Marianne Moore's 9/11

'Finding the Words'

Al Filreis

About eight weeks after the September 11 attacks, the Writers House and Rosenbach Library collaborated on an event held at the Writers House featuring, of all things, the modern American poet Marianne Moore. Moore's 9/11, if you can imagine that. Well, it turned out well, I think. The idea was that a number of us would dip into the Moore papers at the Rosenbach and find something apprarently relevant to say. Then several poets — Greg Djanikian, Tom Devaney, Bob Perelman, Jena Osman — would each read a poem for the "occasion." (Jena and Bob read poems they had just written.) Audio recordings of each presentation - and of the whole - program are available. Tom Devaney sent to the Writers House core community a summary of the event.

The event was webcast live and a number of people, especially in Philadelphia, watched us on their computers (somehow the Rosenbach directors had persuaded the PECO people who own the tall skyline building that runs messages across its top floors to announce it). So you can watch me and others "finding the words." Yes, that was the title we gave the event — "Finding the Words." Jena Osman's piece, "Dropping Leaflets", I admire very much and to this day teach it at the end of my course on modern and contemporary American poetry.

My own piece was called "Mending the Break in Time." Below is the text and here is the RealVideo recordings, and here is downloadable mp3.

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MENDING THE BREAK IN TIME, by Al Filreis

The wartime letter exchanged between and among modern poets was a place "where the fragments met," as Marianne Moore put it in "Nevertheless" — forming a temporary whole that was nevertheless no illusion of enduring wholeness. In 1944 Moore's book Nevertheless was published, mutedly proclaiming that the old perfectly shaped lyric fruits were marred although delicious as ever--but, again, marred so that the hard process of fruition now bore in the final sweetness. "Nevertheless / you've seen a strawberry that's had a struggle." Frost kills rubber-plant leaves but can't destroy down to the roots. A prickly-pear leaf clings to barbed wire, but roots shoot down for a later greener day. "Victory won't come / to me unless I go to it." In his charming November 7, 1944 letter to Moore, William Carlos Williams wrote to her about — exactly as we've categorized it tonight — "the uses of art" in a time of worldwide crisis. While in November '44 it was "hard to focus the mind on praise," Williams said he especially loved the title poem of Moore's new book, which she had sent him: "Nevertheless."

I cannot think of a better gloss on Moore's wartime poetics than what Williams wrote here about what "we get from writing": "All artists are secretive and fly from a style which has been found out." This is why H.D. in her moving 1940 letter is "so keyed-up and happy in our fortress"-that fortress being London hunkered against the Luftwaffe which at the time many believed augured the destruction by air of England. In her poem "May 1943" H.D. wrote that the carpenter "has his chisel" while "I have my pencil": "he mends the broken window-frame of the orangery, / I mend a break in time." And it is precisely why Winnifred Ellerman, a.k.a. "Bryher," could speak of the "irreality and great beauty" of a wartorn night sky, not to say that beauty made sense but precisely that it didn't, any more. It is why she, too, received Moore's homefront letters, as physical things, "with such joy," personal impressions on paper, the crabbed inimitable handwriting, seen immediately upon the postman's delivery, that announced the arrival of what Bryher calls Moore's "strength." Williams's typewritten letter ends with the briefest handwritten postscript: "Paul Sr. is at sea — a destroyer."

We can sense here, in this letter — but also everywhere in Williams' writing at this time — how worried about his son he was. Paul eventually made it all the way to Tokyo, part of the time on an aircraft carrier — in the vicinity of the most terrifyingly difficult fighting of the war. What could the father do? Well, he was putting together the first drafts of Paterson I, another hard-bitten place where the modern fragments would meet.

But with Paul in the Pacific, he did what homefront grandfathers do. He took the disconsolate Paul Jr. on an outing-the perfect Williams outing, down to the dirty but stately Hackensack River, to a "marvelous old-car dump," with "hundreds of junked cars." Paul was beside himself with joy as the grandfather poet "paraded him up one alley and down another, old cars on all sides." He, too, so keyed-up and happy in his fortress. "The weak overcomes [the world's] menace," Moore wrote in "Nevertheless," "the strong over- / comes itself. What is there / like fortitude! What sap / went through that little thread to make the cherry red!"

January 29, 2008

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.