Here’s a poet I don’t believe I’ve ever encountered before.
Marianne Moore plays with line breaks in a lot of her poems. Here are a couple you may enjoy —
Talisman by Marianne Moore
Under a splintered mast,
torn from ship and cast
near her hull,
a stumbling shepherd found
embedded in the ground,
a sea-gull
of lapis lazuli,
a scarab of the sea,
with wings spread—
curling its coral feet,
parting its beak to greet
men long dead.
***
***
The Fish by Marianne Moore
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices—
in and out, illuminating
the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,
pink
rice-grains, ink-
bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.
All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice—
all the physical features of
ac-
cident—lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is
dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.
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I, too, dislike it.
https://poets.org/poem/poetry
I appreciate the imagery, but dislike it as poetry. I would call it “poetry” – sentences with line breaks that provide end of line rhymes, and the typesetting makes it look like it’s poetry.
It doesn’t flow. I mentally stutter while reading it. I think it’s the line breaks, but I haven’t had the mental capacity to sit down and analyze it.
I’m having a kind of different reaction. I sort of enjoy the weird lack of rhythm, though in, say, an epic, I expect it would get old. But I don’t much appreciate the tone of lines like:
All external marks of abuse are present on this defiant edifice — all the physical features of accident …
and so on. I thought these were interesting, but I wouldn’t necessarily seek out more by this poet. If I were actually picking a poem to analyze in a class, though, I might pick something like this.
I’d glazed out before I got to those particular lines, but looking again at the poems, tonight, everything in those poems is grim, isn’t it?