“In This Told-Backward Biography”: Marianne Moore Against Survival in Her Queer Archival Poetry

Abstract

Artists usually design their works to be preserved for future generations. In same way, we observe previous artworks in order to understand contemporary cultural productions. This twofold dynamic, which ensures both survival our artistic patrimony and a continuity its production, is not as endemic to art as often thought. Artists can choose to with traditions, or can refuse to follow artistic conventions. The phrase rather die than . . . is often exclaimed by artistic outcasts this world. Think Roy Lichtenstein's 1963 painting Drowning Girl, alternatively titled I Don't Care! I'd Rather Sink, which is a thematic depiction such an extreme refusal. Yet, I believe that there is one poet in particular who-surprisingly-enriches our engagement with these questions artistic production, queerness, and survival.Marianne Moore, feminist and poet, was a meticulous observer, an obsessive collector. Throughout her life, she believed that to feel deeply one had to see clearly, and she perceived world with precision and critical acuity. Above all, she collected with equal dedication written materials from that observed world. Gathering quotations from a diversity sources, most often nonliterary or even quotidian, it was rule rather than exception that she twisted quoted material's original phrasing or meaning. Her experimental poetry contains catalogues collected fragments and is representative collage. It is a testimony, an archive what she considered valuable and worthwhile for future remembrance. Yet, I argue, her poetic which has a rather atypical design, testifies against ideology survival. Even though her poems have often been called acts survival, Moore does not look at past as a talisman for future, and her archival poem-collections attest to anxiety over-rather than faith in-inheritance, continuity, and memory.1As most impersonal and cagey her already impersonally modernist generation, Moore figures as an exceptional representative archival poetry. As I will indicate, hers is a poetics that opposes legacy closet and literature's subsequent urge to come out, box, and break silence via personal testimonies. Her writings are not confessional-let alone autobiographical-and there is not even a critical consensus about Moore's queerness in first place. She never married, nor did she have any lesbian relationships, and her personal letters attest only to a couple inconsiderable college crushes. However, I draw on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's definition as the open mesh possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses meaning when constituent elements anyone's gender, anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically (1993, 8).In multiple ways, Moore lives and writes according to this less rigid model sexuality. Not until her mother's death in 1947, when Moore was already sixty, had she ever lived on her own, or written a poem without her mother's consent. During her childhood and continuing in later family correspondence, a playful game animal nicknaming began, in which Marianne masculinized as Gator, Basilisk, Weasel, Uncle (Fangs), Mouse, or Rat. She would later adopt this purposefully cross gendering practice into her poetics. In her poetic menagerie animals, dragon is most remarkable. Moore herself once admitted in O, to Be a Dragon that she would like to be one, of silkworm size or immense, preferably almost invisible but a decidedly felicitous phenomenon (1967, 177). This dragon, as a nongendered combatant, offers a clue to eccentric woman who thrives behind tame, reserved exterior. It is this visible-invisible and gendered-nongendered discrepancy that contributes to Moore's idiosyncratic queerness.A queer archive, as established by Ann Cvetkovich, refers to any mechanism that collects information and is composed material practices that challenge traditional conceptions history and understand quest for history as a psychic need rather than a science (2003, 268). …