Moore’s America 435primitive might legitimate American habits of plunder. Affectation and
rapacity might seem opposite vices (the one of civilization, the other of
savagery), but they are related in that both foreclose experience, and thus
“the genuine.” As the world becomes something to price and consume rather
than to experience and praise, purchasable simulations and traces of reality
supplant elusive, recalcitrant actuality. The transformation of nature into
marketplace is a fact of modernity, but the poet’s role is not in sales (it may
be in R&D). Of course poets traffic in representations. So Moore had to
negotiate a space for her art that was not incriminated by the case against the
fake, the simulated, the derivative—the case she herself was making about
the culture at large. Her reality would be a confluence of presences, images,
and uses that make up the changing phenomenal world.
America, Ezra Pound complained, was a “half-savage country,” and
Moore may well be echoing his phrase when she writes, in “New York” (CP,
54), of a “savage’s romance.” The Progressive era was beckoning America to
an out-of-date “romance”—a glamorous master narrative—of the
unconquered wilderness and inexhaustible resources. The unruliness of this
land, its expanse, its ingenuity, its untamed splendor, stimulated the
imagination. Those growing up in America at the turn of the century
indulged a taste for Cooper’s 1826 romance The Last of the Mohicans,with its
noble savages. “The hunter, like the savage whose place he filled, seemed to
select among the blind signs of the wild route, with a species of instinct,
seldom abating his speed, and never pausing to deliberate” (116). But as the
hunter displaces the savage, so the consumer displaces the hunter in our
cultural logic. The savages are the consumers as much as the objects of
romantic fantasy. Is the “New York” of the title and first line the modern city,
Moore’s new home, or the “wilderness” of the Catskills and the Adirondacks,
the site of American nostalgia for origin? The tone of the word “savage” is
as ambiguous as its referent and grammatical function. Moore had taught
“savages” at the Carlisle Indian School the “civilized” skills of commercial
accounting and stenography, and much of her poetry pays tribute to the
civilized behavior of so-called primitives. How civilized is a culture that
annexes land as it “needs the space for commerce,” that has appropriated
wildly within the last century? The commercial lust and reckless exploitation
of resources exhibited by an urban culture that can only imagine the
landscape in terms of its desire for consumption, can indeed seem savage.
Moore’s imagery demonstrates how fashion culture has adopted the very
ways of the savage. New York City is “peopled with foxes,” its population
parading the streets in pelts and wrapping themselves in “tepees of ermine.”
Moore’s reversible phrase—the “savage’s romance”—replaces the