[lit-ideas] Re: Hereabouts
- From: epostboxx@xxxxxxxx
- To: Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2016 02:04:40 +0200
On 10 Oct 2016, at 04:34, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
You suit* me well; for you can make me laugh,
nor are you blinded by the chaff
that every wind sends spinning from the rick.
You know to think, and what you think you speak
with much of Samson's pride and bleak
finality; and none dare bid you stop.
Pride suits you well, so strut, colossal bird.
No barnyard makes you look absurd;
your brazen claws are staunch against defeat.
*my note. Marianne Moore, Complete Poems has "sit" in lieu of "suit."
Fenton's text makes more sense …
Cf. Oxford Dictionary of English:
sit
verb
2• [with adverbial] fit a person well or badly as specified
suit
noun
1• a set of outer clothes made of the same fabric and designed to be worn
together
Either - or, better still, both taken together sit well with me!
Some pertinent passages from Donald Hall’s interview with Marianne Moore as
published in THE PARIS REVIEW (No. 26; Summer-Fall 1961):
1. "The accuracy of the vernacular! That’s the kind of thing I am interested
in, am always taking down little local expressions and accents. I think I
should be in some philological operation or enterprise, am really much
interested in dialect and intonations.”
(An Internet search of the phrase ‘sit me well’ generates enough ‘hits’ to
support the conjecture that the phrase has idiomatic legitimacy.)
2. "Annoyances abound. We should not find them lethal—a baffled printer’s
emendations for instance (my 'elephant with frog-colored skin’ instead of
'fog-colored skin,' and 'the power of the invisible is the invisible,' instead
of 'the power of the visible is the invisible') sounding like a parody on my
meticulousness; a ‘glasshopper' instead of a 'grasshopper.’”
(Either ‘sit’ or ‘suit’ could be a printer’s or editor’s interpolation which
‘we should not find lethal.’ — in other words, let the poem live in this new
form - or in both.)
And
3. "You accept certain modes of saying a thing. Or strongly repudiate things.
You do something of your own, you modify, invent a variant or revive a root
meaning.”
(No comment necessary.)
From Wikipedia:
" Moore revised many of her early poems in later life. Most of these revised
works appeared in the Complete Poems of 1967. Facsimile editions of the
theretofore out-of-print 1924 Observations became available in 2002. Since that
time, there has been no critical consensus about which versions are
authoritative."
This is after all the poet who coined the phrase “Utopian Turtletop” when asked
by a Ford executive for suggestions for an upcoming car model. (Discovering the
ironic ending of that search — i.e., the reason why “Utopian Turtletop” did not
join “Corvette”, “Thunderbird”, “DeSoto”, “Coronet”, “Viper”, and the many
other illustrious terms in the catalogue of American car model names — is left
as an exercise for the reader who is not familair with the story.)
Chris Bruce,
whose destiny has been to own
only motor vehicles with prosaic
model designations such as
“145” and “R100CS”, in
Kiel, Germany
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