In this, our last Poetry Pairing for the school year, Marianne Moore’s “That Harp You Play So Well” is matched with the essay “Sing to Me, O Muse (But Keep It Brief),” by David Lehman.
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Editor of the influential literary magazine The Dial and author of several collections, Marianne Moore achieved both literary success and a degree of celebrity, famous for her tricorn hat and cape.
That Harp You Play So Well
By Marianne Moore
From “Pouters and Fantails”
Oh, David, if I had
Your power, I should be glad–
In harping, with the sling,
In patient reasoning!
Blake, Homer, Job and you,
Have made old wine-skins new.
Your energies have wrought
Stout continents of thought.
But David, if the heart
Be brass, what boots the art
Of exorcizing wrong,
Of harping to a song?
The sceptre and the ring
And every royal thing
Will fail. Grief’s lustiness
Must cure that harp’s distress.
Times Selection Excerpt
In the 2014 Sunday Book Review essay “Sing to Me, O Muse (But Keep It Brief),” David Lehman writes about what could be lost in a technology-oriented culture.
Maybe I dreamed it. Don Draper sips Canadian Club from a coffee mug on Craig Ferguson’s late-night talk show. “Are you on Twitter?” the host asks. “No,” Draper says. “I don’t” — he pauses before pronouncing the distasteful verb — “tweet.” Next question. “Do you read a lot of poetry?” Though the hero of “Mad Men” is seen reading Dante’s “Inferno” in one season of the show and heard reciting Frank O’Hara in another, the question seems to come from left field. “Poetry isn’t really celebrated anymore in our culture,” Draper says, to which Ferguson retorts, “It can be — if you can write in units of 140 keystrokes.” Commercial break.
The laugh line reveals a shrewd insight into the subject of “poetry in the digital age,” a panel-discussion perennial. The participants agree that texting and blogs will influence the practice of poetry in style, content and method of composition. Surely we may expect the same of a wildly popular social medium with a formal requirement as stringent as the 140-character limit. (To someone with a streak of mathematical mysticism, the relation of that number to the number of lines in a sonnet is a thing of beauty.) What Twitter offers is ultimate immediacy expressed with ultimate concision. “Whatever else Twitter is, it’s a literary form,” the critic Kathryn Schulz has written. True, the hard-to-shake habit causes its share of problems, “distractibility increase” and other disturbing symptoms. Nevertheless there is a reason Schulz got hooked on this “wide-ranging, intellectually stimulating, bighearted, super fun” activity.
The desire to make a friend of the new technology obliges us to overlook some major flaws: The Internet is hell on lining, spacing, italics; line breaks and indentation are often obscured in electronic transmission. The integrity of the poetic line can be a serious casualty. Still, it is fruitless to quarrel with the actuality of change, though in private we may revel in our physical books and even, if we like, write with pencil on graph paper or type our thoughts with the Smith-Corona to which we have a sentimental attachment. One room in the 2013 “Drawn to Language” exhibit at the University of Southern California’s Fisher Museum of Art was devoted to Susan Silton’s site-specific installation of a circle of tables on which sat 10 manual typewriters of different vintages. It was moving to behold the machines not only as objects of nostalgia in an attractive arrangement but as metonymies of the experience of writing in the 20th century. Seeing the typewriters in that room, I felt as I do when the talk touches on the acquisition of an author’s papers by a university library. It’s odd to be a member of the last generation to have “papers” in this archival and material sense. Odd for an era to slip into a museum while you watch.
The one-minute poem may not be far off. With its need for speed, Twitter’s 140-character constraint brings the clock into the game. Poetry — a byte-size kind of poetry — has been, or soon will be, a benefit of attention deficit disorder. (This prediction is not necessarily made in disparagement.) Unlike the telephone, social media relies on the written, not the spoken, word, and I wonder what will happen when hip-hop and spoken-word practices tangle with the virtues of concision, bite and wit consistent with the rules of the Twitter feed. On the other hand, it is conceivable that the sentence I have just composed will be anachronistic in a couple of years. Among my favorite oxymorons is “ancient computer,” applied to my own desktop.