Yesterday we had several bits of Marianne Moore news–these things tend to come in groups. First, we got our copy of Cristanne Miller’s new book, Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Else Lasker-Schuler, published by U. Michigan Press. Then Vivian Pollack sent us an offprint of her recent article on Sylvia Plath and Moore , called “Moore, Plath, Hughes, and ‘The Literary Life,'” published in American Literary History. We haven’t had a chance to read them yet, but look forward to it–in the meantime, it strikes us for the thousandth time that a) without researchers and readers, our collections can’t tell any stories at all, and b) the need to take care of and present the materials too often gets in the way of spending time with them and learning from them.
A call also came in yesterday from a would-be researcher who wants to know more about Moore’s time teaching at the Carlisle Indian School. There’s a lot here about it–especially in Moore’s letters to her brother from that time–but fortunately the researcher had also been in touch with Carlisle’s Jeff Wood, Moore scholar and bookstore owner, who knows more about Moore’s time in Carlisle than anyone else.