“Just Looking” at the Everyday: Marianne Moore's Exotic Modernism

Abstract

Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University) argues that Marianne Moore was a connoisseur of modern clutter, drawing on the historical residues of “antiques, rare art objects and ancient artefacts”, but also the disorder of the information age: the disaggregated fragments thrown up by contemporary journalism. Moore takes the discursive production of China in the “Illustrated News” and creates a constellation, after Benjamin, that goes further than the confirmation of the West as “a superior site of knowledge” to gesture to something beyond a technocratic modernity.

A Peculiar Kind of Particularity: Plants and Animals in Marianne Moore’s Early Poetry

“…128 While these creatures might seem remote in relation to Moore's lived experience in urban environments from St. Louis, Missouri to Greenwich Village, Moore's unrivalled power to write empirically precise poetry about seemingly exotic subjects can be better understood in light of Bazin's 2006 observation that 'exoticism' was 'embedded' in Moore's 'everyday experience of modernity'. 129 While important research has recently been done by scholars seeking to show how Moore's 'exotic modernism' was influenced by her circumstantial encounters with 'the ephemera of modern life as it was reproduced in newspapers, magazines and journals', her peculiar choice of plants and animals cannot be solely attributed to the incidental circumstances of modernity and modern print culture. 130 As this article demonstrates, Moore actively sought to understand the particular natures…”