'Just looking' at the everyday: Marianne Moore's exotic modernism

Bazin, Victoria (2006) 'Just looking' at the everyday: Marianne Moore's exotic modernism. Modernist Cultures, 2 (1). pp. 58-69. ISSN 2041-1022

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Abstract

The article presents a new reading of Moore’s poem, ‘Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain’. Bazin’s research for the article, funded by the AHRC, drew upon only recently discovered archival resources of the Rosenbach Museum and Library, and hence, resources previously unused in analyses of Moore’s work. The paper therefore makes a significant contribution to understanding of the poem. Bazin used a particularly illuminating entry from one of Moore’s diaries, to suggest that the poem itself is based on her mother’s description of a Chinese plate that she saw in a window display for the Pierce Arrow motor car. Acknowledging its status as commoditised object through its textual sources, ‘Nine Nectarines’, Bazin argues, questions the opposition between the every day and art itself through its method of composition, drawing as it does from the fragments of everyday life.

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