I feel like I haven’t told the full Moxley story unless I quote one of her sublime lyrics. My favorite book of her “lush and intricate” period is The Sense Record and Other Poems. Its quasi-19th century diction, which manages to be ultra-contemporary, is a glorious vehicle to capture the wending of an acute consciousness. The poems are gorgeous objects, beyond their content, and their content is stunningly complex and therefore bracing and healthy and uncomfortable, at first, to read. (As Moxley says in her “Fragments of a Broken Poetics”: “Poems demand a concentrated lingering to which we are unaccustomed. This is why they cause discomfort. When we stand still in one place, attempting to document and respect the details, we feel as vulnerable as a small creature in an open field beneath avian predators.”) Their combination of ornamentation and commitment to truth-rendering makes them strange, but they also feel like artifacts, something you unearth and recognize at once.
In honor of this blog, here’s one from The Sense Record and Other Poems:
The Best American Poetry
We are not chickadees
on a limb
–William Carlos Williams
Nothing matters that is not made to matter,
and in this indiscriminate climate
thoughts of the future afford small comfort.
The soul, over which no law adjudicates,
takes of its sustenance in simple ways.
As tonight the indifferent merry dancers
look thoughtful and responsive lighting up
the Northern sky, and the morning chickadee,
a reckless bird, delighted by his morsel,
still sings before the black-husked seed.
In quaint contrast we stand inside this dreadful
state of reason, unable to couch in art,
or grief—that profiteer of solipsism—
the quandary of nerve it takes to daily
actuate the truth, whether for itself alone
or for this year’s unscrupulous scaffold.
What difference does it make, when there are those
who speak contemptuous words with joy, as if
convenient nihilism could be transformed
to hearth and home, unfeigned intent discarded
and embraced at will, as laughing fingers
fumble to adjust the “mask of anarchy”?
Only in righteous judgement of the old
will new authority be born, whose errors,
once passed into law, will not admit confusion.
Perhaps a lifetime of squirreled dilemmas
does yield a moment of peace, but oh how
lovely to feel, with all our faculties,
that we have chosen—and that the rhetoric works.
There will always be some outskirt missionary,
trapped in a parable of motives, poised
to invent divine purpose, and to the heart
bound by isolation and despair
the night sky’s luminous phenomenon
will look to be all of a piece. But we,
unlike the bird, need not, in the ferment
of small objectives, desert material
purpose, we can direct the equitable
increments, though they provide no guarantee
the outcome shall be just.