Visiting the International Cryptozoology Museum With Marianne Moore on the Mind of Jacquelyn Ardam

Scholar Jacquelyn Ardam, Visiting Assistant Professor in English at Colby College, writes for BLARB about The International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, which she visited recently with her friend Angela. Mostly she is thinking about Marianne Moore: "What matters to Moore is place, is space," she writes. More:

I tell Angela that I want to bring my students to this museum, and explain how I might frame it for them using terms from all the critical theory I read when I was their age. I tell her about Baudrillard, about the simulacrum, about copies of things that don’t exist. Cryptids as signifiers without signifieds. Absence. Presence. The cryptid as Lacan’s objet petit a, the object of desire that is structurally unattainable, the fantasy object, the object that matters less than the desiring drive itself. Angela, who studies social psychology, looks at me a bit askance, as she always does when I start talking about psychoanalysis.

This museum is a budding critical theorist’s dream, which is to say, my dream circa 2003, when I started taking my English major very seriously, when I started wanting to be a professor. These days, my research and writing are more historical, less theoretical. It turns out I prefer things I can locate, can hold. And in some kind of attempt to hold this museum of nonexistent objects, Angela and I take more selfies with these copies of things that don’t exist.

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After my students and I read the short version of Moore’s “Poetry,” we go back and read the long version. This version features one of my favorite statements of poetics; Moore writes that she wants poems to be “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”

Find the full piece at BLARB.