Thursday, October 2, 2008, the homework on the syllabus included more on Moore’s poems and the article, “Discovery, Not Salvage,” by Paul. I read through the poems first and then moved, confused from the poems, to the article. I wasn’t aware that the article was no longer an assigned reading because I failed to read my email that day. On Saturday, October 04, 2008, I read through my email and found that the reason why we didn’t discuss the article on Friday was because that part of the assigned reading was canceled. Reading the article was just as difficult as reading the poems in that the article’s length was not appealing at all. However, the reading of the article, some very interesting ideas about Moore’s style of poetry were brought up. I liked how the article was able to answer some of the questions I had about Moore’s topics and consistent animal subjects. She has a very distinctive style that dominates throughout each of her poems which includes the most obvious, or not so obvious, obscure presentation of themes.
At first, I thought that Moore was sort of battling T.S. Eliot for the title of “most obscure poet.” Then I realized that she totally has reasons for what she does as a poet, according to information I got out of the article. I’m not sure if Eliot was the same way, but he was a poet frequently mentioned throughout the article. I read through and found that Moore actually was inspired by museum exhibitions, most of them of animals. In her poems, with animals dominating as the subject, she actually sat in an exhibition where collectors arranged animals in an environment made to resemble the one of the exhibiting animal’s habitat. That is where I saw Moore’s inspiration to write detailed descriptions of an animal in natural settings.
What stuck to my mind the most was that the article brought up this idea where the person who created a piece of artwork, the collector who arranged artwork to showcase, and the person visiting the exhibition are all artists. In a way, this point is relating to the way Moore writes and also Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” In “The Octopus,” Moore used many quotes, in some ways the poem seemed to be almost entirely comprised of quotes, quotes, that I learned came from travel brochures. The article shows that Moore, herself is an artist, one that curates and arranges so as to create a new piece. The same idea also is fit for Eliot.
I’m glad to have realized this from reading the article. It was really helpful in providing a bit of insight into Moore’s poetic style.
1 comment:
Oh wow that's really insightful. I never got around to reading that article, so thanks for touching upon it :]. I was especially intrigued by the comparison to artists. Come to think about it, Moore is very much like an artist, for she gathers her inspirations and arranges them together with her own thoughts to create her very own unique pieces. So poetry is like art in the literary world perhaps?
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