Here are two versions of "The Past is the Present" by baseball fan Marianne Moore.
The first version is the one that I used for The Oxford Book of American Poetry. The second version is one that I found circulating in the web.
What makes the second version corrupt is that it regularizes the spacing. Easy to understand why: idiosyncasies of spacing, unusual typographical arrangements, and even simple indentation are often casualties of electronic transmission. But the spacing here is crucial. I maintain that Moore's poem if printed with conventional spacing is not the same poem – and it is certainly not as good a poem.
The second version differs from the Oxford text for a legitimate reason as well: it is an alternative draft of the same poem. The difference is between "as on a recent occasion I was goaded into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse" and "as when in a Bible class the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse."
The alternative version is more compact, and usually this is a good thing, but in this case I believe that the original is superior because 1) it is more specific to Moore's personality and 2) it fruitfully complicates the situation and the poem. The phrase "I was goaded into doing by XY" implies that the great assertive sentence that rounds off the poem is not only a comment on what "This man" (or "the teacher") said but also a criticism of it as insufficient. The sentence by XY is vastly more interesting in this light: it exemplifies prose that lacks "a sort of heightened consciousness." The discrepancy between the sentence’s broad truth and its own inadequacy as a vehicle for that truth thus irritates the poet into uttering her epigram. Notice, too, that the Oxford version has the word "occasion" in line four, obliging us to understand how the closing epigram applies to the making of this particular poem.
From the poem’s conclusion I drew the title of the anthology Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms.
The Past is the Present
If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as on a recent occasion I was goaded
into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse.
This man said – I think that I repeat
his identical words:
"Hebrew poetry is
prose with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form.
– Marianne Moore
corrupt / alternative version found on on the web:
The Past is the Present
If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class
the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.
He said - and I think I repeat his exact words -
"Hebrew poetry is prose
with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form.
– Marianne Moore
I love the case you make for Moore's necessary idiosyncrasies of spacing.
Sometimes I give my students a Moore poem printed as prose, and ask them to lineate it themselves. Not the least of their responses to *her* choices, when they consider them in the light of their own suggestions, is to appreciate their weird, distinct, discriminating quality. Whether they can make a case for *why* she's doing it, they certainly come to feel she's *there* in the choices.
That said, your post also made me want to double-check Moore's spacing in this poem. Did she mean "Verse" to stand on its own, for example, or is that just a consequence of the page-width? (I was surprised by its capitalization in yr post...)
Robin Schulze's book, Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907-1924, gives two versions of this poem -- the one printed in the first edition of Observations (1924), and its earliest appearance in Others magazine in 1915.
Can't tell from the 1924 version whether "verse" (not capitalized) and "affords" are intended to be indented as one-word-lines (as you have them), or as leftovers from too-long lines. The right margin's too close.
But the 1915 version, which is in most ways the same, offers some clues. The two sentences with "verse" and "affords" are enjambed *differently* here:
...speaking of / unrhymed verse.
...'Ec- / stacy affords...
And, in this version, all the beginnings of lines are capitalized *except* for "unrhymed verse," and "stacy affords."
Which leads me to think that had Moore but space enough (or time to argue for it), "verse" would not stand on its own but come at the end of a long line ["into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse."], and "affords," similarly, would not stand on its own but come at the end of a long line ["prose with a sort of heightened consciousness. 'Ecstasy affords"].
(I know. Too much space given to a small point. But it's the principle of the thing. And if there's anyone out there who would be interested in the comment, it would be someone who cared about your post in the first place.)
Yours in the common pursuit,
JSC
Posted by: JSC | September 02, 2008 at 01:59 PM
Thanks, JSC, for the outstanding sleuth work and meticulous attention to detail.
It's unfortunate that oddities of typographical arrangement (as here or even more emphatically in Cummings's poetry) -- which were encouraged by the universal use of typewriters -- may be a casualty of computer technology. Have you noticed that italics and space indentation rarely survive electronic transmission?
You'll see that I've made the two changes you suggest.
Posted by: DL | September 03, 2008 at 03:19 PM