♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: Support for "Poetry in America" provided by: ANNOUNCER: The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, supporting original research and public understanding of science, technology, and economics.

♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: Additional support provided by the Dalio Foundation.

And by the Poetry Foundation, an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.

And from Deborah Hayes Stone and Max Stone.

JORIE GRAHAM: The Fish wade through black jade.

It felt like a dive into a dark water, maybe an evening dive, when the light's going away and it's just starting to get really dark and you're not sure whether you're doing a night dive now or a day dive.

AL GORE: Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash-heaps; opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.

The barnacles which encrust the side of the wave, cannot hide there for the submerged shafts of the sun, split like spun glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness into the crevices-- in and out, illuminating the turquoise sea of bodies.

LAURE KATZ: "Sun split like spun glass."

That to me, that line kind of created the imagery for me of what it's like to be underwater.

GRAHAM: The water drives a wedge of iron through the iron edge of the cliff; whereupon the stars, pink rice-grains, ink-bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like green lilies, and submarine toadstools slide each on the other.

GORE: Well, she's seeing the cornucopia of life.

Just incredible how all of the elements interact with one another, all of the different life forms relate to one another.

♪ ♪ All external marks of abuse are present on this defiant edifice-- all the physical features of ac-cident, lack of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and hatchet strokes, these things stand out on it; the chasm-side is... dead.

PETER SELIGMANN: And what I see is the chasm, or as I see as that cliff, that edge that's been cut by water.

And it's a rock that's been carved by the elements.

It is very powerful what she's trying to convey, and so the forces are both creation, destruction, light, darkness, terrestrial, marine.

GORE: Repeated evidence has proved that it can live on what can not revive its youth.

The sea grows old in it.

ELISA NEW: Over her career, the poet Marianne Moore wrote dozens of poems about animals and the complex environments in which they evolve.

A biology major in college, a librarian, a typing teacher, and a magazine editor, Moore emerged in the early 20th century as one of those Modernist innovators who used abstraction to awaken perceptions of color, form, and the dynamic interplay of elements.

Moore liked fact, and she disliked the poetry that indulged human ego, romantic feeling, or sentiment.

♪ ♪ Nature was the poet's guide, Moore stressed, and the artist's role was to evolve utterly new and wondrous creations, but out of the real materials of the world.

Precision and clarity, not overflow of emotion, were the modern poet's proper tools.

GRAHAM: Marianne Moore was reacting to a long moment in poetry where you could just use whatever came at you from the natural world to turn it to service for your own emotions.

In this case, there's an attempt to encounter it and have it guide you to emotions you don't necessarily know you have.

NEW: To explore Moore's poem "The Fish," I invited some keen observers of the natural world to read the poem with me: six ocean scientists from Conservation International; Vice President and Nobel Prize- winning environmentalist Al Gore; and the poet Jorie Graham.

I think it's important to remember that this poem is in a book called "Observations," and the idea of observing is a very different idea than looking or thinking.

So the very first word and the first line she tells you is "wade," which is a very slow action.

And she's saying if you're going to wade into this observation, you're gonna take it step by step.

NEW: And you're going to encounter resistance.

GORE: I love to scuba dive.

I've experienced fish, and their movements are defined by the things they're going around and through.

And it's almost a wading-like process.

- That there's a slow motion... You know, if you go really deep into the ocean, there are fish that basically look like they're walking on their, on the pectoral fins.

They're not elegant fish, and when they're on the bottom, as they walk through, I get that sense of exactly what she's describing here.

GRAHAM: "They wade through black jade."

Look at what you have to do as a reader to undergo that line.

You know that she's describing a certain color of water.

It's water.

It's not jade.

Jade is one of the hardest stones that exist.

It's also just water.

And a reader coming from another planet would say to us, "They're wading through black jade?"

GORE: "Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, "one keeps adjusting the ash-heaps opening and shutting itself like an injured fan."

SANJAYAN: The inkiness of water came through to me.

SELIGMANN: Crow-blue, that's dark.

That's rich, that's deep, and, I mean...

I used to take my glasses off to look at images just to be able to see the colors and the patterns as opposed to the detail.

NEW: The science-inspired observation Moore practices attends closely to characteristics like color, shape, and texture, and it leads naturally to Modernist abstraction.

Considered simply as color, jade, crows, and mussel shells are all the same, and the perception of their resemblance jars and stimulates the senses.

GRAHAM: Then you're gonna be stuck with the troubling act of one thing being so like another, that you simultaneously do many different things.

To know that your rational intellect says, "It's not jade, it's not crow blue," but your imagination says, "Yes, it is, I can see that," your senses are what's awakened.

How hard is one thing?

How soft is another thing?

So she's trying to get you to both observe, but also to undergo the practice of observing so that you can be transformed.

NEW: Perception is also disturbed by the way the poem is cut into stanzas, the way its syntax suffers sudden interruptions, as, at the end of the first stanza, a simile is sliced in two halves, as if literally injured.

The observer wading into this poem discovers that just as water, light, stone, and organic bodies all interact, shaping and eroding one another, so, too, do Moore's sentences, stanzas, lines, and rhymes interact to form a dynamic Modernist collage.

In the erosive onrush of sentences, we may even miss the chiseled rhymes that define the poem's right-hand edge, but the small elements prove mighty.

Each syllable in the poem literally counts.

GRAHAM: "The Fish" is a poem in syllabics, which means only the syllables in each line are counted.

And each stanza has one syllable in the first line then three, nine, six, and eight, like a machine cutting the sentences at very arbitrary-feeling places.

I read it on my phone, so I'm sitting there reading it stanza by stanza on my phone.

And then when I got in to work, I printed it out.

And I, "Oh, look at how, the way, the words..." I didn't look at the form of the poem until this morning, and I just sort of smiled to myself and thought, thought, "Well, that's pretty clever."

GORE: Each stanza resembles all of the others and each has a definitive form that is perhaps like a fish, perhaps like a wave.

Throughout the poem, you see these, up and down, and up and down.

She's mimicking the ocean.

It's something that is actually moving the fish.

It's not only the fish swimming.

It's some other forces, like waves or currents.

GRAHAM: These are also waves of sound.

If you have a syllabic thing, you could probably say that that wave would move with a frequency through water, not unlike the way the fish wade through it.

SANJAYAN: "The barnacles which encrust the sides of the wave cannot hide there."

POLSENBERG: "For the submerged shafts of the sun, "split like spun glass, "move themselves with spotlight swiftness into the crevices"... GORE: "In and out, illuminating the turquoise sea of bodies."

NEW: What happens to our idea of a wave when we think of barnacles encrusting its side?

We are used to seeing barnacles when they have attached themselves to a hard surface.

POLSENBERG: Barnacles do settle on the hard surfaces, or the soft surfaces-- they, they also go on whales and other animals-- but they do settle, so, encrust is hard, but the barnacles as larvae, to get where they live most of their life, do ride the waves.

GORE: Well, it's not that unusual to see waves close to shore illuminate in the side of the wave whatever detritus or life forms the wave has picked up, and they're displayed on the side of the wave.

POLSENBERG: In science, in real life, the barnacles aren't going to attach to the wave, but they are going to attach to the side of the cliff, and the wave and the cliff are going to share sides at some point.

And as the wave goes by, they put out their tentacles.

The animals that live within put out their tentacles and take the edge of the wave.

NEW: What is hard?

What is soft?

Everything changes in relation to everything else.

Barnacles find the hard side of waves, but use their soft inner parts to pierce those waves.

Light, hard as glass, pierces water, but is itself split open, refracted to become turquoise-- a gorgeous color, but also, like jade, a stone.

And thus the poem resumes, now with water hard as iron.

GRAHAM: "The water drives a wedge of iron "through the iron edge of the cliff; "whereupon the stars, "pink rice-grains, ink-bespattered jelly-fish, "crabs like green lilies, and submarine toadstools, slide each on the other."

How we went from that iron wedge, describing the ocean water as iron, and then to the soft-bodied, like the pink-rice grains.

And it just got soft in that part and I actually found my voice lighten when I read that soft-bodied part.

GRAHAM: This is the place where, all of a sudden, the poem rhetorically breaks and it goes, "Whereupon..." And it's so beautiful, when it breaks.

- Yeah.

And it breaks, "Whereupon the stars..." ♪ ♪ SELIGMANN: You know, when I read it, "Whereupon the stars, pink rice-grains," and I was thinking the stars, and I was thinking about first, this is nighttime.

Then I thought, "Actually, we're talking about a tide pool, and it's starfish."

At first reading, I immediately thought of the stars in the sky.

Even funny, I read the stars first as a star.

And then I, like, "Oh, no, there's stars."

SELIGMANN: If you've ever looked at a starfish, and you see it looks like pink rice grains.

It's as if it has glue on it and you've sprinkled pink rice grains on it.

POLSENBERG: The pink rice grains.

Maybe that is like a sea snail's eggs or bits of sponge.

GRAHAM: This is suddenly this joy-like break.

NEW: But you can see "pink" and "ink."

GRAHAM: Yes.

- Those are my, that's my favorite rhyme in the poem.

GRAHAM: What's great about her is that you would say ink is in the human realm with the things that don't belong under the water, but in fact, ink operates in both realms.

And the human imagination partakes of both realms, right?

It lives in language and it is of nature.

The pink rice grains are not rice grains.

They're coral.

Yes, they're tiny little bits of coral and other kinds of undersea life.

But she makes sure to say, "Oh, by the way, "let's just make sure that you're using your imagination.

"In the same way that it wasn't jade, "this, I'm gonna tell you to think 'rice grains,' "you're gonna see rice grains, and you're gonna apply them to this other thing."

SANJAYAN: "Ink-bespattered jelly-fish."

And I can't help but smile when I think about that, because it's almost like it's a child's drawing.

And that's exactly what you see when you see those jellyfish in the water.

It looks like a kid just started doing that with paint.

NEW: The poet is using metaphors here to take us to an in-between place.

"Crabs like green lilies," because of the prong-like shape of lily petals.

GRAHAM: Very interesting that she makes a creature describe a plant and then the plant describe a creature.

GORE: Like a jewel box, a beautiful scene, the riot of color and the animals and plants and things that seem to be in-between.

(chuckles) GRAHAM: And then she has a change and shift in tone, and she gets her submarine in there.

I think it's important to remember that this poem was written in 1917.

The United States only entered the war in 1917, and she was obviously very aware of this, because the war had been going on for three years already.

Because of the Germans reintroducing submarines into the theater of war, she not only uses the submarine in this poem, but in an era when there were no images of submarine life, and it would have been purely an imaginative act to sort of think about what a submarine might look like as it went under the sea.

GORE: "And submarine toadstools slide each on the other.

"All external marks of abuse are present on this defiant edifice..." GRAHAM: "All the physical features of ac-cident, "lack of cornice, dynamite grooves, "burns, and hatchet strokes, these things stand out on it."

SANJAYAN: So the first four or five stanzas for me were a really beautiful dive that I'm having.

And then it turns, and I didn't notice that turn until I read it the second time around.

For me, it's the word "hatchet stroke."

RODRIGUEZ: "Opening and shutting itself like an injured fan."

It has some pain within these actions.

GRAHAM: "External marks of abuse."

"Abuse" is such a strong word.

GORE: "Dynamite," "hatchet," "burns."

Hard to avoid connecting dots between the poem and the time in which the poem was written.

GRAHAM: Marianne Moore's a 30-year-old woman whose brother had deployed to be a Marine chaplain.

He was going to officiate over burial at sea.

So bodies will be put in the sea.

And she was a pacifist; she very much didn't want to go to war.

And there's a subliminal...

I'm talking about the secret subject of the poem, when you're in the middle of a war, where vast amounts of chemicals and artillery and debris do an astonishing amount of damage.

The damage that the First World War did to the ocean floor is probably greater than anything except for deep-water fishing.

And so are you saying that this really is a war poem?

Yes, it's a war poem.

Well, I would say it's also an environmental poem.

At no point can you say, "And this poem is," you know, "about, therefore, World War I" or "ecological disaster."

She was foreshadowing the danger and the risk which already existed for ocean life.

She's pointing out how little it takes for one thing to touch another, to touch another, and all of a sudden, the whole world goes to hell.

What we do to the sea bottom, then and now, is a form of war.

"The chasm-side is dead.

"Repeated evidence has proved "that it can live on what can not revive its youth.

The sea grows old in it."

KATZ: The growing old.

To me, it just brought me back to the kind of age of the ocean, that it's the oldest system that we have.

"Repeated evidence has proved that it can live "on what cannot revive its youth.

The sea grows old in it."

Well, I've thought about that.

It's a little ambiguous, but I was thinking that Marianne Moore was talking about time.

That there's repeated evidence that you cannot revive time, that you grow old in that.

My heart reads it as saying that it ebbs, it slowly dies, but it lingers so long that in our memory, we still think it's alive.

But in some ways, it's already grown old, because the sea lasts longer, the whales live longer, the turtles live longer than we possibly can.

GORE: For me, the experience of reading this poem was conditioned by the way I and so many others see the ocean now as being damaged very severely, unthinkably.

If you'd gone back to the seas just even a couple of hundred years ago, before sort of the Industrial Revolution, you'd have seen a sea that is almost unimaginable to us today.

It would have been filled, absolutely filled with monsters and mythical creatures-- really big things.

And today, we're down to shrimp and jellyfish and little fish.

And we think that that's what it should look like.

We think that's the baseline, but it isn't.

GORE: It's sobering to think of this poem as it might have been written 100 years later.

There would be plastic in the poem.

An expedition just returned from the Marianas Trench, the very deepest place in the ocean, with specialized creatures adapted to the intense pressures, and inside their guts, they found plastic, seven miles down.

More than 90 percent of the extra heat energy that we're trapping with greenhouse gas pollution is going into the oceans.

KATZ: And as the ocean is collecting more energy as our climate changes, and it's filling with more heat and power, and swelling, the ocean's chipping away at our cliffs, at our coastlines, the coastline that I grew up on.

And so to me, I actually went to a place of, the thing that's vulnerable is the cliffs that we live on.

I liked the line, "Repeated evidence proves that it can live on."

And that's something that I, I feel like I have to hold on to as a marine conservationist.

I work in coral reefs around the world that are so vulnerable right now, and we're seeing mass bleaching and dying-off of corals.

And so I need to hold on to this hope that there's evidence it will live on, that marine life will live on.

Or else I couldn't do my job.

OCHOA: What I see is an old reef, and that that reef is actually the base of the new life.

It's, it's-- and I see it all the time.

SANJAYAN: Wow, what she maybe is alluding to is really deep evolution.

If you really think about it, you know, there have been times when the seas have lost 95 percent of all their life.

And yet, the biodiversity we see today has sprung from the, these extinctions that have happened in the past.

And so, maybe this is not the end.

Maybe this is about life really persisting.

GRAHAM: I think that one of the most incredible things you can feel after multiple readings of the poem is the awakening of our imagination.

She awakens the sense of sight, the sense of touch, the sense of color, the sense of sound.

So whatever you've awakened is an instrument you have to understand the world.

Your moral compass depends on having that instrument.

Without it, you don't know what's right and wrong.

She doesn't talk about right and wrong.

She talks about awakening the instrument through observation.

I think the beauty of what she describes can also be a source of inspiration... To safeguard this beauty and not acquiesce in the ongoing destruction of all of what she describes.

GRAHAM: She doesn't tell you what any of this means.

She doesn't tell you if it's glad or sad.

She just tells you the oceans are not to be taken for granted, but they also are a life.

Not just full of life, but they are themselves the life force flowing through everything, allowing everything to live here, and they can grow old.

So pay attention.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: Support for "Poetry in America" provided by: ANNOUNCER: The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, supporting original research and public understanding of science, technology, and economics.

♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: Additional support provided by the Dalio Foundation.

And by the Poetry Foundation, an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.

And from Deborah Hayes Stone and Max Stone.