Marianne Moore's Octopus: a guest blog by Dan De Vries
Whenever I see
The moon on the shore
Or read Copper Vision
by Marianne Moore
Or see a piano leg touching the floor
Or kiss a frog with a Lincoln Log...
--Ed Sanders for the Fugs
Robert Hass, USA poet laureate from 1995 to 1997, recently published A Little Book on Form. The book is neither little (446 pages, and anything but small in terms of its conception and themes), nor only about poetic form. It is as much a personal account of specific poems that have moved and stayed with Hass throughout his creative life. He cites many poems I feel the same way about.
Not that I have read all the poems he mentions. If I've ever read Marianne Moore before, I definitely failed to take her poetry to heart. About all I know qualitatively was that she merited a line in a Fugs song. And here's the fun part. The poem described in Laureate Hass' Little Book is not there as text. And this is a book with whole Sonnets from Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, and Ted Berrigan, and all eight stanza's of Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale."
Why no lines from Marianne Moore in A Little Book on Form? The poem to which Hass refers, "An Octopus," although nearly 100 years old, is "too expensive to reprint here." What an elegant cast of a brilliant fly. What further lure needed to rise and snatch the very thing in one's own jaw. And what a poem it is.
It is about Mt. Rainier, of all things. The glaciers on the mountain face posited as cephalod arms. Never mind that there are twenty-eight of them. One commentator has pointed out that the roughly two-hundred-line poem consists of twenty-eight sentences. Yes, besides finding the poem I found commentary and, no, I did not count the number of sentences. Some things you just take the other girl or guy's word for.
Although I have seen it from Puget Sound, and even on clear days from Vancouver, BC, I was actually on Mt. Rainier for the first time last year in early September. Forest fire had smoked up atmospheres throughout the Pacific Northwest and we never really saw the mountain until we were actually on it, and then through hazes of varying hues. The thing about reading Marianne Moore's "Octopus" is that she is so clearly writing about the mountain I remember from one brief smoky visit.
Among other things, "An Octopus" is a great mountain ode in the Romantic tradition. Catalogs of flora and fauna, geologic form. To borrow a phrase from Henry James, who actually appears toward the end, the poem has "solidity of specification." It's also about many other things, including moral philosophy and what the Greeks got wrong. I think it's on a par with the very greatest of Wordsworth's nature odes, and I rever that Wordsworth.
There are multiple versions. I read one I found online. Robert Hass offers places to find the essential others. His "little" book is truly a marvel in its own write. Get it. My copy of the New Collected Marianne Moore should arrive soon. I'm looking foreward to reading that Copper Vision.
Dan De Vries is a poet who lives in San Francisco. IFSF published his book of poems, Past and Presently, in 2014. You can read additional poems on his blog: http://ppddv.blogspot.com/