“In This Told-Backward Biography”: Marianne Moore Against Survival in Her Queer Archival Poetry

Artists usually design their works to be preserved for future generations. In the same way, we observe previous artworks in order to understand contemporary cultural productions. This twofold dynamic, which ensures both the survival of our artistic patrimony and a continuity of its production, is not as endemic to art as often thought. Artists can choose to break with traditions, or can refuse to follow artistic conventions. The phrase “I’d rather die than …” is often exclaimed by the artistic outcasts of this world. Think of Roy Lichtenstein’s 1963 painting Drowning Girl, alternatively titled I Don’t Care! I’d Rather Sink, which is a thematic depiction of such an extreme refusal. Yet, I believe that there is one poet in particular who—surprisingly—enriches our engagement with these questions of artistic production, queerness, and survival.

Marianne Moore, feminist and queer poet, was a meticulous observer, an obsessive collector. Throughout her life, she believed that to feel deeply one had to see clearly, and she perceived the world with precision and critical acuity. Above all, she collected with equal dedication the written materials from that observed world. Gathering quotations from a diversity of sources, most often nonliterary or even quotidian, it was the rule rather than the exception that she twisted the quoted material’s original phrasing or meaning. Her experimental poetry contains catalogues of collected fragments and is representative of collage. It is a testimony, an archive of what she considered valuable and worthwhile for future remembrance. Yet, I argue, her poetic archive, which has a rather atypical design, testifies against the ideology of survival. Even though her poems have often been called “acts of survival,” Moore does not look at the past as a talisman for the future, and her queer archival poem-collections attest to anxiety over—rather than faith in—inheritance, continuity, and memory.¹

As the most impersonal and cagey of her already impersonally modernist generation, Moore figures as an exceptional representative of queer archival poetry. As I will indicate, hers is a poetics that opposes the legacy of the closet and queer literature’s subsequent urge to “come out,” “open the box,” and “break the silence” via personal testimonies. Her writings are not confessional—let alone autobiographical—and there is not even a critical consensus about Moore’s queerness in the first place. She never married, nor did she have any lesbian relationships, and her personal letters attest only to a couple of inconsiderable college crushes. However, I draw on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s definition of queer as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (1993, 8).

In multiple ways, Moore lives and writes according to this less rigid model of sexuality. Not until her mother’s death in 1947, when Moore was already sixty, had she ever lived on her own, or written a poem without her mother’s consent. During her childhood and continuing in later family correspondence, a playful game of animal nicknaming began, in which Marianne masculinized as “Gator,” “Basilisk,” “Weasel,” “Uncle (Fangs),” “Mouse,” or “Rat.” She would later adopt this purposefully cross gendering practice into her poetics. In her poetic menagerie of queer animals, the dragon is the most remarkable. Moore herself once admitted in “O, to Be a Dragon” that she would like to be one, “of silkworm size or immense,” preferably “almost invisible” but a decidedly “felicitous phenomenon” (1967, 177). This dragon, as a nongendered combatant, offers a clue to the eccentric woman who thrives behind the tame, reserved exterior. It is this visible-invisible and gendered-nongendered discrepancy that contributes to Moore’s idiosyncratic queerness.

A “queer archive,” as established by Ann Cvetkovich, refers to any mechanism that collects information and is “composed of material practices that challenge traditional conceptions of history and understand the quest for history as a psychic need rather than a science” (2003, 268). Cvetkovich further argues that the queer...