<b>“Frightening Disinterestedness”:</b>The Personal Circumstances of Marianne Moore's “Marriage”

Leavell, Linda

doi:10.2979/jml.2007.31.1.64

Cited by 18 publications

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References 2 publications

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“…67 Moore's emphasis on "liberty and union" connects the integrity of one's personal partnership to the health of one's political society; Bishop's correspondence makes dyadic ethics essential to both when it questions the borders between them. 68 Bishop's epistolarity is thus implicitly feminist, mining the political possibilities of the sentimental "women's culture" in Berlant's critique, and using the traditionally feminine genre of the letter to support a long-held feminist dissatisfaction with the divisions between the personal and the political. 69 It seems fitting that Bishop's essay on Moore appreciates the "feminism" of "Marriage."…”

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Elizabeth Bishop and the Ethics of Correspondence

Phillips¹

2012

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Elizabeth Bishop and the Ethics of Correspondence

Phillips¹

2012

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“Words Cluster like Chromosomes”: Marianne Moore and Poetic-Genetic Origination

Shanosky

2024

Twentieth Century Literature

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In 1963, Marianne Moore tells an interviewer, “I never ‘plan’ a stanza. Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.” Six decades earlier, when Moore first learned about chromosomes, the concept was relatively new. Her education at Bryn Mawr from 1905 to 1909 placed her at the forefront of the understanding of heredity for her time, among those who knew that embryos inherited chromosomes equally from each parent. As her early poetry placed embryonic origins in tension with religious, national, and poetic origins, she posed the embryo both as disruptive to Western origin stories—like the Christian story of the fall—and as generative for her poetics, offering a model for a poetics of iterative and continual origination. Heather Cass White has suggested that the future of Moore criticism depends on recognizing how two schools—“the scientific Moore” and “the Protestant Moore”—are ultimately united around “her pursuit of an aesthetically and ethically tenable ‘original’ poetics.” Moore’s attention to embryos suggests that she was also performing a study of origin itself.

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“THE Viper's Traffic-Knot”

Kahan¹

2008

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

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This essay charts a history and theory of celibacy. Redressing the scholarly and popular tendency to read celibacy as “closeted” homosexuality, I disarticulate the history of celibacy from the history of homosexuality. Despite Michel Foucault's much-recited lesson that “there is not one but many silences,” queer theory continues to read celibacy as the sign of another practice: homosexuality as “the love that dare not speak its name” or the “impossibility” of lesbian sex. Mapping celibacy across sexuality studies' major conceptual grids (homo/hetero, acts/identities, fantasy/practice, friendship/homosexuality), this essay attempts to articulate an affirmative content for celibacy. Reading Marianne Moore's last single volume of original work, Tell Me, Tell Me (1966), and Elizabeth Bishop's memoir of Moore, “Efforts of Affection” (1979), I elaborate a definition of celibate temporality in relation to recent work on queer temporality. Under both these rubrics, time is an ideological force that regulates sex: for example, the “old maid” is “late” according to a trajectory of normal sexual maturation that must pass through marriage. Moore's Tell Me, Tell Me offers a depathologized temporal model of celibacy by unfolding a life narrative that does not punish the “old maid” for being developmentally “late.” Celibacy is usually understood as pure potential: its future is unwritten, unacted on, leaving open the threatening possibility that celibacy can take on any sexual character. Rather than see the celibate as desiring something lacking or as embodying a disjunction between desire and practice, Moore's volume posits a coextensive desire and practice, suggesting a theory of celibate desire.

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“Frightening Disinterestedness”:The Personal Circumstances of Marianne Moore's “Marriage”

Cited by 18 publications

References 2 publications

Elizabeth Bishop and the Ethics of Correspondence

Elizabeth Bishop and the Ethics of Correspondence

“Words Cluster like Chromosomes”: Marianne Moore and Poetic-Genetic Origination

“THE Viper's Traffic-Knot”

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