Sunday, January 9, 2011

Wolf Woolf (plug)

Friend and ex-poet extraordinaire Kit Wallach -- now a schoolteacher in Rhode Island -- has been generating some wonderful and weird music lately. (Btw this was the latest occasion for the genius-to-maniac diagram.) Her latest, "A lowly thing, a lonely thing," riffs on that Marianne Moore poem "What are years?" -- his mighty singing / says, satisfaction is a lowly / thing -- and was, I should like to think, partly inspired by an old Moore parody I wrote in college titled "What are bears?"

Tangentially, Moore did not like the question mark:
Miss Moore told me that she did not want the question mark after the title. “In my ‘What Are Years’ the printers universally have insisted on putting a question mark after the title: ‘What Are Years?’ It’s not that at all! It’s a meditation: ‘What Are Years. What Are Years.’ You’re thinking about it, not asking anyone to come and answer you. But they won’t have it that way.”

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