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Megan
Schoerke's fresh take on the "arch-modernist" Marianne
Moore (1887-1972) begins with an unusual source, Moore's letters to
her family held at Philadelphia's Rosenbach Library and Museum and now in
print. The correspondence shows to what degree Moore's poetry subverts and
parodies the elitism of High Modernism of the first half of the 20th Century,
and the heavy Presbyterianism in which her close-knit family was imbued.
Schoerke's research into Moore's process reveals her as a textual cousin
of Gertrude Stein, a radical poet whose experiments with "coding"
and encryption allow a doubleness of reception made singularly clear to
us for the first time.
Megan Schoerke is an assistant professor of English at San Francisco State
University. Her essay "Efforts of Affection: Marianne
Moore's Elegies for Her Mother" will be published in the forthcoming
Critical Essays on Marianne Moore, edited by Elizabeth
Gregory. We nabbed her in the nick of time, as she has recently won a year-long
writing fellowship at the Tanner Humanities Center at
the University of Utah.
May 8, 1998
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