Heather Cass White

PERSPECTIVE: ‘To a Snail’ by Marianne Moore

If “compression is the first grace of style,”
you have it. Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue.
It is not the acquisition of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle that is hid:
in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusions”;
“a knowledge of principles,”
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.

By Marianne Moore (more…)

PERSPECTIVE: ‘Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight’ by Marianne Moore

With an elephant to ride upon—”with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,”
   she shall outdistance calamity anywhere she goes.
Speed is not in her mind inseparable from carpets. Locomotion arose
   in the shape of an elephant; she clambered up and chose
to travel laboriously. So far as magic carpets are concerned, she knows
   that although the semblance of speed may attach to scarecrows
of aesthetic procedure, the substance of it is embodied in such of those
   tough-grained animals as have outstripped man’s whim to suppose
them ephemera, and I have earned that fruit of their ability to endure blows
   which dubs them prosaic necessities—not curios.

By Marianne Moore

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PERSPECTIVE: ‘Is Your Town Nineveh?’ BY MARIANNE MOORE

 
Why so desolate?

  in phantasmagoria about fishes,

    what disgusts you? Could

      not all personal upheaval in

        the name of freedom, be tabooed?



Is it Nineveh

  and are you Jonah

    in the sweltering east wind of your wishes?

      I myself, have stood

        there by the acquarium, looking

          at the Statue of Liberty.


By Marianne Moore

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