Marianne Moore in the Village Voice

During my happy days working in the arts department of the Village Voice, I discovered this previously unknown letter by Marianne Moore in one of the paper’s earliest issues:

To the Jasmine's Kitten contest editor:

Dear Madam:

I think I should have him because I think her [sic] would like to have me. But if I win him, please give him to Mr. Balaban, or his sister, since I have not a yard, a tree, or a fence.

Marianne Moore
Cumberland Street, Brooklyn

Fully comprehending the letter's timelessness, I failed to take down the date, though it must have fallen between 1955, when the Voice was founded, and 1966, when Moore left Cumberland Street. I did record that the ever-quirky Voice editors were holding a kitten contest, and that “Mr. Balaban” was a writer for the paper.

Such a rich missive deserves scholarly attention. Dr. Patricia Willis--Moore expert and a former curator at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library--wrote: “I suspect someone rather fancied getting her name in the paper. By the late 50s, she was becoming New York's pet poet--witness large photo shoots for Life and Look.” The 1953 Life article, called “Life Goes on a Zoo Tour with a Famous Poet,” opines that “more than almost anything Miss Moore loves animals.” Photos show her feeding swans, cradling monkeys, and maintaining an admirable calm while an elephant unfurls his trunk above her head.

But what of Moore and cats? Her 1920 poem "Peter" reveals a complex fondness for felines, comparing a neighbor's cat to seaweed, eels, and mice. (One thinks--I do, anyway--of Christopher Smart's  "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey," a triumph among cat poems.)

Willis added, “There is a cat in a jingle she wrote on commission for the Lead Pencil Manufacturers Association in honor of Pencil Week, 1967.

Velvet mat
is my cat.

Beaver fur
makes my hat.

Our best pencils
write like that.

"It makes my skin crawl and I made sure it didn't go into any of her published works. The first stanza is from the second verse of a childrens' singing game, 'Widdy-Widdy-Wucky.'"