 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To find out more information, or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Oscar Goff. Pedantic Literalist by Marianne Moore. From a collection of poems entitled, Poems. Prince Rupert's Drop. Paper Muslin Ghost. White Torch. With power to say unkind things with kindness, and the most irritating things in the midst of love and tears, you invite destruction. You are like the meditative man with the perfunctory heart. Its carved cordiality ran to and fro at first, like an inlaid and royal immutable production. Then afterward neglected to be painful, and deluded him with loitering formality, doing its duty as if it did it not, presenting an obstruction to the motive that it served. What stood erect in you has withered. A little palm tree of turned wood informs your one spontaneous core in its immutable reduction. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To find out more information, or to find out how you could volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Oscar Goff. To A Steam Roller by Marianne Moore, in a collection of poems entitled, Poems. 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. Barkling chips of rock are crushed down to the level of the parent block. Or not impersonal judgment in aesthetic matters, a metaphysical impossibility, you might fairly achieve it. As for butterflies I can hardly conceive of ones attending upon you, but to question the congruence of the compliment is vain, if it exists. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To find out more information, or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Oscar Goff. Dilligence is to Magic as Progress is to Flight by Marianne Moore, in a collection of poetry entitled, Poems. With an elephant to ride upon, with rings on her fingers, and bells on her toes, she shall out-distance calamity anywhere she goes. Speed is not in her mind inseparable from carpets. Locomotion arose in the shape of an elephant. She clamored up, and chose to travel laboriously. So far as magic carpets are concerned, she knows that although the semblance of speed may attach to scarecrows of aesthetic procedure, the substance of it is embodied in such of those tough-grained animals as have outstripped man's whim to suppose them ephemera, and have earned that fruit of their ability to endure blows, which dubs them prosaic necessities. Not Curios. End of recording. This is LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To find out more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Oscar Goff. Those Various Scalples by Marianne Moore, from a collection of poetry entitled, Poems. Those various sounds consistently indistinct, like intermingled echoes struck from thin glass successively at random. The inflection disguised, your hair, the tales of two fighting cocks head-to-head in stone, like sculptored scimitars repeating the curve of your ears in reverse order, your eyes, flowers of ice and snow, sewn by tearing winds on the cordage of disabled ships, your raised hand and ambiguous signature, your cheeks, those rosettes of blood on the stone floors of French Chateau, with regard to which guides are so affirmative, your other hand a bundle of lances all alike, partly hid by emeralds from Persia, and the fractional magnificence of Florentine goldwork. A collection of half a dozen little objects made fine with enamel in gray, yellow, and dragonfly blue. A lemon, a pear, and three bunches of grapes tied with silver. Your dress, a magnificent square cathedral of uniform, and at the same time diverse appearance, a species of vertical vineyard rustling in the storm of conventional opinion. Are they weapons or scalpels, wedded to brilliance by the hard majesty of that sophistication which is superior to opportunity? These things are rich instruments with which to experiment but surgery is not tentative. Why dissect destiny with instruments which are more highly specialized than the tissues of destiny itself? End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To find out more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Feed Me Also, River God by Marianne Moore from a collection of poetry entitled Poems. Feed Me Also, River God Lest by diminished vitality and abated villagence I become food for crocodiles. For that quicksand of gluttony which is legion, it is there, close at hand, on either side of me. You remember the Israelites who said in pride and stoutness of heart, the bricks are fallen down. We will build with hewn stone, the sycamores are cut down. We will change to cedars. I am not ambitious to dress stones, to renew forts, nor to match my value in action against their ability to catch up with arrested prosperity. I am not like them, indefatigable. But if you are a God, you will not discriminate against me. Yet, if you may fulfill none but prayers, dressed as gifts in return for your gifts, disregard the request. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To find out more information, or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Oscar Goff To William Butler Yates on Tagore By Mary Ann Moore From a collection of poetry entitled Poems It is made clear by the phrase, even the mood, by virtue of which he says the thing he thinks, that it pays to cut gems even in these conscience-less days. But the jewel that always outshines ordinary jewels is your praise. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To find out more, or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. He Made This Screen by Mary Ann Moore In a collection of poetry entitled Poems He Made This Screen, not of silver nor of coral, but of weather-beaten laurel. Here, he introduced a sea uniform like tapestry. Here, a fig tree. There, a face. There, a dragon circling space. Designating here, a bower. There, a pointed passion flower. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To find out more information, or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Oscar Goff. Talisman By Mary Ann Moore In a collection of poetry entitled Poems Under a splintered mast, torn from ship and cast near her hull, a stumbling shepherd found embedded in the ground, a seagull of lapis lazuli, a scarab of the sea with wings spread, curling its coral feet, parting its beak to greet men long dead. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To find out more information, or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Black Earth by Mary Ann Moore In a collection of poetry entitled Poems Openly, yes, with the naturalness of the hippopotamus or the alligator when it climbs out on the bank to experience the sun, I do these things which I do, which please no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am submerged. The blemishes stand up and shout when the object in view was a renaissance. Shall I say the contrary? The sediment of the river which encrusted my joints makes me very gray, but I am used to it. It may remain there. Do away with it, and I am myself done away with. For the patina of circumstance can but enrich what was there to begin with. This elephant's skin which I inhabit, fibred over like the shell of the cocoa nut, this piece of black grass through which no light can filter, cut into checkers by rut upon rut of unpreventable experience. It is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the hairy toad. Black but beautiful. My back is full of the history of power. Of power? What is powerful and what is not? My soul shall never be cut into by a wooden spear. Throughout childhood to the present time, the unity of life and death has been expressed by the circumference described by my trunk. Nevertheless I perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after all, and I am on my guard, external poise, it has its center well nurtured, we know where, in pride, but spiritual poise, it has its center where. My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of the wind. I see and I hear, unlike the one like body of which one hears so much, which was made to see and not to see, to hear and not to hear, that tree trunk without roots, accustomed to shout its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact by who knows what strange pressure of the atmosphere, that spiritual brother to the coral plant, absorbed into which the equable sapphire light becomes a nebulous green. The eye of each is to the eye of each, and a fretful speech which sets a limit on itself. The elephant is, black earth preceded by a tendril? It is to that phenomenon, the above formation, translucent like the atmosphere, a cortex merely, that on which darts cannot strike decisively the first time, a substance needful as an instance of the indestructibility of matter. It is looked at the electricity and at the earthquake, and is still here. The name means thick. Will depth be depth? Thick skin be thick? To one who can see no beautiful element of unreason under it? End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To find out more, to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. He wrote the history book, It's Said, by Mary Ann Moore. From a collection of poetry entitled, Poems. He wrote the history book, It's Said There. You shed a ray of whimsicality on a mask of profundity, so terrific that I have been dumbfounded by it oftener than I care to say. The book? Titles are chaff. Authentically brief and full of energy, you contribute to your father's legibility, and are sufficiently synthetic. Thank you for showing me your father's autograph. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To find out more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Oscar Goff. You are like the realistic product of an idealistic search for gold at the foot of the rainbow, by Mary Ann Moore. From a collection of poetry entitled, Poems. Hid by the August foliage and fruit of the grapevine, twine your anatomy round the pruned and polished stem, chameleon. Fire laid upon an emerald as long as the dark king's messy one could not snap the spectrum up for food as you have done. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To find out more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reinforcements by Mary Ann Moore. From a collection of poetry entitled, Poems. The vestibule of experience is not to be exalted into epic grandeur. These men are going to their work with this idea, advancing like a school of fish through still water, waiting to change the course or dismiss the idea of movement till forced to. The words of the Greeks ring in our ears, but they are vain in comparison with a sight like this. The pulse of intention does not move so that one can see it, and moral machinery is not labeled. But the future of time is determined by the power of volition. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To find out more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Oscar Goff. Roses Only by Mary Ann Moore. From a collection of poetry entitled, Poems. You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability, rather than an asset. That in view of the fact that spirit creates form, we are justified in supposing that you must have brains. For you, a symbol of the unit, stiff and sharp, conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority, and, liking for everything self-dependent, anything an ambitious civilization might produce. For you, unaided to attempt through sheer reserve, to confute presumptions resulting from observation is idle. You cannot make us think you a delightful happen so. But Rose, if you are brilliant, it is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing of preeminence. You would look, minus thorns, like a what-is-this, a mere peculiarity. They are not proof against a worm, the elements, or mildew, but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance without coordination, guarding the impotestimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be remembered too violently? Your thorns are the best part of you. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To find out more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Oscar Goff. In This Age of Hard-Trying Nonchalances Good and by Mary Ann Moore. From a collection of poetry entitled Poems. In This Age of Hard-Trying Nonchalances Good and really, it is not the business of the gods to bake clay pots. They did not do it in this instance. A few revolved upon the axes of their worth, as if excessive popularity might be a pot. They did not venture the profession of humility. The polished wedge that might have split the firmament was dumb. At last it threw itself away and falling down, conferred on some poor fool a privilege. Taller by the length of a conversation of five hundred years than all the others, there was one whose tales of what could never have been actual, were better than the haggish, uncompagnionable drawl of certitude. His by-play was more terrible in its effectiveness than the fiercest frontal attack. The staff, the bag, the feigned inconsequence of manner best bespeak that weapon self-protectiveness. End of Recording This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To find out more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Oscar Goff. The Fish by Marianne Moore. From a collection of poetry entitled Poems. The Fish waved through black jade. Of the crow-bloomed muscle 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 spotless 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, where upon the stars, pink rice grains, ink-bespattered jellyfish, 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 accident, 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 cannot revive its youth. The sea grows old in it. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. Find out more information or to volunteer. Please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Oscar Goff. My Apish Cousins by Mary Ann Moore. From a collection of poetry entitled, Poems. My Apish Cousins winked too much and were afraid of snakes. The zebras supreme in their abnormality. The elephants with their fog-colored skin and strictly practical appendages were there. The small cats in the parakeet, trivial and hum-drum on examination, destroying bark in portions of the food it could not eat. I recall their magnificence, now not more magnificent than it is dim. It is difficult to recall the ornament, speech, and precise manner of what one might call the minor acquaintances twenty years back. But I shall never forget that Gilgamesh among the hairy carnivora, that cat with the wedge-shaped, slate-grey marks on its forelegs and the resolute tail, marking they have imposed on us with their pale, half-fledged protestations, trembling about in inarticulate frenzy, saying it is not for all of us to understand art, finding it all so difficult, examining the thing as if it were something inconceivably archanic, as symmetrically frigid as something carved out of cryosopras or marble. Strict with tension, malignant in its power over us and deeper than the sea, when it proffers flattery in exchange for hemp, by flax, horses, platinum, timber, and fur, end of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To find out more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. When I Buy Pictures, by Mary Ann Moore. From a collection of poetry entitled Poems. When I Buy Pictures, or What is Closer to the Truth, and look at that of which I may regard myself as the imaginary possessor, I fix upon that which would give me pleasure in my average moments. The satire upon curiosity, in which no more is discernible than the intensity of the mood. Or, quite the opposite. The old thing. The medieval decorated hat box, in which there are hounds with wastes diminishing, like the waste of the hourglass and deer, both white and brown, and birds and seated people. It may be no more than a square of parketry. The literal biography, perhaps, in letters standing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse. Or, that which is better without words. Which means just as much, or just as little as it is understood to mean by the observer. The grave of Adam, prefigured by himself. A bed of beans, or artichokes in six varieties of blue. The sniped leg hiero, glyphic in three parts. It may be amazing. Two stern and intellectual emphasis, ironic or other, upon this quality or that, detracts from one's enjoyment. It must not wish to disarm anything. Nor may the approved triumph easily be honored. That which is great because something else is small. It comes to this, of whatever sort it is. It must make known the fact that it has been displayed to acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it. And it must admit that it is the work of X, if X produced it. Of Y, if made by Y. It must be a voluntary gift with the name written on it. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Oscar Goff. Picking and Choosing by Mary Ann Moore from a collection of poetry entitled Poems. Literature is a phase of life. If one is afraid of it, the situation is irremediable. If one approaches it familiarly, what one says of it is worthless. Words are constructive when they are true. The opaque illusion, the simulated flight upward, accomplishes nothing. Why cloud the fact that Shaw is self-conscious in the field of sentiment, but is otherwise rewarding? That James is all that has been said of him, but is not profound. It is not Hardy the distinguished novelist and Hardy the poet, but one man interpreting life through the medium of the emotions. We must give an opinion. It is permissible that the critic should know what he likes. Gordon Craig with his this is I and this is mine, with his three wise men, his sad French greens and his Chinese cherries. Gordon Craig so inclinational and unashamed has carried the precept of being a good critic to the last extreme. And Burke is a psychologist of acute raccoon-like curiosity. Summa Dillagentia to the humbug whose name is so amusing, very young and very rushed, Caesar crossed the Alps on the top of a diligence. We are not daft about the meaning, but this familiarity with wrong meanings puzzles one. Hummingbug, the candles are not wired for electricity. Small dog, going over the lawn, nipping the linen and saying that you have a badger. Remember's it often? Only the most rudimentary sort of behavior is necessary to put us on the scent, a right good salvo of barks. A few strong wrinkles puckering the skin between the ears are all we ask. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. This is Oscar Goff. England by Marianne Moore from a collection of poetry entitled Poems. England with its baby rivers and little towns each with its abbey or its cathedral with voices, one voice perhaps echoing through the transip, the criterion of suitability and convenience. In Italy with its equal shores contriving an epicureanism from which the grossness has been extracted and grease with its goats and its gourds, the nest of modified illusions and France the chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly in whose products mystery of construction diverts one from what was originally one's object. Substance at the core and the east with its snails its emotional shorthand and jade cockroaches its rock crystal and its imperturbability and America where there is the little old ramshackle Victoria in the south where cigars are smoked on the street in the north, where there are no proofreaders, no silkworms, no digressions, the wild man's land grassless, linksless, languageless country in which letters are written not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand but in plain American which cats and dogs can read. The letter A in Psalm and calm, when pronounced with the sound of A in candle is very noticeable, but why should continents of misapprehension have to be accounted for by the fact? Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools which resemble mushrooms both are dangerous? In the case of metal-someness which may be mistaken for appetite, of heat which may appear to be haste, no conclusions may be drawn. To have misapprehended the matter is to have confessed that one has not looked far enough. The sublimated wisdom of China, Egyptian discernment, the cataclysmic torrent of emotions compressed in the verbs of the Hebrew language, the books of the man who is able to say, I envy nobody but him and him only catches more fish than I do. The flower and fruit of all that noted superiority should one not have stumbled upon it in America. Must one imagine that it is not there? It has never been confined to one locality. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Doc Rats by Mary Ann Moore from a collection of poetry entitled Poems. There are human beings who seem to regard the place as craftily as we do, who seem to feel that it is a good place to come home to. On what a river, wide, twinkling like a chop sea under some of the finest shipping in the world, the square-rigged foremaster, the liner, the battleship, the third submerged section of an iceberg, the tug, strong moving thing, dipping and pushing, the bell striking as it comes, the sea-yacht lying like a new-made arrow on the stream, the ferry boat, a head assigned, one to each compartment making a row of chessmen set for play. When the wind is from the east, the smell is of apples, the aroma increased and decreased suddenly as the wind changes. Of rope, of mountain leaves for florists, when it is from the west, it is an elixir. There is occasionally a parakeet arrived from Brazil, clasping and clawing, or a monkey tail and feet in readiness for an overture. All palms entail, how delightful! This is the sea, moving the bulkhead with its horse strength and the multiplicity of rudders and propellers, the signals, shrill, questioning, peremptory, diverse, the wharf cats and the barge dogs. It is easy to overestimate the value of such things. One does not live in such a place from motives of expediency, but because to one who has been accustomed to it, shipping is the most congenial thing in the world. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Oscar Goff Radical by Marianne Moore from a collection of poetry entitled Poems. Tapering to a point, conserving everything, this carrot is predestined to be thick. The world is but a circumstance, a miserable corn patch for its feet. With ambition, imagination, outgrowth, nutriment, with everything crammed belligerently inside itself, its fibers breed monopoly. A tail-like, wedge-shaped engine with the secret of expansion fused with intensive heat to the color of the setting sun and stiff, for the man in the straw hat standing still and turning to look back at it. As much as to say the happiest moment has been funeral in comparison with this. The conditions of life predetermine slavery to be easy and freedom hard. For it dismiss agrarian lure. It tells him this, that which it is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Poetry by Marianne Moore from a collection of poetry entitled Poems. I too dislike it. There are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with the perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in it after all a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must. These things are important not because a high sounding interpretation can be put upon them, but because they are useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us. That we do not admire what we cannot understand. The bat, holding on upside down or in quest of something to eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the baseball fan, the statistician. Case after case could be cited did one wish it. Nor is it valid to discriminate against business documents and school books. All these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction, however. When dragged into prominence by half-poets, the result is not poetry. Nor till the autocrats among us can be literalists of the imagination. Above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand in defiance of their opinion the raw material of poetry and all its rawness, and that which is, on the other hand, then you are interested in poetry. End of recording. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Oscar Goff. In the Days of Prismatic Color by Marianne Moore from a collection of poetry entitled Poem In the Days of Prismatic Color not in the Days of Adam and Eve but when Adam was alone when there was no smoke and color was fine not with the fineness of early civilization art but by virtue of its originality with nothing to modify it but the mist that went up. Obliqueness was a variation of the perpendicular plain to see and to account for. It is no longer that. Nor did the blue-red-yellow band of incandescence that was color keep its stripe. It is the color of those things into which much that is peculiar can be read. Complexity is not a crime but carry it to the point of murkiness and nothing is plain. A complexity, moreover that has been committed to darkness instead of granting itself to be the pestilence that it is moves all about as if to be willed with the dismal fallacy that insistence is the measure of achievement and that all truth must be dark. Threaty throat, sophistication is as it always has been at the antipodes from the initial great truce. Part of it was crawling part of it was about to crawl the rest was torped in its layer in the short-legged fitful advance the gurgling and all the minutiae we have the classic multitude of feet to what purpose? Truth is no Apollo Belvedere no formal thing the wave may go over it if it likes know that it will be there when it says I shall be there when the wave has gone by end of recording this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Is Your Town Nineveh by Mary Ann Moore from a collection of poetry entitled Poems Why so desolate? and why multiply in phantasmagoria about fishes what disgust you could not all personal upheaval in the name of freedom be tabooed is it Nineveh and are you Jonah in the sweltering east wind of your wishes I myself have stood there by the aquarium looking