Laura Moriarty

I think Laura Moriarty is probably the most underrated poet in America. I've lived with some of her books for well over a decade and they are a renewable resource of poetry for me. What's not to love about a poet who can maneuver in and out of deconstructions of the erotic, sci fi capriccios, love letters in poetry to artists like Boltanski and Smithson, and keep up an ongoing correspondence through poetry with a poet like William Blake? And that's not even mentioning the truly moving dialogue with her husband, a gifted poet who died prematurely. Their two voices clearly married (I'm thinking of how Alice Notley astutely used that image in her one elegy Valentine to Berrigan) and then when his was silenced, you can see the way her voice picks his up, and still carries his within her own, how their shared vision (or the parts of their vision which were shared) gets elaborated in her ongoing ethical and visionary engagement with the world. Few "avanty" poets manage to embody the erotic--and sexual politics--in any truly convincing manner in their poetry (Eileen Myles comes to mind; but then smart-ass critics want to gerrymander her off from the Avant and the Restless). Who else but Laura Moriarty could get a poem like the one Jorie Graham (to her great credit) chose for that stellar year in the Best American Poetry series? Good job, Jorie. You made great picks. I have no idea why everybody's always hatin on you. Well, I do but it's not really your fault. I have literally dozens and dozens of "favorite Moriarty poems." I can't really say that about many contemporary poets at all. A small handful. Her work does read like an updating of William Blake's, oddly enough. He was brilliantly cynical. So is she. He had love. So has she. Possibly Blake would be as fascinated with conceptual artists as she is. And Blake was certainly divinely Weird. And so is she. The sign of a superior artist is evolution between books and one can see that in Moriarty's works (I don't mean maturation so much as variation--what one sees in an artist like, say Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, but does not see in an artist like John Ashbery). Moriarty's work is violent and prescient, atavistic and futuristic, sexualized and switched-off, elegaic and nihilistic. She embodies all the contradictions one expects to find in an artist truly reading multiply polarized cultures. Although she seems to have been largely gerrymandered out of the L=A=N=G configuration, her non-linear writing praxis (her poetry almost invariably, profitably relies on the recontextualizing "forward/backwards" line which that movement foregrounded) places her firmly outside the traditional sense of writing/reading which mainstream poetry valorizes--linear meditations with inevitable closure, Aristotelian literary values in petto. She favors the open field generally, and even when her words are not deployed in Mallarmean Coup de Des constellation, it's often an open deception, since her poem is still using the Open Field as model. It's just in her grammar. Moriarty's grammar is the Open Field. So many "avanty" American poets have established rather transparent sympathies and alliances with contemporary French avant writing praxis, and this often results in the "translation phenomenon," whereby one ends up with a rather vitiated, pallid form of French writing (I think of Moxley and Evan's funny--and I'm sure well-intentioned--salutation of Michael Palmer as "the best French poet writing in English"--or something to that effect) in the American poet (who is usually a translator of this poetry). I think there's a funny, horrible barb of truth in that, though. I realize it's probably a sickly affected amusement to enjoy watching the drama of Peter Gizzi trying not to fall into that blackhole in his first few books of poetry, ice skating around the distinctly French poem he so loves;*** certainly one can cheer when he manages to wrangle or wangle an American take on French lyricism in the successful poems, which become more frequent as he moves forward (Gizzi injects enough pop culture--from Talking Heads to Thomas Dolby--that an American tilt becomes inevitable. Although I wouldn't want to give up some of his poems that seem to hearken back to midcentury French poetry--poets like Jammes. And his Ledger Domain is a beautiful marriage of the French and the American)******. I don't mean this in a culturally arrogant way. I'm not saying I don't love many of those French poets or that I'm militating for some sort of weird apartheid of the poem.* It's just that the sense of cultural denial (meaning American culture) was palpable in that circle of American poets who cut their teeth on French poetry. And painful.** And I don't see this in Moriarty's poetry at all. Was she a translator from the French? I can't think of anything offhand along those lines. I haven't researched her with the assidutiy of the scholar. I've just had a love engagement with the writing. Anyway, check out her books if you haven't. The Case is a really great book, if you're only looking to pick up one. But then her Selected is wonderful. At first, I thought she had scanted some of her best writing (I guess I could still argue that point) but I think I can see what she was doing, in terms of choosing works which showed more of the gamut in terms of theme, subject matter, style, etc. She's filmic too. But then that goes back to the idea of the "recontextualizing" line so favored in langpo. Many argued that was a model lifted from film as a medium. I could see that as a valid argument--although probably a moot if not endless one. I'm trying to remember who was smart enough to anthologize her. I know Marjorie Sloan did, but I'm thinking Paul Hoover missed her. Did Messerli capture her in any of his noteworthy anthologies? I think it was too early for her to make it in Silliman's Tree although I'm guessing she was one of the poets he saluted en passant in the Introduction. I tend to think she's severely underanthologized--silly phrase, I know. But some of those anthologies I'm thinking of--and certainly the ones I'm citing above--actually matter. And that means she might be missed by the academics who borrow their taste from the handful of tastemakers. I suppose those people will always be lost. But that's the process...the integration. I guess I don't really believe that. Boredom is the ultimate god of the canon. I mean the god who will make those difficult, procrustean cuts in time. So things will correct themselves.



*What I actually love best about that sort of contemporary French poetry is the strong sci-fi elements. Often this is a parodistic version of sci-fi as a sort of critique of capitalist cultural narrative. Think Barbarella devolving into Duran Duran. This results in some truly outre poetry. I'm thinking of Hocquard in some of his books (very sci-fi!) and that very recent book by Caroline Dubois riffing on Blade Runner. I don't mean the subject matter is necessarily sci-fi, although it is (briefly) in that latter book. I mean the model is sci-fi. Time travel opens up the literary work to profitable anachronism. And both Norma Cole and Laura Moriarty engrained that into their poetry. It's all through Michael Palmer too--one of the more enjoyable elements of his poetry. I wonder whether Moriarty absorbed that through Cole's work as a translator. And probably through Palmer, who was doubtless sensed as a colleague early on. Persia (he blurbed it--and I think selected it for a regional prize) is where she comes closest to Palmer's aesthetic, before an inevitable departure for other grounds. That argument for transcultural osmosis helping to form Moriarty's poetics seems very credible to my mind.

Of course, there are the more traditionally Mallarmean French poets like Albiach...the purists. But they translate poorly. The translations of her work I have seen have always disappointed me. I don't think it's the translator's fault though, oddly enough. People don't want to admit the possibility of untranslatability but with many poets it's true. (Yes, all poetry is untranslatable--but you get the question of degree I'm referencing here.) I'd like to see someone try to translate Messerli's poetry into another language. Or rather, I should say I wouldn't. Not because I wouldn't want others to share in the charm of the poetry. But because I know it's inherently untranslatable. Languages don't share that many puns (and paronomasia is the core, the axis, of Messerli's poetry).

**I realize some would say a poem like Palmer's Sun was a strong critique of, and polemic engagement with, America's international politics in that period. But it's rather fey. I never experienced it as being the equal of, say, Oppen's poetry, as some claim they had. And most of his poetry in that period remained engaged more strongly with linguistic concerns. The polis was a strong motif in Palmer's early books, but I think the polis was more linguistic, so there was that inevitable divorce one finds everywhere in langpo: critique of culture by critique of language. (Straw dogs burning cast a lovely light.) Direct engagment was sabotaged by some sort of strange self-consciousness? I still don't quite understand it. There were, of course, exceptions.


***Or is it really Ashbery Gizzi is skating around, that first totem of French poetics in American poetry? Certainly Periplum is where the poet seems equally in love with the poetics of Ashbery, Creeley and perhaps Spicer (maybe more Robin Blaser channeling Spicer). The longer poems in that collection are pretty much pure Ashbery with a soupcon of Gizzi. Gizzi favors the child's heart in many poems, and that innocence of gesture present in many of the poems is what separates the sensibility. Sometimes this is risky (when is nakedness not risky?) and the poem collapses, a notorious example for this reader being the "baby bird" poem in his uneven Burning Deck book. In a way, one could argue that the seminal O.blek series he helmed with Connell McGrath was presided over by the Dioscuri of Ashbery (French-derived pole) and Creeley (more Williams-derived), since the majority of the poets published there seem to have fallen under the influence of either the French (or been French) or the Williams-Creeley axis. And then O.blek published langpo poets. But perhaps I'm trying to be too reductive or trying too hard to pin down another's influences or tastes. Why not just enjoy the individual and his or her sensibility. Taxonomy, one argument goes, is a disease.**** O.blek was very good at occasionally catching those great poets who fit in no movement or easily discernible tradition but simply wrote great poems, poets like Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Merrill Gilfillan, Dallas Wiebe (surely the Burning Deck connection), Laura Moriarty, John Godfrey, John Yau, Joseph Ceravolo, Gail Sher, Elizabeth Robinson, Martine Bellen and Robert Fitterman. I can't really think of a better poetry journal in that period.


****Insane asterisking! Rereading Periplum quickly just now, I'm more interested in the way gender is modeled in the poems, how the language seems to model gender distortions and play with gender.***** But a lot of it is the mythology he imports. There's a pleasant gender-sdvig in so many of the poems. For a non-gay poet, Gizzi is pretty fluent in gender play. It's nice. It must be all those gay poetic fathers.

*****ex. "I wanted beauty, was given endurance.
My features too loud to fit in a compact.
Contact sports and bruises would do for rouge.
Perfumed my heart was chiffon with a string
   of pearls for secrets."

--"A.K.A."

Granted, the poet is narrating in the voice of a frustrated female in what turns out to be a quick, funny vignette of marital dissatisfaction ("The prodigal son eats at Burger King, sabotaged / from birth with sugar and a baseball cap.") but it's still an interesting aspect of the collection. Modeling and parodying gender. Twisting it. The language is often visceral and sexual, yet pleasantly other. Desire is a Twittering machine before Twitter arrived in this collection, and we're not always sure what body is Twittering its erotic fascinations and lassitudes. Pretty sexy stuff in places: "The arc of my nerve alive with your salt." ("Conceit.")


******But then "Ledger Domain" is such a funny and charming poem....a beautiful redolence of--almost!--Edward Lear?? I actually think Edward Lear is one of the most important minor poets in the language. When critics talk seriously about "nonsense" (the way Wittgenstein does) it's not a far leap from Lear to Ashbery. Not to a philosopher's mind, anyway. Only to a poet's. (Remember that tempest in a teapot in the critical pages of Sulfur a few years back?) And Edward Gorey grew right out of Lear's forehead. And Gorey is the candy of literature. So Thank God he existed. Because I want candy.