Comments on: Marianne Moore and Revolution

By: stan smith

stan smith — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 22:06:35 +0000

As the author of the essay you’re discussing, on Christopher Middleton, who attributes the remark to Cezanne in a poem called ‘Found Poem with Grafts 1866′ in his collection ‘Our Flowers & Nice Bones’, I can advise you that a revised version of my essay has just been published in my recent book from Liverpool University Press, ‘Poetry and Displacement’, variously advertised on Amazon etc.
Stan Smith

By: Jeremy Green

Jeremy Green — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:52:16 +0000

I can’t prove it, but my money’s on Cezanne for the carrots, if only because Zola based his painter, Lantier, on Cezanne. Apparently Cezanne was not pleased, and the novel broke up a friendship of thiry years, so it seems unlikely that Cezanne would have wanted to quote from a book he found so wounding.
Ange, I’ll be happy to send you a copy of the Stan Smith article. Just drop me a line.

By: ange

ange — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 01:33:25 +0000

Did Zola crib from Cezanne or Cezanne from Zola? Fascinating. If anyone can tell me the easiest way to get a hold of that Stan Smith essay, I’d be much obliged.
Jordan: No book or record stores, but a mobile phone store on every block. Reminds me why I wasn’t sorry to leave the city.

By: Jordan

Jordan — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:13:42 +0000

Hooray for Riverrun! And a moment of silence for the devastated ecology of New York City’s second hand and independent bookstores.
(The libraries, though… still wonderful.)

By: Jeremy Green

Jeremy Green — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 02:45:39 +0000

Moore might have found her carrot in Zola’s “Masterpiece”: “The day was not far off when one solitary, original carrot might be pregnant with revolution.”
Stan Smith published an interesting essay on what carrots and revolutions might mean in Christopher Middleton’s work in Verse (1984, I think).