Modern American Poetry

(^438) Bonnie Costello
plunder, / but ‘accessibility to experience.’” One would not think of
scholastic philosophy as being accessible. But access is not ownership and
experience is not simplicity. Moore’s poem imitates this rigor in its
suspended syntax, which takes in increasingly complex clauses, full of
conceptually demanding details. In the end Moore does reduce the
wilderness to a phrase, but it is a phrase that points beyond itself to a depth
and density that cannot be fathomed. The poem, like scholastic philosophy,
becomes its own wilderness (rather than an image of the wilderness) in the
concatenation of phrases. And here we return to the paradox that initiates the
poem. For if one aim of “New York” is to establish the distance between
nature’s wealth and culture’s desire, another aim is to refuse the opposition
of nature and culture. The wilderness and scholastic philosophy, like real
toads and imaginary gardens, become enfolded in a denser reality, a greater
wilderness, which is always near and accessible, but also remote, requiring no
special charter or protection from the accretions of commerce. One need not
travel to the Adirondacks or the Catskills to visit it. This reality, the subject
of all Moore’s poems, is minutely particular, but “has never been confined to
one locality.” It can be experiened or ignored; it cannot be occupied.
In “New York” Moore largely “stands outside and laughs” when
confronted with the wilderness, as she wrote in her first version of the poem.
In “An Octopus” (CP, 71–76) she has at heart our getting lost. While “New
York” catalogued the modes of plunder, “An Octopus” tries to convey the
immediate experience of the wilderness. It does so, paradoxically, by drawing
attention to our mediations. Moore presents a reality that is never
circumscribed, which cannot be reduced to an image or a use, and cannot be
mastered by a single perspective. She does not so much describe reality as
give us an analogous experience in language. She draws a map in order to get
us lost. “An Octopus” may well have been inspired by a map—an aerial map,
“deceptively reserved and flat,” of Mt. Rainier and its eight-armed glacier,
included in a park pamphlet. But disorientation is the rule in the expedition
that follows the title. The relation of land and sea becomes ambiguous; the
poem compares the lowest point of the continent—the life of the sea—to the
highest. There are no stable coordinates here:
an octopus
of ice. Deceptively reserved and flat,
it lies “in grandeur and in mass”
beneath a sea of shifting snow-dunes;
The map can only lie in trying to configure the “grandeur” in which the