A correction concerning Marianne Moore, & The Fugs: a guest blog by Dan De Vries
Two guest posts for IFSF's Book Blog, and the first already calls for correction.
Although it is an amusing correction. Amusing to me, at least.
For anyone who didn't read my post, or didn't particularly care to read it, or read it but found it eminently forgettable, it began with the lines from a Fugs song, attributed to the poet Ed Sanders.
Or read Copper Vision
by Marianne Moore
That post ("Marianne Moore's Octopus") concluded with a fervent wish to read "Copper Vision" as soon as my New Collected Poems: Marianne Moore arrived by the national post.
So it arrived a few days ago. There's no poem titled "Copper Vision" in the New Collected. Not even close.
I realize that the fact that the title is not in a New Collected does not necessarily mean that Marianne Moore never wrote a poem, or some other thing, with that title. I am only beginning to find my way around her work.
The current volume appears to be an excellent place to begin. The editor, Heather Cass White, shows a sure hand in her brief and eloquent Introduction. The volume's format includes original notes that Ms. Moore included with certain of her poems, as well as Professor White's notes, with direction to both as footers, page-by-page, something maybe other Collected Poems have, but it's the first I've seen of it.
One thing I learned from Prof. White's introduction was that Ms. Moore rewrote and republished poems in variant form throughout her publishing life. White suggests that Moore's later revision in notable instances dialed back certain vitalities that rendered her earlier work influential to younger post-modernist poets in the 1950s and 60s. You know, poets like Ed Sanders. So there may well be a "Copper Vision" that Ed Sanders even read, in there somewhere, but I kind of doubt it.
(By way of brief aside, before we get to Ed Sanders and his Fugs, which this is really about, that suggestion of a sort of poetic retreat, a dialing back, as it were, reminded me immediately of the dish on Wordsworth, whose mountain odes Marianne Moore's "An Octopus" brought back to me. That the radically prophetic young Wordsworth ended up a conservative old cop-out fuddy-duddy. Shelley lay that charge at him, and the writing justifies the charge. That's not what White is suggesting about Moore's later work, merely that the earlier versions are sharper and would have been better off not messed with.)
So, about those lines from the Fugs, from track #11, "The Divine Toe, Pt. 1" on It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest, widely acknowledged, including by me, to be the best Fugs album ever. Track #11 is all of 37 seconds long. I found the lines I quoted originally online after a rigorous Google search which I don't seem able to replicate, on some other listener's blog from a previous era.
I'd always hear the line as "cop a visual on Marianne Moore" which, of course, does not make a whole lot of sense. Not finding "Copper Vision" in my New Collected I did what any sane but slightly obsessed Privatgelerhte would do. I went back and listened to the track again. "Cop a visual" wins by several lengths. What was on Ed's mind, who knows?
I was hoping to use the rest of this post to recommend all the reasons why everyone who finds this of remote interest to go out and find both the New Collected Poems: Marianne Moore and It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest. There are so many reasons for both that I would end up writing all evening and it would probably crash the IFSF website to include it all.
A couple of things though: My transcription of "The Divine Toe, Pt. 1" which you will not find anywhere on the internet because it simply isn't there, until, perhaps now, includes a final line which I neglected to include in the earlier post becase it seemed to me...well...indecorous...
Whenever I see the moon on a shore
or cop a visual on Marianne Moore
or see a piano leg touching the floor
or touch a frog with a Lincoln log
I Get Horny! Horny! Horny!
Other notable tracks on It Crawled...,some of which can be found online (including the first one, which you can actually listen to courtesy of YouTube) include
"Crystal Liasion," a wonderful sendup of the classical mass:
In the great bowling alley of your mind
I am your pin boy
I am your PIN BOY
"Ramses II is Dead My Love," a right fine Grand Ole Opry gloss on the funereal practice of the 19th Dynasty.
He's left from Memphis for heaven
Ptah has taken him in the solar barque
And walked him to Nuit's celestial shores
And, of course, Side B Track 12, "National Haiku Contest":
Do not tell me I am the source of your knockup
The mud elephant wading through the sea
leaves no tracks.
You can get the Marianne Moore New Collected at City Lights, or from one of those online booksellers whose name may not be uttered.
If you are ever so fortunate to see this LP (It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest by the Fugs, supplied by the author of this guestblog but not pictured because of technical difficulties) in the bin in a used record marketplace, BUY IT! You will never regret your decision.
Dan De Vries is a poet who lives in San Francisco. IFSF published his book of poems, Past and Presently, in 2014. You can read his additional poems on his blog: