A few years ago, rummaging through the archives of the Academy of American Poets, I found a box labeled “Votes of 1950” – a secret vote record of the chancellors in the year the Academy's prestigious fellowship was awarded to EE Cummings, which made him famous. The voting process is a black box – no one outside the Academy ever finds out who else is running and by how much the winner wins.
When I opened the ballots, one name came up again and again, so much so that I was moved to count.
Marianne Moore had lost by one vote, not knowing how close she was. It would take many years until, at the age of 77, he was finally awarded fellowship.
Long before that, before he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award (sharing a table with Rachel Carson at the ceremony), Moore had put his ideas into writing in a series of stories that were later collected in the precious out-of-print space. Predictions (public library). To answer for them is the impossible task of the writer – to weave tapestry of truth and meaning into the thick music of words in the ramshackle thread of language.
In an essay titled “Feeling and Accuracy,” Moore writes:
Feeling deep down – as we all have reason to know – is often elusive. If it manages to come out in the open, it may seem too abstract, so that the author is criticized as being mysterious or rude or arrogant.
How we say what we feel is not a matter of our writing style but of the way we are, because in order to say something we must first hold it and hold everything very small and the person as a whole – with a frame of reference that is our whole life, the sum of our experiences and memory. When “one of New York's more interesting magazines” asked Moore to change his style of poetry to his own, he fought the “tyranny” reflex to laugh:
You no longer create a rhythm, a rhythm, a person, and a sentence, but a radiograph of a personality.
And yet a person can write with more or less persuasion – that is, write more or less well – depending on what the person brings to the writing. In another essay from the collection, Moore identifies three psychological traits necessary for persuasive writing: “humility, concentration, and interest.” A generation after Mark Twain assured his friend Helen Keller when she was accused of plagiarism that “mostly all ideas are secondary, knowingly and unknowingly drawn from a million outside sources,” he writes:
Humility… is a defense, because it recognizes that it is impossible to be the first, in the sense of doing something that has never been thought of before. Authenticity in any case is a product of integrity; that is, an honest feeling and rejects anything that might cloud the vision.
By “concentration” Moore means a kind of behavior – to strengthen the essence of the feeling by cutting off all the explanations, explanations, and distractions of the style, to have the greatest truth in the least possible way. Noting that there is always “an unhelpful sincerity that creates a poem” and that a good poem is always “centered,” he writes:
Concentration – necessary in persuasion – may feel self-evident, but with its opposite pressure… I personally would rather be told too little than too much.
Long before we had the language of external and internal motivations, of finite and infinite games, Moore applies a beloved word, now dusty, to that unique private passion that drives all creative work with its twin guiding and liberating properties: “gusto.” Echoing Rachel Carson's timeless writing advice — “If you write what you yourself honestly think and feel and are interested in,” she advised a young writer, “there's a good chance you'll be interesting to other people, too.” – More's offer:
Gusto thrives on freedom, and freedom in art, as in life, is the result of the discipline we impose. Furthermore, any writer who is very honest about entertainment is almost certainly going to please others.
He maps the basic relationship between these three:
Humility is a very important teacher, which makes concentration increase anger.
When you create sincerely with these three values, it doesn't matter how the work is received because the process of finding and expressing the truth as you feel it, the world as you see it, is its own reward. In what is the best advice I've come across about how to adapt to your work, Moore writes:
There are always those who oppose, but we must not sympathize with being unpopular or unpublished… The thing is to see the point of view and not deny it; or we care and admit we do.
Learn from Walt Whitman on how to keep criticism from sinking your soul and Mary Oliver's advice on writing, then enjoy the moving story of how Marianne Moore saved a rare tree with a poem.
