poetry lamenting war #15

[truepenny]

TO MILITARY PROGRESS


You use your mind
like a millstone to grind
   chaff.
You polish it
and with your warped wit
   laugh

at your torso,
prostrate where the crow
   falls
on such faint hearts
as its god imparts,
   calls

and claps its wings
till the tumult brings
   more
black minute-men
to revive again,
   war

at little cost.
They cry for the lost
   head
and seek their prize
till the evening sky's
   red.

--Marianne Moore, Complete Poems. New York: Penguin Books, 1981.

LINKS:
The Academy of American Poets still seems to be suffering technical difficulties. Their Marianne Moore page (assuming that one will eventually be able to reach it) is here.

Until then, try here for biographical information.

Another biography, with a great photograph of MM and Langston Hughes, from the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Women in American History.

Some secondary sources from MAPS.

A site with biography, interviews, chronology, and all sorts of other stuff, including an incredibly cute picture of the young MM in a hat.

Marguerite Zorach, of whom I had never heard before, painted this portrait of MM in 1925 (housed in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery).

A page with tips on teaching Moore.

And, of course I'm linking to a page of links. Because why do some of this work when somebody else already has?

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

There's a marvelous Moore collection at the Rosenbach Museum and Library here in Philadelphia. They used to have a room upstairs set up exactly like a room in her house, complete with baseball memorabilia--probably still does.

She and h.d. went to my college. (Well, really, the other way around...)