When I was 14, a friend invited me to stay a week with his family on the Outer Banks. What I remember most vividly about that week is a book. The book belonged to my friend’s mother, though I don’t remember ever seeing her actually reading it. Still, the book did change tables in the living room, so I assume she did. This book produced a commotion in me that I can best describe by saying that the book seemed to offer an invitation to luxuriate.

At first, this copy of The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967) offered a physical appeal. The paper had a heavy, textured quality (something I learned much later to identify as laid paper), and simply running a finger across the page was pleasing. And then there was all that white space: what extravagant wastefulness!

I might have zeroed in on “Poetry,” one of Moore’s best-loved poems, as exemplifying such luxury of blank space.

“Poetry”

I, too, dislike it.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one dis-

covers in

it, after all, a place for the genuine.

 

After these words, a snowy field flows to the bottom of the page, broken only by the page number at bottom left. The page is both too small to contain the poem (the long second line has to be bent back on itself) and much too large for it. This visual isolation draws one in, but one quickly discovers a flip side: the prickly quality of the verse itself keeps understanding at bay. The two are bundled together: the invitation to luxuriate is also an invitation to take your time being confused.

Moore finds two ways to derogate poetry in a mere three lines. What’s the difference between “dislike” and “contempt”? I take “dislike” to be an everyday affair. “I dislike ironing my shirts, but somebody has to do it.” “I dislike so-and-so at work, but we can manage to work together.” Dislike is something one lives with, something one manages. But “contempt” is considerably stronger—it pushes away. Contempt denies the possibility of a shared space. We “hold” someone in contempt, from above, as if with tongs. And yet, disliking poetry, Moore says she reads it with contempt.

The difficulty that is distinctly modernist: like Eliot’s, to take just one example, Moore’s poetry is studded with quotations and allusions you need footnotes to understand. For example, Moore’s poem “Marriage” is such a dense weave of quotations that it is very unclear what Moore is actually saying about this important topic. Still, all this was—and is—part of the incomprehensible commotion: the pleasure of not understanding.

Perhaps I should describe the feeling more strongly: my failure to understand was a kind of humbling. The “perfect contempt” directed at poetry, its spotlight of scorn, spills over to take in the reader as well. We are invited in—“I, too, dislike it,” Moore writes (emphasis mine), as if we were in cahoots—but also quickly shown the door. Moore’s poems play hard to get.

Moore’s point, I think, is that you have to read poetry to dislike it; poetry is, for some of us, an everyday annoyance. Those who never pick up a book of poetry may be indifferent or dismissive, they may mock the very idea of poetry, but they can’t really be said to dislike poetry, much less have a purified, a perfected, contempt for something they do not encounter.

But if we’re reading poetry at all, we are already luxuriating, dawdling in a space in which love and contempt—for the poem, for poetry itself, for ourselves—are inseparable.

The poet writing now who meditates most insistently on poetry’s combination of the alluring and the contemptible is Diane Seuss. For years she has been subjecting inherited poetic forms—sonnet, villanelle, ballad, and so on—to a rather violent form of roughhousing. Her latest book, titled Modern Poetry (which may be an echo of Moore’s famous poem), tells us how she came to poetry from an unlikely place, how hopeless she really thinks it is, but also how, in the end, she’s not sure she has anything else of greater value. Here is the opening poem:

“Little Fugue State”

Far have I wandered not knowing

the names of where,

long have I woven this dress

of human hair, here

I have pitched my tent, here and there,

not knowing my name,

or where, not even the color of my hair

nor why

it tangles so, now where my comb goes,

nor where my brush,

how far I wandered through underbrush,

into onrush,

nor where my body was, nor what it called

itself, nor the nature

of my calling, nor what my scrawling meant,

not that scrawl then,

nor this scrawl here, nor what a self

could be,

nor what a bee could be, nor breath,

nor poetry,

this dog I’ve walked and walked

The poem displays the gratuitousness of poetizing: its submission to sound and beat, its jury-rigged quality. We follow Seuss as she adds line to line as rhyme suggests (from “called” to “calling” to “scrawling”), and as she drops in bits and bobs of language that come in handy, whether those are trivial phrases (“here and there”) or pompous clichés (“here / I have pitched my tent,” “the nature / of my calling”). The dog is being walked to death even as we watch.

Many of the poems in Modern Poetry tell stories of Seuss’s education in poetry and the homeliness of that apprenticeship. In “My Education” she tells us:

What I know of literature, of history, is spotty.

I was a poor student, disengaged from the things

I didn’t need, and I knew what I needed,

and that the time to get it was now.

When I needed Keats, I got him. I read enough

to get the point, then tuned into his ghost.

I read most of Joseph Conrad, having figured out

that I could find some things repulsive and still

require them for my project. My project

was my life. There was no vision or overarching

plan. There was only foraging for supplies,

many of which were full of worms or covered

in dust, like apples on the orchard floor,

and furniture junked on the side of the road.

There’s the luscious Keats, and then there’s the “repulsive” Joseph Conrad. Like Moore, Seuss sees that the alluring and the unlikable are bundled together. But what makes Seuss’s dislike of poetry different is the reduction of both Keats and Conrad to the status of “supplies.” Moore’s “perfect contempt” can seem fussy and genteel; Seuss’s judgment of poetry is just as severe but comes from a blinder need: her “supplies” are “not to be displayed but hoarded, / like canned goods in a storm cellar. / Go back for the garbage and deal with it.” Poetry as survivalism.

A “monody” is a poem of grief, a form that Seuss salvages only by turning it inside out like a glove:

“Monody”

Kindness, like enthralling

madness after

shock

treatments, is first to go.

In the past, I snapped

the beans’ spines, aware

that something died

so I could thrive.

But this emptiness

makes even a nightingale

consumable. As for

the song and red tailfeathers,

take them, here.

I just don’t care.

To grieve is a dilettantish

stand-in for the subject

of my grief. What I’m saying

is the verb

is a canned performance

of the missing noun.

Or I’m saying

I don’t know how

to feel anymore.

Use metaphor,

but don’t adhere to her.

As more than once

I was used but not adored.

The “dilettantish” song of Keats’s nightingale may feel disposable, as pointless as “red tailfeathers.” Still, for Seuss, poetry nevertheless continues to demand adherence and adoration, both of which will be—must be—repudiated. And yet these attachments are not entirely destroyed but remain audible: Seuss’s five final lines spin a sonic thread—anymore, metaphor, adhere, more, adored—that binds us to a genuineness of sentiment, hiding in an envelope of contempt.

For Seuss, Keats is the name for the contemptible, yet necessary, luxury of poetry. The very last lines of the book find her clinging to this necessity:

“Romantic Poet”

You would not have loved him,

my friend the scholar

decried. He brushed his teeth,

if at all, with salt. He lied

and rarely washed

his hair. Wiped his ass

with leaves or with his hand.

The top of his head would have barely

reached your tits. His pits

reeked, as did his deathbed.

 

But the nightingale, I said.

The power of that final riposte—Seuss’s refusal to give it all up utterly—lies in its odd combination of the feeble and the implacable.

Poetry may be a mangy cur nearly walked to death, but it’s not dead yet and it demands constant attention from Seuss. It’s a responsibility. But it’s also a dream of negligence and luxury (an invitation to luxuriate), as the poem “Little Song” makes clear:

You can’t stay vigilant and remain alive.

Or infinite vigilance is a kind of death.

Or you can’t be present tense.

That is, tense about the present.

Here, you said in school. Present. But you were not.

Your mind back home eating sweet elephants from a jar.

Or placing Thumbelina in a milkweed car.

 

What luxury, to think of milkweed cars

and cookie jars and turning lights on in the dark

or lights off in the light or dreams of dropping

vigilance or memories of negligence, heedless

in your posh knee socks, your ritzy lamb, your

lush pop beads, your lilac jam, your breathless,

deathless, feckless little song.

A “little song” is a sonnetto—a sonnet—and, sure enough, Seuss gives us both the 14 lines and the vaunts of “deathlessness” such poems often make. But the pleasure bomb is in the “negligence” and “luxury” of putting Thumbelina in a milkweed car and the gaudy nonsensicalities of the ending: the “posh knee socks, your ritzy lamb, your lush pop beads, your lilac jam.”

Despite the ravishments of this little party, the judgment of poetry is never lost to view entirely. It may be “breathless and deathless,” sure; but poetry is also “feckless.”

Each of Seuss’s poems manifests an energy of invention, in the face of each poem’s unique failing to answer the world’s failing of her. She can be angry and dismissive. She verges on contempt from time to time. But mostly she writes her poetry from the more intimate space of everyday dislike, the rub and stain that accompanies any attempt to put Thumbelina in a milkweed car. Still, despite it all, Seuss’s poems offer an invitation to luxuriate: embracing heedlessness, “dropping” vigilance, taking pleasure in the gritty and the jejune.

Perhaps we should accept such an invitation. Our vigilance feels so helpless and hopeless, anyway. Perhaps poetry is the only kind of uselessness we require. We might call it futile, if only we had something better to do with beauty.