Marianne Moore and the Archives

The essays that comprise Marianne Moore and the Archives: From Material Culture to the Digital Humanities use new archival research to explore the work of this major American modernist poet, providing innovative approaches to Moore’s career as it is documented in her archives. The volume represents new interpretations of archival materials found at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, where Moore’s collection is held. This volume is also the first that draws upon the Marianne Moore Digital Archive (MMDA), a major project that is digitizing, transcribing, and annotating Moore’s notebooks for use by scholars, students, and non-academics to make these materials more widely accessible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction | Jeff Westover

Primary Sources and Resources
1. Postmarks and Watermarks: Reading through Marianne Moore’s Letters | Aurore Clavier
2. The Literary Digest, Moore’s Scrapbooks, and the Archive of Mass Print | Bartholomew Brinkman
3. The Poet’s Room as Archive | Robert Volpicelli

Sex, Race, and Economics in the Archive
4. Out-Casts and Stay-at-Homes: Marianne Moore, Arthur Mitchell, and LGBTQ Migration in NYC | Elizabeth Gregory
5. “His Shield”: Prester John, Amphibiousness, and Black Fugitivity in Marianne Moore’s Haile Selassie Poems | Ryan Tracy
6. Archives of Excess and “power over the poor”: Marianne Moore’s “The Jerboa” | Linda Kinnahan

Archives and Meanings
7. “Possible Meaning”: Marianne Moore’s Anagogical Reading of Rilke, Herbert, La Fontaine, and Holderlin | Luke Carson
8. Questioning Categories to Revitalize Words: Meaning and Mottoes in the Poetry of Marianne Moore | Jeff Westover

Archive as Product and Process
9. “This is how the mind works”: Marianne Moore and the Aesthetics of Notebooks | Roger Gilbert
10. Robert Duncan, “On Reading Marianne Moore”: An Introduction | James Maynard

Teaching and Learning in the Digital Archive
11. The Marianne Moore Digital Archive: Teaching and Research | Claire Nashar

Origins of the Archive
12. An Interview with Patricia C. Willis | Karin Roffman