The October edition of POETRY featured an annoying sequence of petulances entitled, collectively, “Antagonisms,” none more excruciating than earnest Eavan Boland’s cautious, provisional confession of failure to bond with Marianne Moore, who I’m sure she resents and detests. (The name Moore, of course, means Black, but the Moores were Orange, Baptist or Episcopal Irish; I don’t know about Boland, but Eavan smells like the rainy wind of the Gaelic revival). After throwing up her hands in decorous, humble-pie, obeisant lament, Boland knifes the titanic and iconic modernist for “a relentless ironization of the persona,” complains, Boland in propia peronae, “At a time when I was stumbling through my own worries about poetic voice and disclosure, I took no comfort from this. When I read a Moore poem I felt–which I never did with Bishop, that I was being kept a distance, warned away from feeling and expression.” How the world turns–around Boland. She means Elizabeth Bishop, Moore’s Nova Scotia-cum-Bostonian epigone, a blander, more North American version of Moore’s biting cheddar. Boland goes on to complain by faint praise that Moore’s “shimmer and cleverness” promoted an unpleasantly arctic transformation of “argument into epigram,” but then Boland offers an epigram of her own: “I still feel, as I felt then, that irony is the automatic pilot of modernism.”

Ouch, that hurt. But Moore retaliated preemptively, expressing her thinking about vulnerable, literalist women like Boland, anti-intellectual feeling mongerers, in an oft-anthologized poem called “The Fish,” though because of its opulent and stunning prettiness, the poem is as tirelessly and assiduously misunderstood as women themselves. The poem isn’t about the fish, nor the “turquoise sea of their bodies,” but the more (Moore!) awful marriage of water forcing a “wedge of iron through the iron edge of (a) cliff,” with the ensuant eruption of traditional, symbolic and celebratory wedding confetti: “stars, pink rice-grains, ink-bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like green lilies, and submarine toadstools,” tokens and totems of fertility, all of which “slide each on the other.” The object, that which is unmoved by all this apocalyptic copulation, the iron-edged cliff and “defiant edifice,” which is Moore’s subject as well as her trope of subjectivity, survives littered with sunken breasts and moribund vaginas: “lack of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and hatchet strokes; the chasm-side is dead.” And Moore concludes with a punishing locker-room truth, affirming snidely:

Repeated
      evidence has proved that it can live
           on what can not revive
                its youth. The sea grows old in it.

Punitive and snide, but not negative. Cognescenti allow shrimp to cure for hours on a warm windowsill prior to consumption, or as Napoleon telegrammed Josephine after defeating the British navy all across the Caribbean, “Home in three days. Don’t wash!” Such irony as Moore’s and Bonaparte’s conveys the hideous joy which energizes the Truth’s dichotomies, and Being’s wrenching and rewarding dialectics. Literalists like Boland, who Moore derides throughout her work, seek safe harbor for “feeling and expression,” and imagine a dreamworld of bedrock values and honest simplicity. Hating nuance and irony, they invest their hopes in inchoate, insight resistant sincerity, echoing Shakespeare’s proto-Republican advising his college-bound son: “To thy own self be true,” and so forth. Or echoing the political columnist, George Will, who recently extolled some conservative British writers’ endorsement of Sir Lewis Namier: “What matters most about political ideas is the underlying emotions, the music to which ideas are a mere libretto, often of very inferior quality.” Or echoing William Safire’s malicious, cunning but pointless deconstruction of John Kerry’s foreign policy positions as Neo-Neo-Con, in the N.Y. Times following the initial Bush-Kerry debate, the one in which George W. stood behind the podium pointing his toe at the floor, not as if angry and determined to fight, but like Mercury preparing for flight, or as if exposed and embarrassed. Or echoing the President’s own word-games in which he portrays Kerry as supporting Saddam, reckless taxation and philosophic defeatism. Irony isn’t a word-game. It’s the fearful embrace of cognition’s contraries and ambiguities, an honest alternative to sincerity’s sentimental inner faith, a hoax and, indeed, paradoxical reliance on verbal casuistry to authenticate inner and higher, invisible values and feelings. Occult conservatism has comforted American academicians for several decades under the erudite, deliberately unintelligible auspices of Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, and Jacques Derrida, who was quoted in an obituary appraisal by Edward Rothstein, also in The N. Y. Times on the theme of the September 11 th deaths in Manhattan:

We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy–a name, a number–points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about.

–Philosophy in a Time of Terror, Jacques Derrida