Exhibition curated by Patricia C. Willis, Ph.D. Student in English Literature.
The thirty-three poems in the exhibition were chosen to illustrate the poet's transformation of visual images into poetic form. Objects and figures in the photographs anf newspaper clippings she carefully saved reappear in these poems, sometimes many years after she first saw them, sometimes combined with other images. The sketches that she made of a small desert rat at the Museum of Natural History in New York, for example, became the basis for her poem "The Jerboa." Even her mechanical crow, a tin wind-up toy, that appears in "To Victor Hugo of My Crow Pluto," survives-because Marianne Moore "kept everything." Moore's process of poetic creation comes to life in this exhibit, which presents the viewer with the images she used, her notebooks, and the multicolored underlinings she designed to distinguish rhyme patterns. This exhibit, on loan from the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, PA. was curated by Patricia C. Willia, Curator of Literature and the Marianne Moore Archives, and a prolific Moore scholar.