Moran's The Room Within
 

The Room Within
Moore Moran
The Swallow Press, 2010

Caveat lector: Mike Moran is my friend, mentor, co-religionist and fellow Irish-American, so
I do not approach this marvelous collection in a dispassionate way. He’s one of those rara aves who can write equally well in form or freely, confirming again what my old tutor, Robert Penn Warren told me at seventeen: “Boy, if you want to write free verse, first you have to learn how to write in meter and rhyme.”

I tend to like Moran best when he is at his most formal, most concise, most spiritual. But I like everything in this book, his first in a decade, and I am very grateful to Swallow, whose specialty is poets of the American West, for giving us this generous sampling from one of Ivor Winter’s greatest Stanford students. Here’s a poem that utterly delights me.

The Truth Concerning the Pizza in Monterey

Custom House Cafe stood on this spot, straddling
Pier and sea wall like a fisherman gaffing catch.
It was here, in Forty-Six, that Carlos brought pizza
To the county--hand-pounding his dough flats so fine
That when he spun them at the ceiling, light
From the harbor shone through.

At the great iron oven he would hand them out crackling,
Bubbling real Mafia mozzarella,
Tomato so fresh it sassed you all the way down;
Crust edges: buttery popover. Friday nights,
Ramirez and I downed two extra-larges per, hardly pausing
To pull on longnecks so cold chunks of ice

Still knocked around inside the bottles. Today
You can only get pizza at the franchise parlors in town
Where the freshest thing going is the waiters.
And nobody tosses anymore. Instead, they pancake
Their wheat-germy dough through rubber wringers
Lifted from old washing machines in the junkyard.

I responded to Mike via email:
“I just completely cracked up on your Pizza poem. We still have a pizzeria like that in Fargo, where the dough is thrown. Duane came here from Naples Pizza in New Haven, yeah the ORIGINAL joint. (You can imagine how much Naples Pizza I ate on my all-nighters.) I'm thinking, hmm, tastes just like home! Duane died many years ago but not before teaching his son to make a perfect thin crust pizza.

My ideological opponent but old friend, Senator Byron Dorgan, always flew into Fargo rather than Bismarck so he could eat Duane's pizza, even though that left him a 200 mile drive to the state capital. But trust Byron to fly fifteen hundred and drive two hundred miles for the perfect pizza.”

You can save Swallow Press the 60 percent Amazon gouges by ordering directly:
http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/The+Room+Within

How is Moore? It was fun when he used to hang out here. Can you persuade him back?

In New York, just about all pizzerias (and there are hundreds or thousands of them) throw the dough, Tim. I'm shocked to find out that it's not the common practice elsewhere.

I try to disagree with Tim as much as I can to show what an independent fellow I am, but here I'm compelled to agree with him. These are poems you want to read and reread for their craft and wonderful density of ideas. My favorite? The title poem, which I chose when I guest edited The Raintown Review.

Mike Moran was one of Yvor Winters’ students when I was reading Winnie the Pooh.
I have very mixed feelings about Winters. He wrote a few flawless poems, and about how many 20th Century poets can one say that? I think his opinions on Yeats, on Frost, are poppycock, and that despite his towering reputation he was a poor judge of poetry. But teaching at his rich, young college in Palo Alto, Stanford, he had an outsize influence. Our successors may look back some day and fully appreciate it. First, he took JV Cunningham, America's great epigrammatist under his wing. He nurtured the talents of Edgar Bowers, Turner Cassity, and Mike Moran. Wallace Trimpi, Helen Pinkerton Trimpi and Thom Gunn were all within his circle, as was my Master of Memory, Robert Mezey, whose feelings about him are as mixed as mine. Janet Lewis, his spouse, was arguably a better poet than he.

But through Stanford and the California scene the influence continued to my generation. I count Tim Steele, Suzanne Doyle, the great Indian writer Vikram Seth, and Dana Gioia as all among the Stanford School. Throw in England’s expatriate, Dick Davis, and there you have the contemporaries who persuaded me to publish. Rest assured, there will be no North Dakota School. If you look up all these biographies, you won’t find an MFA teaching creative writing among them. But you know something, when I read Gunn’s The Man With Night Sweats, I am gay, and HIV is just starting to kill my friends in Minneapolis. When I read Bowers I find pentameters that are among the most skillful ever written. As Dana quoted to me one day:

Eternal Venice, sinking by degrees
Into the very water that she lights.

Mike Moran went into advertising, married, raised a family. For many years now he’s been confined to a motorized scooter, nearly paralyzed by a rare nerve disease. In the face of one of the world’s most hedonistic, secular societies, SoCal, he keeps the faith. I’ll conclude these scattershot ruminations with a poem in the acephalic tetrameters of Auden’s elegy for Yeats:

Ordinary Time in the Pews

Ordinary days again.
Advent, Pentecost are past;
who now will accept our sins,
raise the dust in which we’re cast?

Cold the God flesh on the tree,
banned the crèche to attic murk,
sheer the silence after prayer,
Nothing seems at all to work.


Yet we try and try again
serving Him we hardly know;
honk if you love Jesus, friend,
beeping blessings as we go.

Here we meet who, somehow, must
rescue meaning from the dust,
where betrayal’s kiss presents
our best hope of relevance.

He was a wonderful presence here, a fine poet, a thoughtful critic, a charming, friendly guy.

The book is wonderful. My favorite is "To the Golden Gate Bridge" which he posted when he was here, and which has haunted me ever since Such a combination of optimism, poignance and compassion... well, no sense describing it. Just read the damn thing!

I look forward to reading this book. Thanks for letting me know about it.

Ed