Gabrielle Bellot Applies Marianne Moore's 'Feeling and Precision' to Trump Era Prose

Literary Hub shares Gabrielle Bellot's essay about her experience with poet Marianne Moore's essay "Feeling and Precision." In "Feeling and Precision," Moore outlines the ways that her "famously difficult" poems contain multitudinous feelings and emotion. Bellot explains that "Moore believed that poetry that was too on-the-nose failed to dip into that special, untranslatable realm in which our most complex feelings reside, that space in which our emotions live in the thrumming electric hum of atoms, or the world around stars. Difficulty, she believed, defined reality, at least in some moments. And I think it especially important, as 2019 begins, to remember the importance of complicated art." From there: 

An editor told me quite the opposite. In the Trump era, they informed me, writers of personal essays required extreme precision and bluntness. One should avoid having too many details, lyric language, and even seemingly tepid political references—the latter a bulwark against having conservative readers label their mainstream publication “fake news” or “biased” or a “libtard rag.” Be careful with your opinions and your stories; let them be simple and direct, but not too sharp that they might cut against the bad beliefs someone may hold, or force them to think too much.

Complexity and difficulty of many kinds—even political difficulty, by virtue of calling out the present administration for their lies—were dangerous, it seemed, since readers, according to this logic, were neither patient nor smart enough to process certain types of writing in the wake of the election—an insult both to writers and readers, regardless of one’s political affiliation. This editorial advice was brief, but it was also frightening, for it was an attempt to make difficult writing more palatable—even when it needs its unpleasant edges.

After the 2016 election, I wrote a response to it. Like many people, it hit me hard. The piece was published, then unceremoniously taken down the same day it was put up. It needed additional editing, apparently—which primarily meant that I had to pare down some of the more emotional parts, where I revealed that I had cried after learning the results (which I had). People needed to be cautious, the editor told me; everyone was on edge after the election. It went back up later that day. It was only in retrospect that I realized how weird this situation was. How the terror of being perceived as “fake news” had caused an editor to decide that my piece needed to have some of its sharper edges softened, so they would not upset conservative readers. How even the editor himself—and all the other editors involved—seemed genuinely upset that they had had to do this.

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