Was it really four years ago already that the new edition of The Poems of Marianne Moore was published? I remember standing in a bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with a new baby, worshipfully cradling that expensive hardcover. And then, rashly, buying it.
I dug it out today to re-read an obscure, previously uncollected poem from 1919 called “Radical.” It was first brought to my attention in this article by Steve. It is a youthful political poem that Moore later suppressed.

Radical
Tapering
to a point, conserving everything,
this carrot is predestined to be thick.
The world is
but a circumstance, a mis-
erable corn patch for its feet. With ambition, im-
agination, outgrowth,
nutriment,
with everything crammed belligerent-
ly inside itself, its fibres breed mon-
opoly—
a tail-like, wedge-shaped engine with the
secret of expansion, fused with intensive heat to
the color of the set-
ting sun and
stiff. For the man in the straw hat, stand-
ing still and turning to look back at it
as much as
to say, my happiest moment has
been funereal in comparison with this, the condi-
tions of life pre-
determined
slavery to be easy, inclined
away from progress, and freedom, hard. For
it? Dismiss
agrarian lore; it tells him this:
that which it is impossible to force, it is impossible
to hinder.
It struck me as a peculiar poem when I first read it, and still does. What kind of mind generates an allegory about Communism from a carrot? Answer: you already knew Moore’s marvelousness is inseparable from her strangeness.
And then last weekend I treated myself, and drove for 45 minutes to browse in a very good used bookstore downriver. Among the things I picked up was a first edition of Our Flowers and Nice Bones by Christopher Middleton (Fulcrum Press). In lieu of blurbs, Middleton had written a short precis of the book, and quoted this from Cezanne:

The day will come when a single original carrot shall be pregnant with revolution.

Now, Middleton’s source for this quote (Henri Perruchot’s Cezanne) was published in the late 1950s, so it couldn’t have been Moore’s source. But was there an earlier source that she might have gleaned?
A question for a real scholar, not for me—I’m stuck in a small house with small boys, idly putting two and two together in the hope they may equal an imaginary number (poem). But I can see “original carrot” as a possible source for “Radical:” I first misread “orange” (”the color of the setting sun”) for “original,” which we often pair with or swap for “radical.” And Moore had to have loved Cezanne.
Incidentally, I later discovered that technically speaking I needn’t have left home, or driven a total of an hour and half, in order to have found the books I bought. The entire store inventory is online. I felt somehow deflated. The thing is, I probably wouldn’t have bought the books I did if I hadn’t made the trip; in the cold light of the computer screen, without the artifact in hand, I could not have justified the purchase. And I definitely wouldn’t have seen Middleton’s jacket copy with the Cezanne quote. Not much has changed since I rashly bought that hardcover Moore in Park Slope. I mean, I haven’t changed much: the act of shopping for books, browsing real shelves for a find, then splurging nervously, is deeply satisfying. But in that time, inventory has leapt online, and made it theoretically possible for me never to have to leave the house. As this is already the suburbs, with few interesting places to go that don’t involve “hiking” or “kayaking,” I’m sad.
Nothing for it but more reading:
And I am aglow, he says,
with all the hues of the infinite.
(“Found Poem with Grafts 1866,” Christopher Middleton)

11.27.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

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