanza Siobhan at issue, i'll I'll read it again, and then maybe you can talk about how you, as a reader, um try to kind of wade your way through it or make sense of it.
00:42:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
At first I thought a pest must have alighted on my wrist. It was a moth, almost an owl, its wings referred so well, with backgammon board wedges interlacing on the wing. Okay, so that's the first stanza.
00:42:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
um What are you noticing there, Siobhan?
00:42:29
Siobhan Phillips
Well, yeah, we have this occasion for the poem, a pest on the wrist, and it's a moth that could be an owl. So already there's a lot there, a lot for us as readers of poetry, and then a lot for us as readers of Marianne Moore in particular.
00:42:42
Siobhan Phillips
The the Marianne Moore, well, first of all, we have an I in this poem, which is interesting, I thought, right? And this poem works works interestingly, I think, with I and then with we and then with I um again.
00:42:59
Siobhan Phillips
ah Moore's poems don't always have a whole lot of I in them. I mean, just literally I in them, which is one of the things that makes her maybe noteworthy for us to among modernist poets and among the you know generation of poets that she was working and living with through and also just in poetry in general. But here we have this eye and this um clear statement of a speaker.
00:43:24
Siobhan Phillips
And then we have the the moth and the owl. Marianne Moore was really well known, um of course, for her poems about animals. So she wrote a lot of poems that take up um the natural world, plants, but also and natural phenomena, the ocean, sea, but also animals.
00:43:43
Siobhan Phillips
And she, so she has poems about the frigate pelican and she has a poem about pangolin, a poem about an elephant, a poem about, um, uh, well, there's other poems in Draboa.
00:43:54
Siobhan Phillips
I mean, there's,
00:43:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, and even in the list that you've given us, there's not just animals, but like peculiar animals in one way or another, right?
00:43:58
Siobhan Phillips
Peculiar animals. Yeah.
00:44:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
All
00:44:00
Siobhan Phillips
And, um and the poems are often built from very precise observations and facts about these animals, very specific um facts about these animals.
00:44:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
00:44:08
Siobhan Phillips
And this was, you know, ah a way for readers and critics to characterize her as um and maybe kind of hiding herself behind these figures um or, you in in some ways as ways to could be a way to dismiss her as being kind of interested in these you know kind of more or less zany we could even say facts about animals um of course there's always ah lot lot of significance both in the detail itself and then what the details are telling us but so more is a poem a poet who
00:44:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:44:42
Siobhan Phillips
focuses on animals often, and we can off we could imagine a more poem that would just be like about this moth.
00:44:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:44:50
Siobhan Phillips
We get the start.
00:44:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
It just stayed there. Yeah.
00:44:52
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, exactly. Because the the descriptions that she offers, wonderful descriptions, right? With backgammon board wedges
00:44:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:44:59
Siobhan Phillips
interlacing on the wing, you can see that wing of the moth, right?
00:45:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:45:02
Siobhan Phillips
And the comparison to a backgammon board is seems very Marianne Moore-ish to me because it's like a game and another kind of example of art that's not exactly arty, but it's like a board game that's arty.
00:45:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. But it's also like a thing from the natural world that looks like a thing that's crafted or man-made, right?
00:45:19
Siobhan Phillips
Exactly.
00:45:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:45:20
Siobhan Phillips
Totally. Yeah. And that's such a, ah seems to me a typical, in the best way, to kind of typical Morian move to do that.
00:45:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:45:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
and And maybe also, am I right in thinking, and maybe it's just because, I don't know, I'm Persian or grew up playing backgammon and there's the word Persian comes up here later, but there is a kind of like, it's also seems to me like, ah and I say this lovingly, but a typically kind of orientalizing kind of imagination that she has, right?
00:45:28
Siobhan Phillips
And the same...
00:45:43
Siobhan Phillips
Totally, yeah.
00:45:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:45:44
Siobhan Phillips
And I think um i I completely agree. And there's a there are recurrences in her work of allusion to um Persian art. And Moore was very much very interested in art of all kinds.
00:45:58
Siobhan Phillips
And there's been a lot of interesting work done about more in museums and museum going in New York and her, her access to the art world and her interest in the art world there are and the way she took from not just things she was seeing, but like texts and pictures, et cetera.
00:46:13
Siobhan Phillips
Um, so yeah, I think that her, um, her interest and we can, one of the things that, okay, so the animal thing we have, we have, you know, I'm just kind of trying to finish,
00:46:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, yeah, sorry. Yeah.
00:46:24
Siobhan Phillips
um not to yeah not to get too far ahead or behind or wherever we are, but the animal thing is really interesting, the fact that it's an animal. But we don't stay with that animal. We move on quickly and um we move on in the second stanza right away.
00:46:38
Siobhan Phillips
The particulars of the animal here might also give us a moment of pause or, you know, we have a moth and an owl and those seem pretty symbolically rich animals to choose. The moth is, um you know, we can think of the Virginia Woolf essay about the moth or other examples of moths in literature.
00:46:59
Siobhan Phillips
And also you can think of the owl and all the symbolism of the owl. These are two night animals and they are two animals that symbolize, they could be symbols of the soul and or of wisdom.
00:47:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:47:09
Siobhan Phillips
They seem kind of particularly potent um um creatures to choose here.
00:47:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. The moth I want to think of as like, um, but also like the moth to the flame idea, you know, and the owl, right.
00:47:16
Siobhan Phillips
So
00:47:20
Siobhan Phillips
totally, yeah.
00:47:24
Siobhan Phillips
Exactly. Yeah.
00:47:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's like wisdom and or whatever.
00:47:27
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah.
00:47:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Yeah.
00:47:28
Siobhan Phillips
So it could be transformation.
Themes of Solitude and Armor in Moore's Work
00:47:29
Siobhan Phillips
It could be mortality. It could be something ephemeral.
00:47:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
00:47:31
Siobhan Phillips
It could be, and there's all this kind of sense of like, you know, wisdom flying at night, maybe. Um,
00:47:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
But what about that first mistaken idea? At first I thought it was a pest.
00:47:40
Siobhan Phillips
Exactly. Right.
00:47:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:47:42
Siobhan Phillips
So there is a moment of annoyance that starts this poem before we get into any interest in the wings of this creature.
00:47:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:47:50
Siobhan Phillips
A moment of annoyance. um ah I thought a pest must have alighted in my wrist. So it's something intruding on the speaker here. um And that's almost the occasion for thinking about, well, thinking about the alphabet, thinking about poetry, thinking about illusion, thinking about knights and the grail and modesty, and finally thinking about the wish, that this concluding wish.
00:48:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Right.
00:48:20
Siobhan Phillips
So it really just, it's almost like it's a... it's a very slight catalyst that just sets the poem in motion immediately.
00:48:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:48:30
Siobhan Phillips
But it starts off as like potentially annoying. I'll just throw in one other thing here too, which is that there's a moment in Moore's great poem, Marriage. We've just, we mentioned that before.
00:48:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:48:39
Siobhan Phillips
Moore herself was... She wrote maybe the best poem ever about marriage that isn't Paradise Lost. I don't know, think you tell me. I shouldn't make those kind of statements.
00:48:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:48:49
Siobhan Phillips
but
00:48:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's fine.
00:48:49
Siobhan Phillips
um ah So she wrote this poem, Marriage, which is really phenomenal poem and in complex and interesting. She was never herself married. um And as far as we know, biographers say she never, Linda Level is the biographer, the critic who wrote
00:48:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:49:05
Siobhan Phillips
um Holding on Upside Down, which is the biography of Moore I'm thinking of here, and Level's done amazing work on Moore and on her relationships there and other articles.
00:49:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
00:49:15
Siobhan Phillips
um As far as I know from scholarly work, Moore never had a romantic relationship. She lived with her mother until her mother died, and her mother died rather lived a long time and then Moore lived alone.
00:49:27
Siobhan Phillips
And there were opportunities, there were occasions in her life when she might have pursued um relationship.
00:49:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:49:35
Siobhan Phillips
ah And she was living in a time and she had friends um and very close friendships and new people and new couples of all kinds, right?
00:49:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:49:45
Siobhan Phillips
um In New York, all sorts of relationship setups, et cetera. um But she herself remained single and probably, chaste, celibate.
00:49:56
Siobhan Phillips
um And so, and you know, there's been critical work done on that, that choice as a, as a, as a real choice and identity and um way of being for more and others.
00:50:07
Siobhan Phillips
Anyway, so she wrote this poem, Marriage. And in that poem, it's a poem like Adam and Eve poem, back and forth, husband and wife poem.
00:50:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right.
00:50:13
Siobhan Phillips
In that poem, there is a moment um in which the like the eve figure of the poem um there's a moment where ah a butterfly settles on her hand and it's a it's an allusion to another book but it's like and that the the figure the e figure is like kind of annoyed that this butterfly is settling on her hand for life and that's a metaphor or like a symbol or a you know construction of marriage this is like this pest has settled on my hand for
00:50:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:50:42
Siobhan Phillips
life.
00:50:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:50:42
Siobhan Phillips
The poem doesn't end there. Marriage doesn't doesn't settle there. but So that also could be way back behind this poem, that there is something in this poem, this poem does not have any sense of a pairing or a romantic relationship in its obvious surface, but we do get by the end of the poem to unhackneyed solitude.
00:50:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:51:01
Siobhan Phillips
And so there might be something that Moore is working through here, getting back to that armor, the armor that is in so many of her poems as well.
00:51:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:51:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:51:09
Siobhan Phillips
um If Moore is a poet of animals, she's also definitely a poet of armor. um This is like, we see this all throughout.
00:51:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Sometimes armored animals, right? The pangolin or whatever.
00:51:20
Siobhan Phillips
Exactly. the first It's the first line of the pangolin, right?
00:51:24
Siobhan Phillips
Another armored animal, um which is like, pangolin is again, kind of a little bit um further on in her career and she's almost like acknowledging, she's like, oh, here we go again, another armored animal, right?
00:51:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:51:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah. Right.
00:51:38
Siobhan Phillips
And she talks about in one poem, um Yeah, so armor, she talks about self-protect, that weapon self-protectiveness, right? um
00:51:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:51:48
Siobhan Phillips
So that armor and the armor of animals and um shield is a poem. called his shield and there's there are shields throughout Moore's work um there's a great early poem called to be liked by you would be a calamity um we're not kidding about the great titles of more poems but and in that poem she talks about this encounter with this person that is not congenial um or not nice um and uh and also talks about
00:51:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:52:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:52:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:52:21
Siobhan Phillips
and framing the encounter as almost like a battle with her shield or her her armor.
00:52:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, right.
00:52:25
Siobhan Phillips
um So, and yeah.
00:52:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
But, well, so you you gave this ah like lovely kind of telescopic view of like, okay, so we begin with this little kind of accidental minor kind of occasion. It's at first a pest, and then it sets her off on this sort of stream of association.
00:52:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
Now I'm using words that maybe you didn't necessarily use that you'd want to sort of quarrel with or adjust in some way, but...
00:52:46
Siobhan Phillips
No, totally.
00:52:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
um that eventually lead us to the nature of language and the nature of poetry and um and sort of medieval quest and so forth and so on, and and down to this idea of the wish.
00:53:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
So, I mean, I have all kinds of questions about that, but one is just like, it it is this is is it it would it be a sensible question for me to ask to wonder...
00:53:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
Like, is there a principle that gets us from the one thing to the next here? Is it, I mean, is it, is it like, free association that that has some kind of underlying, if if kind of hidden or unconscious, ah meaningfulness, right? And the thing that gets us from one thing to another, or is there some kind of principle of like randomness at at work here where I'm asking the wrong question if I'm trying to wonder about the the sort of joints of connection, like the why we go.
00:53:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
from this thing to that thing? that's That's one question I have, maybe just as a way of like moving now into the poem and into that um consideration of language.
00:53:53
Siobhan Phillips
Right.
00:53:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
I have this other kind of lingering question, which I'm sure we'll get back to when we get to the end, which is just to say like, okay, this interest in armored animals, the sort of, to me, obvious analog that suggests itself is that Moore's poetics are her kind of version of armor in some way, right?
00:54:16
Siobhan Phillips
right
00:54:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
That they're this kind of elaborate defense or kind of um shell that is meant to protect her within, to allow you as an outsider to see her, but not touch the sensitive bits, you know, or whatever.
00:54:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
um So, you know, maybe we can kind of like,
00:54:33
Siobhan Phillips
yeah
00:54:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
but I just don't want to forget that that thought. i want to put it out there as something for us to be thinking about.
Language and Expression in Moore's Poetics
00:54:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
But maybe take us, Siobhan, into like how we get from that first animal kind of misidentification, identification, description, to this business of um language and poetry, which quickly becomes the apparent subject of the poem.
00:54:54
Siobhan Phillips
yeah
00:54:58
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, well, I think your question about armor gets us there too, because if in the end we're thinking about armor as a kind of aesthetic principle, which I think is apt and you know definitely, then that's part of the energy that's moving from the very beginning.
00:55:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
00:55:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:55:13
Siobhan Phillips
I do think that, I do think there's a lot we could say about Moore's aesthetic choices and her um fascination with art armor and with a kind of morality that is I don't want to sound like like um bellicose or something, but it has associations with the hero, with the knight, with something that has that is defensive and um and strong, but also remembering too that there is in more always a sense of
00:55:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:55:46
Siobhan Phillips
um and a kind of enabling constraint and a kind of freeing humility. So the under the modesty of armor is also, if it's if it's ah it's it's productive as well as ah defensive um in a way.
00:56:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:56:01
Siobhan Phillips
And ah defense can be a kind, not defense as offense, but defense as communication and as self-generative in a sense. So how do we get from the moth beautiful moth owl to alphabet, language, poetry, our disgust with poetry, maybe, and then to the knights and the grail?
00:56:23
Siobhan Phillips
I think that's a central question, right? And I do think that this poem moves by kind of jumps almost like like a moth. but um But I think there there are lots of things, that lots of ways that have been proposed about how it moves. And um So I'm drawing and thinking here, I mean, Ellen Levy is one critic who's written about this in the context of Moore's encounters with art and her conception of art.
00:56:51
Siobhan Phillips
And um Donald, yeah, so it's a really wonderful book.
00:56:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
in her book criminal ingenuity yeah she's great yeah
00:56:56
Siobhan Phillips
um and And Donald Hall wrote about this also um much earlier.
00:57:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right. Right.
00:57:02
Siobhan Phillips
that one of the things that might be going on, so we get this illusion here, self-determination made an axe of a stone and hack things out hairy paws, the consequence are misset alphabet. And there's a line break between misset and alphabet, which are with a rhyme, set alphabet.
00:57:11
Kamran Javadizadeh
right right
00:57:14
Siobhan Phillips
The last line of all these stanzas is the shortest, and that's what kind of like little punch at the end of this.
00:57:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:57:20
Siobhan Phillips
um Our Mithset Alphabet. And this is an illusion, Moore was thinking about, this book that she read. um And she offers a note to it, this book that says, you know, um this is a book by ah guy named Walter Ogg, I think, O-G-G.
00:57:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. I don't know how you pronounce it.
00:57:41
Siobhan Phillips
don't know how to pronounce it. So she she gives us a note, more ah famously offers footnotes to her poems. And this is a move that other modernist writers do as well.
00:57:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oscar Ogg. Is that right? That's what I have in mind.
00:57:53
Siobhan Phillips
Gosh, I don't even know.
00:57:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's Oscar anyway.
00:57:54
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah. um And it's it's a book about the history of the alphabet and about printing and typography.
00:57:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:58:01
Siobhan Phillips
It's pretty wonderful. um
00:58:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:58:03
Siobhan Phillips
So in this book, ah the very first chapter says... This is, I'm quoting from the first chapter of Og's book. It says, before history, the very oldest relics of man's early ancestors are some crudely chipped stones.
00:58:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, great.
00:58:17
Siobhan Phillips
He gripped them in his hairy paws and used them to hammer and chop with, probably to fight with. So it's really interesting because the Luzon, we have fighting again, like the armor and the knight, right?
00:58:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, yeah.
00:58:27
Siobhan Phillips
um But that book is then tracing how we got in... in its story of human evolution to making marks with, making like um marks with stones and then making pictures, making pictures that represent things, telling stories.
00:58:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:58:48
Siobhan Phillips
And then the the evolution from there, from pictures into Alphabetic letters and the story that og I hope I'm saying that name right August telling is that story.
00:58:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:59:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
Let's just go with it.
00:59:00
Siobhan Phillips
So going from like the thing and the picture to the letter and the representation right.
00:59:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:59:08
Siobhan Phillips
And I think that one of the associations that might be at work here, I'm drawing again on Levy and Hall and others, but that there is a sense of the moth or the owl as this um beautiful thing of itself. And then we have, okay, how are we representing it? How might that, the picture of the thing turn into a letter or word of the thing.
00:59:35
Siobhan Phillips
This is a preoccupation that many other, um well, poets have been preoccupied with this for as long as they've been around, but certainly within the modernist era, we can think about Pound, for example, and others really fascinated with languages that seemed closer to image, right?
00:59:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm. Right. Right.
00:59:52
Siobhan Phillips
And there was a lot of um ah discussion about that. um Moore might be thinking something here a little bit through her, something similar here, through her reference to this history of the alphabet.
01:00:09
Siobhan Phillips
So we go from this, you know, someone trying to make a picture of this, trying to make a picture of an animal or something they've seen to our misset alphabet.
01:00:22
Siobhan Phillips
And there's a sense of a fall from grace almost, right, with that misset alphabet.
01:00:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, well, totally. Not to mention the hairy paws that are doing the marking or whatever.
01:00:29
Siobhan Phillips
Exactly.
01:00:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
the crew i mean, there's something crude and kind of animalistic seeming about the human in this story, right?
01:00:38
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah. Yeah. So we're kind of almost like falling into language, which would be that kind of maybe a slightly more reductive way of putting it or too reductive, but we can go with that maybe for now, because then we get into this really beautiful and stanza full of verve, just denouncing Moore's chosen an art form.
01:00:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:01:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:01:01
Siobhan Phillips
No wonder we hate ah no wonder we hate poetry
01:01:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
read the read read Read the stanza for us.
01:01:06
Siobhan Phillips
um, arise for it is day, even gifted scholars lose their way through flawed etymology. No wonder we hate poetry and stars and harps and the new moon. If tributes cannot be implicit, give me diatribes in the flavor of Ida."
01:01:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
And then she goes on. Yeah. Okay. Right. Okay.
01:01:19
Siobhan Phillips
So, yeah.
01:01:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
So yeah. Talk about that stanza, Siobhan.
01:01:23
Siobhan Phillips
Um, yeah, so, ah
01:01:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
Are we the gifted scholars who are losing their way? Yeah.
01:01:29
Siobhan Phillips
i think I think we all are. We all could be losing our way through Vaudi etymology, through um you know ah being too far along in this train of derivation um in which we are we're wrapped up in a kind of meretricious, poetic, decorative art that's concerned with stars and harps and the new moon.
01:01:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:01:52
Siobhan Phillips
And um we can maybe make the comparison later. She talks about armor that has wreaths and silver rods and gilded that's gilded and inlaid that that's clearly not what moore wants right she wants something that is either implicit that again kind of protective um an implicit tribute or something that is um announcing itself plainly and clearly like a diatribe and the fragrance of iodine iodine she says um so
01:02:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
01:02:29
Siobhan Phillips
I read that as like, okay, on the one side are the implicit and the honestly explicit, and on the other side are the stars and the harps and the new moon and the poetics that might be um kind of decadent by this point in history.
01:02:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
why Why new moon rather than full moon or whatever? Do you have a thought?
01:02:53
Siobhan Phillips
I do not know.
01:02:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
um No wonder we hate poetry. It's interesting what you say about etymology, right? Because the idea you know for yes for people who don't ah know, the right etymology would be like the study of the origin of a word, right? So tracing a word back to as far as we can take it to, you know,
01:03:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
um an ancient language or whatever and and and following that path forward. The idea, i suppose the kind of hidden premise behind the interest in etymology is that there is some kind of meaningful and necessary narrative that takes us from the kind of abstract sign that we now have and have sort some has somehow denaturalized back to its source, which would be, i suppose if you could go back far enough, the thing itself, the kind of the grunting sound that was made about the object.
01:03:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:03:43
Siobhan Phillips
Or this beautiful moth owl in its it's essence, right?
01:03:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
01:03:50
Siobhan Phillips
um We could, in its actual existence. I mean, we can think about this too when we think about knights questing for the grail, right? What are we what are we questing for when we're casting but when we're questing
01:04:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
don't
01:04:04
Siobhan Phillips
for the grail
01:04:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah what are we i don't know.
01:04:06
Siobhan Phillips
um Well, it's some kind of, ah I mean, I'll use the word very gingerly, authenticity, right? Some kind of real connection to a power um in the actual object itself rather than ah word, representation, symbol, et cetera.
01:04:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Mm-hmm.
01:04:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. We all know, we know the story that the grail comes from, but we live many hundreds of years after it.
01:04:32
Siobhan Phillips
We have the faulty etymology. Yeah.
01:04:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
If, if we could find the thing itself, we would be somehow connected in a much more immediate way than, than to rely on, you know, dusty books or whatever.
01:04:47
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, but I, yeah, i i think that's I think that's there. I also think, though, that Moore is not saying we're going, i mean, this might take us down back to the last and the imperishable wish and the tarnish.
01:04:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
So, yeah.
01:05:04
Siobhan Phillips
um i We can get to this, too, but I think it's interesting and important that that the The sounds here are are really important, I think, or not just because I love them, but, um and by the end, when we get to there is the tarnish and there the imperishable wish in the ish sounds were kind of
01:05:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, well.
01:05:26
Siobhan Phillips
returning to I thought a pest might have alighted on my wrist, the the sounds of that first stanza, right?
01:05:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah.
01:05:32
Siobhan Phillips
So we're there is something um as the way that sound travels through this poem that's also leading us backwards and forwards.
01:05:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:05:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. So what do you make of um the very different sound, but quite pronounced, I think, sonic effect of the lines like, um so just where you left off reading, I'll pick up, if tributes cannot be implicit, give me diatribes and the fragrance of, yeah, I would say iodine. She says iodine.
01:06:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
The cork oak acorn grown in Spain, the pale ale-eyed impersonal look which the sales placard gives the Bach beer buck. I mean, we're like in the realm of tongue twister here and a Peter Piper picked a pack of pickled peppers, right?
01:06:13
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah. Yeah.
01:06:15
Siobhan Phillips
yeah
01:06:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
You know, like what do you um What's going... Like what is... Why, like what account can you give Siobhan of why that the sound is so peculiar and kind of, um um you know, artificially alliterative or whatever there, maybe that's the wrong way to think about it.
01:06:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:06:36
Siobhan Phillips
um Yeah, I think it's beautiful. I i totally love this stanza. um And it's one in which we have this pile up of Mauryan detail, um which is another signature of her poetry.
01:06:53
Siobhan Phillips
um It's the cork oak acorn grown in Spain. It is the pale ale-eyed impersonal look of the Bach beer buck. And she gives us a little reference to tell us exactly which
01:07:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
She's thinking of like a poster that's an advertisement for Bach beer.
01:07:08
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah. Yeah.
01:07:12
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah. She tells us the brand.
01:07:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
And there's a buck, which is an animal, right?
01:07:14
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, exactly.
01:07:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's like the, yeah, that's funny.
01:07:16
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah. Um, I think I, I found it or I found the, uh, label from the company that she makes reference to in her footnote.
01:07:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:07:28
Siobhan Phillips
Um, it's It's always very interesting the kind of footnotes more gives us, you know, where Elliot will give us a footnote to like Dante or something and more is like, well, here's here's the beer advertisement I'm looking at.
01:07:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:07:38
Siobhan Phillips
And here's this this book, which is, ah you know, really interesting book, but not like, you know, like
01:07:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Yeah.
01:07:46
Siobhan Phillips
Pound making reference to, you know, these classics of um that they considered to be the know the the foundations of literary civilization.
01:07:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
01:07:56
Siobhan Phillips
um So here, i think more is. is doing what she knows poetry can do um so beautifully and so well.
01:08:08
Siobhan Phillips
And we hate poetry, but of course, we also love poetry. i mean, Moore's most favorites famous poem poetry is begins with, I too dislike it. That's the very first line of the poem. um and goes on to talk about it's a poem in its original full version, full of detail, full of quotation, full of um sounds and consonants. And um she talks about there about getting in all the raw material of poetry um and that which is genuine. And she talks about there about being literalist of the imagination. i could be getting this little bit wrong, but um that this sense of getting down precisely what the world is offering us is part of what more thinks poetry can do and finding in that
01:08:58
Siobhan Phillips
the genuine. um So she's exemplifying all of that here and then kind of drawing herself up short almost with the question, what is more precise than precision?
01:09:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:09:10
Siobhan Phillips
Illusion. And then we get another kind of jump, like the jump from the moth to the alphabet.
01:09:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
01:09:18
Siobhan Phillips
We get a jump from precision illusion to knights and the knights will take us through to almost the end of the poem.
01:09:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
01:09:26
Siobhan Phillips
So i think
01:09:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
So maybe could we just stay for a second with the what is more precise than precision illusion?
01:09:28
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, with the then precision.
01:09:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. so
01:09:33
Siobhan Phillips
oh yeah, I was letting you take that one.
01:09:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah
01:09:36
Siobhan Phillips
um
01:09:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, so no, no. Sorry. You're the guest. Right. So, well, I'll just, i'll I'll form it more fully as a question, maybe while you think about it.
01:09:40
Siobhan Phillips
how
01:09:43
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, no, I'm happy to.
01:09:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
What is more precise than precision? Illusion. I wouldn't think naturally of illusion, whatever it whatever it has to recommend it. I wouldn't think that one of the things that illusion has to recommend it is precision.
01:09:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
In fact, I would think quite the opposite, that
01:09:58
Siobhan Phillips
Exactly.
01:09:58
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah.
01:09:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
illusion is kind of like gauzy and imprecise and vague and so forth.
01:10:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's, it's barely real, you know, barely seems real even it has that sort of shimmering quality, but not so from, from more here, apparently.
01:10:05
Siobhan Phillips
yeah Yes.
01:10:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
So does that make sense to you within the context of this poem? And, and if so, can you explain it to us?
01:10:16
Siobhan Phillips
Totally. It's like, um Well, I don't know if I can explain it, but I can i can just kind of amplify and what you just said, which I think is exactly it. We're right at the halfway point of the poem, right?
01:10:28
Siobhan Phillips
We're just about um the end of the fourth stanza.
01:10:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:10:32
Siobhan Phillips
And the poem is kind of... Bringing itself to this um real like self-testing moment. What is more precise than precision? Illusion. And by way of, as I say, just kind of going further with what you but you have um described as the paradox here of precision and illusion,
01:10:53
Siobhan Phillips
being put on a continuum, a kind of continuum of of goodness or a continuum of of um desired things, I think, um rather than being opposed.
01:11:05
Siobhan Phillips
um We can talk about a little more about maybe precision, precision, I should say that precisely, um in Moore's work. ah This is another like modesty, like armor, um why this poem is so fun and comp, there's another, it's another um signal more word and you know critics from the beginning have been talking about more as precise and her poems as know the details as being so precise and the her forms as being so precise and
01:11:39
Siobhan Phillips
um precision as being this meticulousness.
01:11:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Meticulousness, right?
01:11:43
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, absolutely.
01:11:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:11:44
Siobhan Phillips
And um she herself in poetry talks about like conscious and unconscious fastidiousness in, I think that's in Critics and Connoisseurs, right?
01:11:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:11:53
Siobhan Phillips
And then she even talks about, I think there's, it's, we are um for precision, precision in the poem called Bowles or precisionists.
01:12:04
Siobhan Phillips
um she uses She uses that word herself. And um i think she's aware that ah this is um one part of what she wants from her poetry. I mean, we can think more about what precision actually is. But one part of what she wants from her poetry is this um precision.
01:12:27
Siobhan Phillips
and the But the other part is is the illusion. And this is, again, I'm going to get i man to try to make sure I'm saying the phrases correctly, because in the poem poetry, we can think about the literalists of the imagination, right?
01:12:41
Siobhan Phillips
If I'm getting that right, that that paradox, um the raw material, and then the genuine.
01:12:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right.
01:12:47
Siobhan Phillips
And the genuine is always going to be the wish, right? The the the um impossibility in a sense, but it's also has to be found through the raw material, the precise pieces that we're
01:13:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:13:05
Siobhan Phillips
putting together, sounding out, looking through, writing in our misset or transcribing in our misset alphabet. um
01:13:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:13:17
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, i there's a, yeah.
01:13:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
there's There's something, so go ahead.
01:13:20
Siobhan Phillips
So think, no, no, go.
01:13:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah Yeah, I was just going to say there's something, i mean, you when you're bringing up poetry, I think there's something about that precision illusion thing that, you know, seems resonant with the, you know, another famous phrase from that poem, the um imaginary gardens with real toads in them, right?
01:13:38
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah.
01:13:38
Siobhan Phillips
Mm-hmm.
01:13:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
The idea that on the one hand, there is this kind of
01:13:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah fanciful illusionistic kind of um setting that's imagined and that paradoxically it seems within it is where one finds the real thing which is you know maybe ugly and lumpy or whatever like a toad yeah yeah so So that helps, yeah, and I think that poem is is certainly kind of lurking in the background of of this one.
01:14:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
um That line that she that where where that she then goes on to this kind of grail quest thing, knights we've known... um that that's one where certainly in her reading of it, it sounds, it's very easy to hear that is not K N I G H T S, but N I G H T S, right?
01:14:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
Like ah the experiences we've had, but, but maybe she's playing there.
01:14:31
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah. Yeah. Mm
01:14:34
Siobhan Phillips
yeah
01:14:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
So yeah, maybe um talk a little bit about um the, the kind of next movement of the poem Siobhan and how she gets from this business of precision and illusion into um this description of the grail romance.
01:14:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. and um and into the what seems like i don't know with more one wants to talk about like the argument of a poem sometimes or like the uh yeah you know but the the sort of concluding section of the um sections of the argument of this poem know where would you want to take us next
01:15:08
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, that, no, I think that's true. i think because more, you can hear it in, and so read it and see it in so many poems that her, her syntax, her kind of construction often has the form or sound of an argument.
01:15:24
Siobhan Phillips
Like she says, though this, this, right?
01:15:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right.
01:15:26
Siobhan Phillips
the You know, and, um, this should be this, or this is this. He often has these, um I don't know if they have names in formal logic, but we don't need need to go that far.
01:15:38
Siobhan Phillips
But the sound and the construction of a kind of argumentative paragraph is often there in Moore's lines.
01:15:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
01:15:46
Siobhan Phillips
And yet, I think this is part of what makes her work so, um it's just so fascinating and interesting. And changes. I mean, every time i I read different more poems, I'm like, oh, now I hear it this way or this way. And the tone is often difficult.
01:16:02
Siobhan Phillips
What I was going to say is there is a syntax of argument, but the argument itself is often not as definitive as the syntax might imply, if that makes sense.
01:16:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
think it does.
01:16:10
Siobhan Phillips
and in my in my experience of the Moore poem.
01:16:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. yeah
01:16:13
Siobhan Phillips
And that's partly ah what I love about it, um that she manages that um assertion, ah kind of humble assertion, we could say, humility or modesty and assertiveness um that is right there in the form of it.
01:16:28
Siobhan Phillips
And, you know, and there's a... There's a lovely reading of, really, a challenging and lovely reading um of Moore's Precision by um Natalia Cicere.
01:16:39
Siobhan Phillips
I may be saying Natalia's name last name wrong, but where she talks about the Moore's precision and this her style, her precision style,
01:16:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, that's that's right
01:16:48
Siobhan Phillips
With ah comparison to D.A. Miller's reading of Jane Austen, where he talks about the Austenian style as a way to kind of assert things while also veiling one's own personal um statement or investment.
01:17:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
right. right.
01:17:04
Siobhan Phillips
This is obviously it's more complex than that, but there is something in that. Mauryan like making an argument but also not we're never quite sure exactly how strongly the argument where the argument emphasis lies and where the I figure the first person of the argument really is in more
01:17:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay, so we so we get this like kind of backhanded defense of poetry. you know
01:17:27
Siobhan Phillips
With precision and illusion maybe yeah, but then we're getting to the Knights right yeah yeah yeah
01:17:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
not Right, yeah, sort of like that's... Yeah, so I guess i guess what I want to know is like whether with respect to the the kind of style or the sound of argument or whether with respect to the like what the the substance of the poem itself, how do we get from there... like Using or keeping in mind the titular idea of the armors undermining modesty to that final wish of the the imperishable wish of the like, can you help, you know, lay the trail of breadcrumbs for us to to get from point A to point B, Siobhan?
01:17:53
Siobhan Phillips
Yes.
01:17:58
Siobhan Phillips
Yes.
01:18:02
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah.
01:18:05
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, exactly. So, um,
01:18:10
Siobhan Phillips
You know, how armor's undermining modesty, how is modesty an armor? How does um how might modesty help us
Moore's Artistic and Poetic Philosophy
01:18:20
Siobhan Phillips
um navigate this fallen, more or less, however however detrimental that is, more or less fallen work world of language and alphabets?
01:18:30
Siobhan Phillips
um And how might we inhabit that ideal, that heroic ideal of the knight, questing after something, And in that quest, um bringing with it a kind of association of battle and combat, um and it more talks about Mars, right? Mars is excessive in being preventive.
01:18:53
Siobhan Phillips
um But a hero need not and ah hero need not write an ordinal of attribbates to enumerate an ordinal of attributes to enumerate what they hate. um how do we um ah quest after the good and find the genuine and also understand ourselves not not be not letting self get in the way there and then letting self and the assertion of self that would be the non-humble or non-modest get in the way.
01:19:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, what what would be the danger in that? why Why would it be bad to let, like what what would it prevent, according to Moore, do you think, to let self get in the way?
01:19:32
Siobhan Phillips
Well, I think that's, um um this is gonna this is kind of an evasion, but it's a genuine one, I promise.
01:19:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Maybe ah an appropriate, yeah. yeah
01:19:41
Siobhan Phillips
I think that's part of what Moore is wrestling with here. Like, I think in an earlier Moore poem, what would have been like, self-protectiveness is a weapon. That's great. armor not It's not never quite simple so simple, but like um another armored animal, yes. like But here, yeah the modesty is undermining. Like, what what where are we? Do we really, are we really insisting on the value or... um imperative to be armored.
01:20:05
Siobhan Phillips
And the mirror of steel on insistence um should countenance, continence, objectified and not by chance. So in some sense, the mirror of steel is more seeing herself in the armor of the night, right?
01:20:18
Siobhan Phillips
Like this humility or this armor, this modesty, I shouldn't confuse those two, um is ah throwing ourselves back on ourselves in a sense, right?
01:20:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:20:28
Siobhan Phillips
In the the mirroring, we're looking at ourselves, the mirror of steel on insistence should countenance, continence.
01:20:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's totally a tongue twister, but so let's but go carefully through those words.
01:20:33
Siobhan Phillips
um
01:20:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
A mirror of steel, uninsistence should countenance, that is what, um consider or confront or take take on or
01:20:44
Siobhan Phillips
approve of um allow.
01:20:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
Continence.
01:20:48
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, all those.
01:20:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
Continence meaning what, the um the containment or the capacity to exhibit or to to contain or to, and I'm thinking.
01:20:59
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, and I think a kind of um persistence, a kind of um endurance, a kind of ongoingness, um which more values, I think.
01:21:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
01:21:13
Siobhan Phillips
And some of the poem conclusions of The Fish what are years that we've talked about before.
01:21:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:21:19
Siobhan Phillips
Mirror of Steel is very, very, very, um Okay, so Moore is talking with one of them about excess armors undermining modesty instead of innocent depravity. So what we want here is the modesty, that mirror of steel and insistence. It should count in its countenance.
01:21:43
Siobhan Phillips
That's what we want. And we we're not quite sure if its armor is undermining that or allowing that. We're we're we're we're pretty sure, but we're not quite sure. We don't want that innocent depravity, right? Even if the innocence of depravity might be like a prelapsarian innocence, we could even say, but let's, we can't get there more is like, we can't get there.
01:22:01
Siobhan Phillips
We're requesting after the grail. We're not back in, you know, the pre-alphabetic moment, um, where we might, ah you know, um body and soul might be in a different relationship right now.
01:22:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:22:13
Siobhan Phillips
We have to
01:22:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
For better for worse, we have our armor, right?
01:22:16
Siobhan Phillips
but but We have our armor around our body and our on our soul is is therefore might be armored as well or might not be.
01:22:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:22:24
Siobhan Phillips
So is armor allowing that modesty or is armor undermining that modesty? We're going to need to talk with these knights about that. And ah we need to know because a mirror of steel and insistence should countenance countenance.
01:22:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:22:35
Siobhan Phillips
um That's what we would like. And that you know that mirror, there's so much in there too. It's a mirror of steel. So that sense of, again, of kind of a a blade or a weapon or a shield or a ah piece of armor, a plate of armor in the steel.
01:22:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
who
01:22:54
Siobhan Phillips
There's never, steel is never, we're never gonna be in kind of easy non-steely ah um ecstasy in more, I don't think.
01:23:05
Siobhan Phillips
um But it's a mirror of steel, uninsistence. So it's a way of um kind of stepping back from things maybe. um to countenance this ongoing, this continence, this innocence and altitude in an an unhackneyed solitude.
01:23:22
Siobhan Phillips
um So there's a little bit here. i mean, we can kind of work through um some of the allusions that more might be working with.
01:23:34
Siobhan Phillips
um ah So one of them...
01:23:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, yeah, sure, by all means.
01:23:39
Siobhan Phillips
um The mirror here, we can think about like the mirror held up to nature, like the classic allusion to um the mirror that is art.
01:23:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:23:51
Siobhan Phillips
And the, um I'm just kind of, you know, thinking about that.
01:23:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:23:55
Siobhan Phillips
um I think Paul Muldoon, Muldoon, you'll not be surprised if you know Muldoon's poetry, um talks about this poem in his talk about Marianne Moore.
01:24:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. right.
01:24:05
Siobhan Phillips
And he brings in that idea of the mirror um from Shakespeare.
01:24:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah hu
01:24:11
Siobhan Phillips
um So, it but in the the Shakespeare quotation, right, when Hamlet's talking and says, um you know, suit the action to the word, the word to the action when he's giving that speech about the mirror held up to nature.
01:24:26
Siobhan Phillips
With this special, not not overstep the modesty of nature for anything so overdone is is from the purpose of playing, whose end both at the first and now was and is to hold as to where the mirror up to nature.
01:24:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hamlet is talking to the to the players.
01:24:40
Siobhan Phillips
Players, to show virtue around future.
01:24:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
Is that right? He's giving them advice, right, about how to, the actors, in other words, right?
01:24:42
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah. Yeah.
01:24:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:24:44
Siobhan Phillips
So, I mean, what's what's interesting to me there is that modesty is right there in the quotation and in that illusion.
01:24:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:24:50
Siobhan Phillips
And then he's talking about the modesty of nature, like we need to make sure that we're not overdoing it and holding up the mirror, kind of uninsistence and modesty is there too. And then there's another poem, gosh, I don't know if I'm going to be able to find it um in real time here, but where Moore talks about Shakespeare as being unhackneyed, I think.
01:25:12
Siobhan Phillips
So if I can find that, I will.
01:25:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, well if if you want to look, I mean, I have a question I can take up some time while you do, which is just to imagine like unhackneyed solitude is interesting.
01:25:15
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah.
01:25:21
Kamran Javadizadeh
I didn't, I don't know what it it it naturally suggests the question of like, what would a hackneyed solitude be like? and is and And where my mind goes is maybe like, oh, is that like the um sort of self mythologizing kind of romantic solitude, you know, who is,
01:25:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Yeah, so I see you nodding yes. ah that That sounds right to you, all right?
01:25:45
Siobhan Phillips
I love it. Yeah, I think so.
01:25:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:25:47
Siobhan Phillips
I think that the and the happening solitude might be someone who lets self bar their usefulness to others. And it might be someone kind of wrapped up in the stars and harps in the new moon too, right?
01:25:58
Siobhan Phillips
Which could be a kind of...
01:25:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:26:00
Siobhan Phillips
um
01:26:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's like a romantic poet.
01:26:02
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah. um You know, Moore had an interesting relationship to romance. I think there is this kind of um Heather Cross White and Luke Carson talk about this in article, I think, that they wrote, um that Moore had this vision of, as in here, as in this poem,
01:26:24
Siobhan Phillips
a kind of chivalric romance, like a romance in the um more early modern sense, right? And then um kind of posing that against this ah more, for her, sullied maybe or tarnished romance.
01:26:41
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, the moment where she talks about Shakespeare is as unhackneyed as an efforts of affection. When she talks, she says, unhackneyed Shakespeare's hay, sweet hay, which hath no fellow, loves extraordinary ordinary stubbornness.
01:26:57
Siobhan Phillips
um That poem, efforts of affection, is another, and the illusion, the connection there might be another signal that there is something here about this poem is Armourous, Undermining Modesty, is about love in some way, or it's thinking about love in some way.
01:27:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:27:12
Siobhan Phillips
But yeah, so she, these might be, you know, at this point, there's so many different echoes here, but these may be more or less useful for us. But I do think that um in that, that mirror of steel and insistence, that is, for me, at least something of what Moore is looking for.
01:27:30
Siobhan Phillips
Like that is the the posture that will allow us to quest um in the proper, the old Roman fashion, um in the in the way that will um provide for us or sustain for us the wish.
01:27:48
Siobhan Phillips
So the tarnish is always there, right? The wish for that, that grail for poetry and its it's it's better form.
01:27:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:27:55
Siobhan Phillips
um And there is a, ah um almost a religious import to that, I think. i mean, more is, more was to that, to that ideal, I would say.
01:28:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
A religious import to what? Sorry.
01:28:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
Uh-huh.
01:28:09
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah. I mean, I think in the, you know, you talked about nights we've known could be N-I-G-H-T and there is a sense of night and day happening here and, um, the arise for it is day.
01:28:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:28:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:28:23
Siobhan Phillips
There is a, it could be also like, ah you know, that's, that's a quotation too. um Also comes from the Ogg book. um And it's a, it's the motto of a printing company.
01:28:38
Siobhan Phillips
um
01:28:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
01:28:38
Siobhan Phillips
That was the John Day printing company or printing. Yeah.
01:28:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
Like a press, right?
01:28:44
Siobhan Phillips
Enterprise.
01:28:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
A publishing press.
01:28:45
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah. Press.
01:28:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:28:46
Siobhan Phillips
um Anyway. Yeah.
01:28:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, okay. So I want to talk about this last line.
01:28:49
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah.
01:28:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's so interesting to me. It's also, I mean, strikingly beautiful, I think in, in the sound of it in, in her reading of it.
01:28:59
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah.
01:29:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
But, um,
01:29:01
Siobhan Phillips
It's so gorgeous.
01:29:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
So i have a, couple you know, maybe observation and then question. There is the tarnish. I mean, what exactly is being designated by the word there that um like where, know, but maybe hold hold hold that question um to one side for the moment. There is the tarnish. So tarnish what is like um the sign of where or of,
01:29:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
aged, so you know something that's exposed to the elements and it doesn't look as sort of shiny and mirror-like maybe as it once did or is or the flaw or the kind of fallenness of the thing.
01:29:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
But then we get this lovely kind of, um there is the tarnished semicolon, right? not ah Not a full stop, but a kind of partial stop there. And there, I don't know, a different place or the same the same there?
01:29:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
there in the tarnish, the imperishable, which sounds paradoxically opposed to tarnish the imperishable wish. So what I hear in that is sort of like that, see, Moore must have loved that sound because to me, to my ear, I hear the same sound at the end of what are years, right?
01:30:15
Siobhan Phillips
Yes. Yeah.
01:30:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
This is eternity. but This is eternity. this is and Have I got it right? This is eternity. This is mortality. Or have I got it backwards? This is mortality. This is eternity. Right.
01:30:25
Siobhan Phillips
yeah
01:30:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
um But ah so, so that's just an observation. My one question I have for you, and it might seem like a trivial question, but maybe there's some meaningful account of it. Like every stanza up till now has had a long line followed by a very short line.
01:30:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
In the, the fifth line would be the very long line and the sixth and final line of each stanza is the very short, I think in every case, almost every case, three syllable, line here we don't get that we get the long line as the fifth line of the stanza and the poem ends so what you know why why why like can can you say anything about the absence of a of a kind of concluding short line um but then whether or not you can i mean maybe talk to us about you know just the final line on its own and the and the relationship between tarnish and wish
01:30:57
Siobhan Phillips
It's enough. Yeah. Yeah.
01:31:10
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah.
01:31:22
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, i I think you could read the the absence of that final, it's often, most often three syllables, I guess there's one that's four syllables, but that the absence of that final little three syllable line in this last stanza, you could read it as seeming some ways unfinished, but I think of it as almost being more finished, that it doesn't need that
01:31:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
01:31:51
Siobhan Phillips
extra almost like caveat or that little extra bit that then spurs us on to the next leap of association and qualification or argument.
01:32:06
Siobhan Phillips
um it does come to a kind of, in my feeling of it, my reading of it, it comes to a kind of rest here.
01:32:11
Kamran Javadizadeh
Thank you.
01:32:14
Siobhan Phillips
And in part, because I do hear, I just do, I love like you, I love the beauty of those words and that line. And I hear, i love the echoes of the beginning. And, again, the again the the form of it, that the the construction of the sentence is like there, there. It seems very definitive, but it's actually quite vague.
01:32:35
Siobhan Phillips
And um that also, I think there's other there are other moments in Moore where that happens, you know, like in the Days of Prismatic Color, which is her one of her poems about Adam and evil Adam and the fall.
01:32:51
Siobhan Phillips
um And there's a, at the end, I think it's like, it is, it is, it is. And we're not exactly sure what the it is.
01:32:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
01:33:00
Siobhan Phillips
um It's truth, but it's also something else. um Maybe.
01:33:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
There's a lovely kind of like there is the tarnish. I love that and there comma. She she omits the the repetition of is.
01:33:11
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah.
01:33:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
She gets it out of the parallelism.
01:33:13
Siobhan Phillips
yeah
01:33:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
But if that's an unusual kind of grammatical rhythm within the space of this poem, I think it's quite lovely actually rhythmically.
01:33:19
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, yeah. it's It slows us down. It kind of brings us to a ah place of somewhat peace. I think, so we're in this um description of armor and its and it's modesty.
01:33:35
Siobhan Phillips
um armor is relation, armor's relationship to modesty, I should say. And um we have a mirror of steel on insistence. So I read that as being more thinking about the construction of this posture of the hero, of the knight, of the um the mirror of steel that is allowing the but true virtue to continue.
01:33:59
Siobhan Phillips
And that mirror steel is countenance incontinence, objectified and not by chance. They are in its frame of circumstance of innocence and altitude. So it's almost as if the armor has become a mirror and that mirror has achieved a frame, um its frame of circumstance of innocence and altitude.
01:34:18
Siobhan Phillips
So we had innocent depravity, but now we have innocence as a kind of, as an altitude of a higher innocence.
01:34:21
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:34:24
Siobhan Phillips
um and an unhackneyed solitude. So we're ah alone with this mirror um that is objectifying something, objectifying maybe ourselves, objectifying maybe nature, maybe both, um that is maybe a figure for um poetry, that mirror of steel and insistence, which again gets back to your point about poetry as armor or armor as poetry but is kind of transformed that by this point in the poem into not just a defense right and then we're not being excessive and being preventive we're not maybe excessively preventive here but we're being
01:35:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
01:35:07
Siobhan Phillips
allowing uninsistedly, uninsistently is the word, um ah what is there to be there um in this uninsistence, mirror of steel uninsistence, and achieving in that an unhackneyed solitude.
01:35:26
Siobhan Phillips
um And that's the tarnish. Then the fact that it's a construction, mirror,
01:35:37
Siobhan Phillips
ah human construction.
01:35:42
Siobhan Phillips
it's always going to be tarnished, I think, but then there is the imperishable wish that we'd get it right, or we did reach that. um
01:35:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
is the imperishable wish is something like the hankering after the like in poetry the um the place for the genuine or whatever yeah mm-hmm
01:35:58
Siobhan Phillips
The place for the genuine, I think, yes. There is a tarnish in there, the imperishable wish. And, you know, I guess one of the... um
01:36:11
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, one of the questions I'm left with, I think that's maybe as far as I'm gonna get, but um think you can take it further.
01:36:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:36:19
Siobhan Phillips
But one of the questions I'm left with is really, ah with many, the the eye here, the I should, i confess, like to have a talk with one about excess.
01:36:31
Siobhan Phillips
So the I comes back in this poem and we have that mention of self and the I is there in the beginning of this poem. and we have a we and we hate poetry um but i wonder um how much that mirror how much the uninsistence and the contentance here are about and the and the unhackered solitude are about um a vision of self-creation or a vision of aesthetic creation um and how how different those two things are and how much creation is not even the word here um uh
01:37:10
Siobhan Phillips
almost a kind of um acceptance and arrangement and framing of circumstance um
01:37:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, right.
01:37:18
Siobhan Phillips
um
01:37:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
That that one one has, oh, sorry, that that innocence and altitude you said?
01:37:19
Siobhan Phillips
in sense and altitude.
01:37:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:37:25
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, I'm just repeating the gorgeous last
01:37:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
they there are worse things to do. um That like one has been given a set of circumstances that one has, that all one can do is to decide how to sort of dress it or, you know, present it or um defend it.
01:37:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah But that in, in those choices that one makes, there is, there is this kind of paradoxical ability to, um, to enact a kind of creation or to, or to, or to allow poetry to, um, encode a kind of wish, um,
01:38:11
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, in the modesty um that the armor could support, perhaps, um
01:38:23
Siobhan Phillips
there is that... um
Moore's Influence on Modernist Poetry
01:38:27
Siobhan Phillips
risk restraint that is positive, right?
01:38:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:38:30
Siobhan Phillips
That is that, I mean, I think when i I was just now, as I was thinking about the altitude and thinking when you were um offering that lovely reading, um also of the the frigate pelican, which is another of the animal poems that, and more talks there about the bird hides in the height
01:38:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:38:54
Siobhan Phillips
and in the majestic display of his art. um So the altitude hiding in the height, but I think what's maybe slightly different about this poem this, you know, late-ish poem is more is kind of wondering about the hiding a little bit more.
01:39:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
01:39:15
Siobhan Phillips
But that altitude is there. And that frigate pelican is also about, you know, the bird that was never fallen in love. Like, it's also alone, you know?
01:39:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
01:39:23
Siobhan Phillips
So that's there too.
01:39:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. I wonder, you know, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has ah has this beautiful collection of armor.
01:39:35
Siobhan Phillips
Oh, wow.
01:39:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
I wonder if Moore saw it. I'll bet she did. I don't know how long it's been there. um i
01:39:42
Siobhan Phillips
I love that.
01:39:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
Anyway, I wonder.
01:39:44
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, I'm thinking about, yeah, or um I'm sure like maybe Karen Rothman or Emily Satina or some of the other scholars have worked on more and material and art would be, would know that's a really fascinating question.
01:39:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
A question for a biographer, maybe.
01:39:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:39:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. I should have Karen and Emily, both of whom are, of course, friends of mine as they are of yours.
01:40:04
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah.
01:40:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
I should have, I should, they, they're on my list. be Karen, Karen, Emily, if you're out there, be forewarned.
01:40:08
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, no, i I would love to know what they, yeah.
01:40:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
I'm going to be hitting you up.
01:40:12
Siobhan Phillips
um
01:40:15
Siobhan Phillips
Right.
01:40:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's great.
01:40:16
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah.
01:40:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
Any, and yeah.
01:40:17
Siobhan Phillips
Because I mean, that there's, you know, the, um yeah, sorry, go ahead.
01:40:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
No, I was just going to ask if you had any last thoughts for us here.
01:40:24
Siobhan Phillips
um I mean, there's so much else to say. you know that the the if there is this is me i think this is a poem about
01:40:34
Siobhan Phillips
about poetry and what and what it does and are and our um our desires and our circumstances and how we navigate them.
01:40:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:40:45
Siobhan Phillips
um it's That's a very vague, but I also think there is a, maybe a buried question, not just about um self-protection and defensiveness, not just about precision and its uses and its nature, um not just about modesty and its capacities and its power, but also about relationship. You know, the,
01:41:10
Siobhan Phillips
the night we talked about whether or not there is a kind of love poem here and if I'm not mistaken I don't but the nights that seek the grail of the nights that are not that are pure right that are um not involved with
01:41:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
my main My main source on the and the and knights and the grail is like Monty Python. So I'm not sure how well it's to be trusted.
01:41:34
Siobhan Phillips
yeah well i I should I should um do more research than that before um
01:41:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
and And of course, there's the grail. you know i don't know if Moore is also thinking about you know her friend Elliot's own mythologizing of the wasteland as a kind of grail poem or as a grail quest.
01:41:45
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I do think that, you know, Moore's long poems, Marriage and the Octopus, among them are in some ways in conversation with other great modernist long poems.
01:42:01
Siobhan Phillips
I mean, we didn't talk much about Moore's situation in modernism and her, after she left Carlisle was in New York and um was, you know, she,
01:42:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:42:12
Siobhan Phillips
were knew all those poets. I mean, was fascinating, Moore's connections and the way she kind of she she connects and she um you know ah elicited admiration and connection and friendship from poets whom you might not think are um you know similar and more and more
01:42:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:42:35
Siobhan Phillips
really appreciated Gertrude Stein. Moore was a mentor to Elizabeth Bishop. Moore was friends with her new William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot. She knew Auden. She corresponded with Wallace Stevens. um H.D.
01:42:48
Siobhan Phillips
ah bri You know, she had all these. um But I think and so I think her I think she was very much aware of those currents in modernist poetry and that she was talking back to them and I think if Armour's undermining poetry is also I think looking and thinking back to marriage um that a sense of quest or and to octopus at that sense of a quest and the the long poem as quest is in here very much and is is speaking back to that um with her own very different conception of what it is to be a knight what it is to be a uh
01:43:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:43:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:43:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:43:22
Siobhan Phillips
um and the quest and a lyric poet right and how that the notion of quest and lyric poetry come together um yeah
01:43:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
and and ah And a lyric poet. Yeah. Yeah.
01:43:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:43:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's fantastic Siobhan. um I, on the one hand, want to go on talking with you about this poem and on the other think, well, we we've probably, um we've reached a moment where I think it would be good to hear the poem maybe one more time as a way to conclude our conversation. So could I could i ask you to do the honors and to read the poem one time and from beginning to end and in your voice?
01:43:59
Siobhan Phillips
Yeah, one second.
01:44:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
Are you, have you got it?
01:44:11
Kamran Javadizadeh
got
01:44:11
Siobhan Phillips
At first, I thought a pest must have alighted on my wrist. It was a moth, almost an owl, its wings were furred so well, with backgammon board wedges interlacing on the wing, like cloth of gold in a pattern of scales with a hair seal Persian sheen.
01:44:28
Siobhan Phillips
Once self-determination made an ax of a stone and hacked things out with hairy paws. The consequence, our misset alphabet. ah Arise, for it is day. Even gifted scholars lose their way through faulty etymology.
01:44:42
Siobhan Phillips
No wonder we hate poetry. and stars and harps and the new moon if tributes cannot be implicit give me diatribes in the fragrance of iodine the cork oak acorn grown in spain the pale ale-eyed and personal look which the sales placard gives the bock beer buck what is more precise than precision illusion Knights we've known, like those familiar, now unfamiliar knights who sought the grail, were dukes in old Roman fashion without the addition of wreaths and silver rods and armor gilded or inlaid.
01:45:12
Siobhan Phillips
They did not let self bar their usefulness to others who were different. Though Mars is excessive in being preventive, heroes need not write an ordinal of attributes to enumerate what they hate.
01:45:24
Siobhan Phillips
I should, i confess, like to have a talk with one about excess. and armors undermining modesty instead of innocent depravity a mirror of steel uninsistence should countenance continents objectified and not by chance there in its frame of circumstance of innocence and altitude in an unhackneyed solitude there is the tarnish and there the imperishable wish
01:45:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah Thank you. That was great, Siobhan. You've just heard Siobhan Phillips um reading Marianne Moore's Armour's Undervinding Modesty, a poem that I feel like I know in a whole new set of ways after having talked with you ah for for the last um hour so, Siobhan. So I just want to thank you so much for for um so generously coming on to the podcast and and sharing your brilliance on this poem and this poet with us.
01:46:18
Siobhan Phillips
Oh, thank you so much. This was a real pleasure.
01:46:21
Kamran Javadizadeh
think Thank you listeners for hanging out with us for the last little bit. um I'll say, as I um try to always remember to say at the ends of these episodes, that if you're enjoying the podcast, I hope you'll share it with your friends and I hope ah you will subscribe or follow it on your podcast podcast. platform of choice, as they say.
01:46:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
um i hope you'll consider leaving a rating and review, which helps spread the word. I'm really feeling um excited and glad to be after something of a hiatus to be back into the rhythm of recording new episodes of the podcast. They will keep coming um if you keep listening. So um thank you everyone again and be well.