Marianne Moore, Photography, and the Self-in-Flux

Emily Setina

arianne Moore mentions photography in only one poem, “A Face” of 1947. She took a lifelong interest in the art form, however, and it inflects her poetic Mprocess. A 1909 letter home from Bryn Mawr narrates with characteristic gusto her chance meeting with a niece of photographer Paul Haviland, an “out and out artist” working in “a studio on Fifth Ave. near 33rd St with an ” (Letter to Mary Warner Moore). Already “pining for a chance to leave ‘the kittens my classmates’ at their play and see if things weren’t done anywhere in the right way (except at home),” Moore found this glimpse of the NewYork avant-garde tantalizing. She endorsed Paul Haviland and Stieglitz as “very spirited and young enthusiasm-ists” and enthused over the images she saw in Miss Haviland’s copy of Steiglitz’s magazine, declaring them “satisfac- tory in every particular—way beyond pictures (painted),” far different from the “common garden photographs on dull paper” she had expected. Indeed Moore was “taken by storm”—and her interest persisted. When she visited NewYork six years later in December 1915, Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery, its address recorded at Bryn Mawr, came first on an ambitious agenda.There she met Stieglitz, initiating the first of many friendships with well-known pho- tographers. Her correspondence files at the Rosenbach Library include personal invitations from Stieglitz, notes from Richard Avedon (signed “Dick”), and hand-drawn Christmas cards from George Platt Lynes.

Moore’s prose writings reiterate over the years her affinity for photography and also con- vey an appreciation of its technical challenges. As editor of The Dial in 1925, she hailed Stieglitz’s “Seven Americans” show, which included work by Stiegliz and , as patriotic proof of “creative power” in America (Prose 150). In her 1940 tribute to The Dial, Moore remembers Charles Sheeler’s expertise in “coping with the difficulty of photograph- ing for reproduction Lachaise’s polished brass head of Scofield Thayer . . . mounted on glass—glitteringly complicated from any angle” (362). Her 1957 forward to a book of Lynes’s images of the NewYork City Ballet praises “[his] understanding of light and impatience with retouching as a substitute for focus” (655). She admires Sheeler and Lynes not only for their work, but also for their understated behavior as artists—fitting to their medium, which seems to allow the artist invisibility behind the lens. Of Sheeler’s work, Moore writes, “[I] have never seen anything effected with less ado or greater care” (362). She defines Lynes

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as the photographer who “in a way that is emphasized by absence—contributed to my knowledge of art; not art merely, but to my knowledge of art as behavior” (655).

Although her prose evinces admiration for photographers, however, Moore’s poetry omits the art form almost entirely. Poems feature painters from Durer to da Vinci, El Greco to “Redon (Odilon),” Magritte to the “Chinese / who imagined this masterpiece,” but photog- raphers receive mention only in appended notes (Complete Poems 219, 30). “Camellia Sabina,”for example, has two photographic sources: “Mouse with a grape. Photograph by Spencer R. Atkinson, National Geographic Magazine, February 1932” and “The wire cage. Photograph by Alvin E. Worman of Attleboro, Massachusetts” (264). Only the “Notes” at the back of Moore’s Complete Poems mention that we are looking at photographed subjects. In the poem Spencer R. Atkinson’s National Geographic “Mouse with a grape” becomes sim- ply “yonder mouse with a / grape in its hand.”The speaker presents The wire cage of Alvin E. Worman’s photograph as though it exists in three-dimensions. One can move closer to see inside: “The wire cage is / locked, but by bending down and studying the roof, it is pos- sible to see the pantomime of Persian thought” (17).

Only much later, in “Blue Bug,”published in 1966, does Moore credit a photographic source on the same page as a poem. She contextualizes her address with the lines: “Upon seeing Dr. RaworthWilliams’ Blue Bug with seven other ponies, photographed byThomas McAvoy: Sports Illustrated” (sic) (218). McAvoy’s photograph, cited below the poem’s title, becomes a more prominent source than those held until the “Notes” at the collection’s end. Even here, however, Moore quickly loses the photographic frame. She looks through rather than at McAvoy’s photograph to address its subject, making “Blue Bug” the “you” of her poetic conversation: “In this camera shot, / from that fine print in which you hide / (eight-pony por- trait from the side).” “Bug” looks back, seeing through the photograph on the Sports Illustrated page “to recognize / the recognizing eye” of an observer, the poem’s speaker.The typewritten article accompanying the photograph seems to interfere with Moore’s ability to reach her addressee, filling the page outside the camera shot with “fine print in which you hide.”

Photography exerts an influence on Moore’s poetic not so much in its content, and not only via a particular photographic aesthetic, but through her productive engagement with tech- niques and creative processes particular to photography as a medium. In her study on Moore and the visual arts, Linda Leavell demonstrates Moore’s affinity with, “straight pho- tography.”Also known as “pure photography,”the movement eschewed negative and print manipulation in favor of sharp focus, “truth” to the medium and to the object. Leavell argues that a similar ideology under-girds Moore’s precision of language, her criteria of selection, and her motif of seeing as “spiritual” activity (34, 131–32, 210–11).The images that first took Moore “by storm,” however, were not those of “,” but of its antithesis: , a style that used negative and print manipulation to emulate sym- bolist and pre-Raphaelite imagery. In her 1909 letter home from Bryn Mawr, Moore describes two pictorial photographs in the issue of Camera Works as “the book’s ‘peaches’ Emily Setina 279

surely”: “one was called the bubble, a girl crouching over a stream with her arm out, hold- ing a big crystal ball—thin glass or soap bubble of some sort on in and . . . another of a nymph under the shadow of a tree or bank, splashed all over with sun and spray so you could barely make her out.”1

Pictorial images of the kind that originally transfixed Moore destabilize identity by turning physical objects into transitory images—light and shadow: “the thin glass or soap bubble of some sort . . . a nymph under the shadow of a tree or bank . . . you could barely make her out.”Paradoxically, straight photography, for all its geometrical clarity, calls even greater attention to the instability of the object. Straight photography was Stieglitz’s answer to Cubism in painting. While Cubist painters broke canvases into facets to depict space reveal- ing itself through time, the photographer, limited to the single perspective of the camera, had to approach space and time differently, compressing motion into the instant. Although it cannot chart an object’s evolution through time, the photograph empowers the eye to sep- arate one instant in the process of seeing, a brief interaction between artist and object that serves as a transitory still in an ever-changing relationship.The very speed necessary to cap- ture an object in clarity calls attention to its instability. Hart Crane, writing about Stieglitz in 1923, cites speed as the defining quality of photography: “Speed is at the bottom of it all, the hundredth of a second caught so precisely that the motion is continued from the picture indefinitely: the moment made eternal” (qtd. in Sontag 65). The high speed that arrests motion also preserves it. A shutter speed that allows light to strike the film for more than one-sixtieth of a second can blur an image taken with a hand-held camera. Only the instant can be precise in a world in which subject and object exist in dynamic, on-going exchange, each shaping and being shaped by the other.

Photography’s two-way relationship between artist and object distinguishes it among the visual arts. The ultimate source of a painting, engraving, or sculpture is the artist’s eye (whether the physical eye or the eye of the mind), but the physical body of the photograph- ic model asserts its own presence in the image. Barthes calls the photograph’s model its “referent,”a title indicating that the image refers to the model rather than to the artist as its ultimate source. Unlike the objects represented in other arts, the photograph’s referent is not an “optionally real thing” but “the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph” (76). Challenging the hierarchy between artist and object—the photographer and the referent—composition becomes a two-way conversation. Barthes writes that as a photographic subject he “[constitutes him- self] in the process of ‘posing’” (10). In choosing a perspective from which to compose the image within the frame, the photographer, too, constitutes an identity—a pose—in relation to the referent.

Although the principle of shared composition is most evident in portrait photographs—such Richard Avedon’s 1963 photograph of former slave William Casby (reproduced in Barthes’ Camera Lucida) in which the referent, Casby, like the referent in Moore’s “Blue Bug,”literal- ly looks back—any photographed object takes part in a dialogue with the photographer.The 280 English Language Notes 44.2 Fall / Winter 2006

lens serves as a two-way passage for sight and light between artist and referent.The pho- tographer looks out through one side of the lens and the referent reflects light back through the other—into the camera where it strikes the eye and, at the moment that the photogra- pher releases the shutter, the film, creating the image. Barthes terms this reflected light the “emanation of the referent”—the means of physical contact between himself as audience and the body of the referent whose “radiations . . . ultimately touch me” (80). Through its emanations, even the referent unaware of itself being photographed, even the inanimate object—Sheeler’s staircase or Strand’s machine—plays an active role in composition.

Just as photography challenges the hierarchy between the creating artist and created object by turning composition into a two-way conversation, the medium also destabilizes notions of selfhood and objecthood. Rather than existing in stable and separable entities, each object assumes an identity in relation to another. Although Moore’s “Hero” sees past the superficial to discover a deeper truth, “the rock / crystal thing to see—the startling El Greco / brimming with inner light,” even this core attains solidity only by accepting flux, “[covet- ing] nothing that it has let go” (8–9). The solid “rock / crystal” shines with an animated, unstable brilliance, “brimming”—at the cusp of overflowing—with light, provoking the viewer’s response as do El Greco’s “startling” painted visions.

For Moore as for Barthes, a work of art should come alive in its interaction with an audience. Barthes names as “punctum” the unexpected detail that breaks the placid surface of a pho- tographic image to serve as a point of interaction and animation: in a Koen Wessing war photograph from Nicaragua, Barthes isolates the bare foot of a corpse and the sheet inex- plicably held by the weeping mother as punctum.The punctum engages the viewer’s curios- ity and provokes a response: “(why this sheet?)” (23). Sharp and aimed outward like an “arrow,”the punctum “rises from the scene” and “pierces” the viewer (26).The speaker in Moore’s “When I Buy Pictures” seeks an animation similar to what Barthes defines as punc- tum: a work of art “‘lit with piercing glances into the life of things’” (emphasis added, Complete Poems 48).The interaction, though “piercing,”is unstable, coming in “glances.”In photography, too, the quality that animates one print and escapes another is ineffable. Stieglitz describes it as “something born out of spirit, —and spirit is an intangible while the mechanical is tangible” (qtd. in Leavell 125). What Stieglitz calls “spirit” may be the self out- side concrete boundaries, the self interacting with another. In this way, photography—like Moore’s poems with their outward-looking speakers—becomes a social activity, an art that cannot be created in isolation but only by placing the self in conversation.

Critics have often read Moore’s poems of address as deflective armor in which she hides the self. By addressing the other, Moore does not shield a core of selfhood, however, but, like the photographer, places the self in conversation, acknowledging that in isolation neither self nor object can constitute an identity. We can see her working through this poetic of self- positioning in relation to an other in two early, uncollected poems. In “Blake,”a six-line trib- ute to the poet-painter, published in the magazine Others the same month that Moore first visited Stieglitz’s gallery, December 1915, reflection and refraction—the camera’s media— Emily Setina 281

provide the poem’s central metaphors for the tenuous positioning of a self in relation to an artist Moore admired, and indeed identified—to an enquiring Ezra Pound—among the “direct influences bearing upon my work” (Selected Letters 123).

I wonder if you feel as you look at us, As if you were seeing yourself in a mirror at the end Of a long corridor—walking frail-ly. I am sure that we feel as we look at you, As if we were ambiguous and all but improbable Reflections of the sun—shining pale-ly. (105)

While Blake shines as “the sun,”the speaker’s identity wavers in “[reflection]” of his light. Just as a photograph’s referent (“the thing of the past”) communicates with its audience through light in Barthes’ formulation, in the poem light serves as a means of transmitting vision (81). Blake, the “sun,”shines on an audience separated from him by time and space. The “long corridor” acts as a kind of lens, perhaps as a telescope held the wrong way, dis- tancing referent and audience. Although our identities meld into “[reflections]”—making it difficult to tell referent from audience and image from body—an emotional distance remains, recalling the analogous strangeness that Walter Benjamin, following Pirandello, identifies in an actor before the camera and “before one’s own image in the mirror” (230).

Denied access to Blake’s vision, the speaker can only “wonder” what he sees. Rather than placing the self in one-on-one conversation with Blake as his equal, Moore’s speaker hides among a crowd: “we”—a sum lesser than Blake’s self.The speaker phrases his or her per- sonal feelings as tentative observations—“I am sure that we feel. . . / As if we were”—con- firming only our own uncertainty, our feeling of being “ambiguous and all but improbable.” Constituted in Blake’s reflection, our identity becomes transient as the “fleeting expression” caught by a photograph (Benjamin 226). Even the words used to describe us waver, as the adverbs “frail-ly” and “pale-ly” barely hold themselves together with hyphens.Though we, the audience, are the living, we are “frail” and “pale,”connoting infirmity and illness as well, perhaps, as moral “frailty” in contrast to the poet-prophet. Nevertheless, Blake, too, may depend on his audience’s animating vision. Intercrossing our actions with Blake’s—“you look at us” and “we look at you”—the speaker’s use of chiasmus links us in a two-way rela- tionship of seeing.The phrases that describe our own instability as images—“walking frail- ly” and “shining pale-ly”—reflect simultaneously on the source of our light: “the sun—shin- ing pale-ly.”Our frailty becomes Blake’s own as the speaker imagines him seeing us as if he “were seeing [himself] in a mirror . . . walking frail-ly.”Although the speaker casts our iden- tity-in-flux as a frailty, the energy he or she admires in Blake, “the sun,”is itself unstable.

In “To a Man Working His WayThrough the Crowd,”a poem published eight months earli- er than “Blake,”in April, 1915, Moore chooses as referent another artist who she knows only as “the spiritual forces” behind his work: here the English writer and stage designer Gordon Craig (Complete Poems 48). Craig too numbered among Moore’s “direct influ- ences” cited in the 1919 letter to Pound; in fact, Craig’s name comes first on the list. 282 English Language Notes 44.2 Fall / Winter 2006

Although she wrote the poem before she had met Craig, unlike Blake the stage designer was a contemporary, someone whose actual photograph she could see, and did—at the year’s end, when she visited Stieglitz’s 291. Evidently the dramatically-lit Eduard Steichen portrait of Craig greatly impressed Moore. Her letter home from NewYork reports a conver- sation with Stieglitz: “I said I had not known there was anything in existence like Steichen’s photograph of Gordon Craig—I said at all events I had never seen anything like it. ‘Well, there is nothing like it,’ [Stieglitz] said” (Selected Letters 108).

“To a Man” is the first of eleven poems written between 1915 and 1917 that Moore titles “To” a person, animal, or object.2 The mode of address positions Moore’s speaker in the photographer’s role, facing the referent through the lens of the poem. The poem’s first three words, “To Gordon Craig,” belie the random selection implied in the title’s anony- mous address and open a channel of direct communication between speaker and referent.

To Gordon Craig:Your lynx’s eye Has found the men most fit to try To serve you. Ingenious creatures follow in your wake.

Your speech is like Ezekiel’s; You make one feel that wrath unspells Some mysteries—some of the cabals of the vision.

The most propulsive thing you say, Is that one need not know the way, To be arriving.That forword smacks of retrospect.

Undoubtedly you overbear, But one must do that to come where, There is a space, a fit gymnasium for action. (62) Rather than positioning a self among others as in “Blake,”here the speaker selects a refer- ent from the “[crowd],” then rapidly focuses an indefinite title—“To a Man . . . [in] the Crowd”—into a decisive address: “To Gordon Craig.” Like the poem’s speaker, Craig, too, boasts selective vision: “Your lynx’s eye / Has found the men most fit to try /To serve you.” Craig’s “[wrathful]” speech—performing a trick somewhere between magic and angry phonics—“unspells / Some mysteries” of vision, empowering our eyes so that we, too, may enter the inner-circle of seers, “the cabals of the vision.”

Like the photographer’s art, Craig’s discovers motion in the moment, creating a frame for continued “action” and interaction: the “motion [to be] continued from the picture indefi- nitely” (Crane, qtd. in Sontag 65).The first stanza places Craig and his followers in a kind of array with Craig forging ahead and the other men “[ingenious] creatures [following] in your / wake.”A “wake” exists through movement, a broken train of water that smoothes itself as the wave-breaker forges ahead. The image recalls early photographic motion studies, revealing moments that pass too quickly for the naked eye to arrest: “imperceptible, fleet- Emily Setina 283

ing parts of movement” (Sontag 121).The poem’s speaker too captures a subject in motion, “Working His Way.”The use of the present participle, here and in Craig’s saying—“one need not know the way, /To be arriving”—recalls Stein’s continuous present, emphasizing the on- going nature of creation: a process of discovery rather than a set path to a fixed product. Evincing a self-assurance unknown to the speaker of “Blake,” this speaker critiques Craig, “Undoubtedly you overbear.” Like Craig’s prophetic voice, the speaker’s words also “smack” together language and vision, “foreword” and “retrospect,” disregarding tempo- ral barriers as well. Without a fixed “way” or final goal, creation becomes not the execution of a plan but a process of discovery, involving a continuing exchange between artist and object. Following Craig, we “come where / There is a space, a fit gymnasium for action.” Recalling the theatrical stages that Craig designs, the room provides a frame for action, but, unlike the curtained-off stage, invites interaction. In European usage, “gymnasium” names a preparatory school, a place for both mental and physical training—art’s continuing exer- cise toward empowering vision.

The instant of sight that Moore admired in photography implies a radical critique of both selfhood and objecthood that continually repositions identity in relation to objects that are themselves in constant flux. Rather than implying a desire to capture the essence of an object in some unmediated, stable way, photography presents glimpses of clarity that call attention to the instability of vision and identity. Art—the poem or the photograph—pre- serves precise moments in a process of definition. Even a “face photographed by recollec- tion” offers only a temporary stay against loss in Moore’s 1947 poem “A Face” (Complete Poems 141). The title has as misprision, or meaningful misreading, the word “efface”—to erase. Reflection established a fluid relationship between speaker and object of address in “Blake.”The same trope appears in the first stanza of “A Face,”but the latter poem’s mirror is more rigidly literal and offers only the self. After “studying and studying its expression, / exasperated desperation . . . would gladly break the mirror.”

The tone of exasperation shifts in the last four lines as the speaker seems to insist on the memory’s photographic power to preserve what “desperation . . . would gladly break”:

Certain faces, a few, one or two—or one face photographed by recollection— to my mind, to my sight, must remain a delight. As in “To a Man,”the speaker rapidly narrows the uncertain plural “Certain faces” to “a few, one or two—or one.”The speaker is still learning how wide a field can be kept in focus, and her fluctuation—“one or two—or one”—is a concession to these limits. Unlike an engrav- ing, whose every fine line testifies to the care and attention of its making, the photograph seems instant, almost careless, with the speed of its creation prefiguring the speed with which it fades and calling attention to the transitory nature of the referent whose image it preserves. Benjamin finds a “melancholy, incomparable beauty” in the photograph that captures for the last time “the fleeting expression of a human face” (226). A consciousness 284 English Language Notes 44.2 Fall / Winter 2006

of the mortality of the photograph itself as an organic object infuses Barthes’ sense of melancholy before the image: “born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages” (93). In Moore’s poem, the photograph fades even faster: what the word “photographed” seems to offer—a material representation—is taken away two words later by the noun “recollection,”which makes the photograph merely metaphorical. Rather than a confident assurance, the speaker’s final insistence that the face “must remain” indi- cates a fervent but impossible wish: even the photographic instant, which seems to arrest motion and preserve an identity, is itself in flux, ephemeral as its referent.

Emily Setina Davidson College

NOTES Quotations from unpublished writing of Marianne Moore appear by permission of her literary executor, Marianne Craig Moore. I owe thanks to Elizabeth Mills, Alan Parker, and especially Suzanne Churchill at Davidson College for reading and improving this essay from its earliest stages of flux. 1 The photographs that Moore identifies are Anne Brigman’s The Bubble andThe Brook or The Source, which appeared along with The Dying Cedar and Soul of the Blasted Pine, in the January 1909 issue of Camera Work under the name Annie W. Brigman (Palmquist). 2 My count is based on Margaret Holley’s helpful “Chronology of Moore’s Published Poems” (195–97).

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