Modern American Poetry

Moore’s America 431

AMERICANVERSIONS OFPASTORAL

Moore’s famous remark about poetry applies as well to her view of America:

I, too, dislike it.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,

one discovers in

it, after all, a place for the genuine.

(CP, 36)

But what is the genuine? Could place itself provide the sense of the genuine,
an authentic connection to nature? Moore’s “genuine” surprisingly evades
the model of American naturalness, the always-future past of the “first idea”
in which materiality and meaning are perfectly joined as “nature’s nation.”
Moore’s America, whatever original nature it may retain, is a dense network
of imaginary gardens, some quite materially imposed on the landscape. If
nature is not simply aligned with the genuine, neither is culture simply
aligned with the artificial. But America isintricately bound up with landscape
and geography. The task of the poet is not to create nostalgic myths of
contact and presence, but to make a place within this modern condition for
a lived relation to the world.
Moore knew America’s landscape in modern terms, through its
commercial and technological advances, its conquest of time and space,
through the language of advertising and the images of fashion and
entertainment. These were for her as much a part of the landscape as were the
mountains and rivers that suggested to English settlers an untainted Eden. As
she shows in “People’s Surroundings,” Moore knew America as well in its
local and domestic arrangements, in the diversity of its styles, “the deal table
compact with the wall,” Shaker simplicity as well as the “Sèvres china and the
fireplace dogs” (CP, 55) of Gilded Age extravagance. She admired efficiency
and durability, as well as the ingenuity that could produce a “paper so thin that
‘one thousand four hundred and twenty pages make one inch,’” but she noted
with implicit distaste the flair for mass production with its “vast indestructible
necropolis / of composite Yawman-Erbe separable units” (55). The idea of the
genuine in America could not be reduced to single species, and would have to
accommodate a dense and various life, in which nature and culture were
inextricably bound together. But there were two tendencies of American life
that inhibited the genuine: derivativeness and rapacity. Rapacity has the
tendency to destroy what it is trying to possess. Derivatives are simulations
that bypass experience and present themselves as the real thing.