[John Hutchcraft]

Swinging back over to successful examples of syllabics . . .

I mentioned above Marianne Moore. If syllabics indeed are meter, then fewer more scrupulous metricists have written, though of course she wrote free verse too.

I have a sense, maybe unwarranted, that not many people read her anymore. That's too bad, because she's the bee's knees. I remember reading somewhere that she was a big influence on a young Wilbur, for what that's worth. I think you can hear her in a killer-diller line like "whips map countries in the air" - that has something of Moore's ability to zig in a completely unexpected direction. I think she is a complete master of the interplay between line and sentence, and one of the most surprising poets around, though definitely not among the most readily accessible. A lot of it is mysterious.

Here are three of her early poems. With the new coding on the Sphere, I lack the technical competence to reproduce Moore's indentations, so you'll just have to imagine them.

The Fish

wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like

an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices—
in and out, illuminating

the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,

pink
rice-grains, ink-
bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.

All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice—
all the physical features of

ac-
cident—lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is

dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.


To a Steam Roller

The illustration
is nothing to you without the application.
You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down
into close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them.

Sparkling chips of rock
are crushed down to the level of the parent block.
Were not 'impersonal judment in aesthetic
matters, a metaphysical impossibility,' you

might fairly achieve
it. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive
of one's attending upon you, but to question
the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.

The Past is the Present

If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as on a recent occasion I was goaded
into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse.
This man said – I think that I repeat
his identical words:
"Hebrew poetry is
prose with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form.