Quotations in Moore's writing.

While writing up Short Assignment 6 last week, I thought about the interesting effect that quotations have on "An Octopus", and what Moore was really trying to do by including them in her work.

When I began working on the short assignment, I started out by searching for all the most unlikely sources of quotations I could possibly find. I eventually settled on my Physics and Math textbooks, a Sci-Fi book by Iain Banks, and a pack of Milano chocolate biscuits. I then compiled a list of quotations to use in poem, and built up my text from there, occasionally changing or removing a quote when I couldn't find a way to make it work. This made me wonder: how did Marianne Moore decide on which quotations to include in her poem? They integrate well with the poem, but is this simply because she built the poem up around them? Or maybe she had an idea in mind, and then painstakingly searched through pamphlets and random literature until she got the effect she was shooting for...

This collage of quotations reminds me a little bit of the algorithmic poetry and "Erika T. Carter," the programmed poet, in that Moore uses phrases and words fabricated by others and combines them to form her final work. The words are programmed into her poem, in a way, but she still somehow manages to bring it together as a cohesive whole. I find this interesting because when we study poetry we often assign a lot of importance to the author's "voice", but then what do we make of a poem that is composed of "voices" other than that of the author? Maybe she is making a point about "plagiarism" and originality, like William Carlos Williams in "Spring and All".

Although it might be a little hard for me to understand what drove her to use this writing technique, I can nevertheless see how it affects the poem: "An Octopus" has a kind of recycled feel to it (hmm, interesting... She speaks of nature and her quotations come from forestry pamphlets. Maybe she is trying to convey a message about sustainability? Or maybe I've just been spending too much time re-reading my L&S C30U notes...) The quotations add to the constant flow of the poem because they dovetail into each other almost seamlessly: if the quotation marks had not been there, the poem would have felt quite natural and uninterrupted. Moore grabs these pieces of text and fits them into her work like she would fit pieces together in a jigsaw puzzle. Another metaphor: the text inside the quote marks are like quick snapshots of something else, views into the valleys and forests described by the pamphlets. This  gives the reader the feeling that there is a vast background story to the poem, and her original writing serves only to aid in the flow of images.