MOFFETT, Judith

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Nationality: American. Born: Louisville, Kentucky, 30 August 1942. Education: Hanover College, Indiana, 1960–64, B.A. (cum laude) 1964; Colorado State University, Fort Collins, 1964–66, M.A. in English 1966; University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1966–67; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1969–71, M.A. 1970, Ph.D. in American civilization 1971. Family: Married Edward B. Irving in 1983. Career: Fulbright Lecturer, University of Lund, Sweden, 1967–68; assistant professor, Behrend College, Pennsylvania State University, Erie, 1971–75; visiting lecturer, program in creative writing, University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1977–78; visiting lecturer, 1978–79, assistant professor of English, 1979–86, adjunct assistant professor, 1986–88, adjunct associate professor, 1988–93, and since 1993 adjunct professor of English, University of Pennsylvania. Awards: Fulbright grant, 1967, 1973; American Philosophical Society grant, 1973; Swedish Institute grant, 1973, 1976, 1983; Nathhorst Foundation (Sweden) grant, 1973; Eunice Tietjens memorial prize, 1973, and Levinson prize, 1976 (Poetry, Chicago); Borestone Mountain poetry award, 1976; Ingram Merrill grant, 1977, 1980; Columbia University translation prize, 1978; Bread Loaf Writers Conference Tennessee Williams fellowship, 1978; Swedish Academy translation prize, 1982; National Endowment for the Humanities translation fellowship, 1983; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1984; Swedish Academy translation grant, 1993. Address: 951 East Laird Avenue, Salt Lake City, Utah 84105, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Keeping Time. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1976.

Whinny Moor Crossing. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1984.

Novels

Pennterra. New York, Congdon and Weed, 1987; London, New English Library, 1988.

The Ragged World. New York, St. Martin's Press. 1991.

Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream. New York, St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Short Stories

Two That Came True. Eugene, Oregon, Pulphouse Press, 1992.

Other

James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York, Columbia University Press, 1984.

Homestead Year: Back to the Land in the Suburbs. New York, Lyons & Burford, 1995.

Translator, Gentleman, Single, Refined, and Selected Poems 1937–1959 (bilingual edition), by Hjalmar Gullberg. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

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Critical Studies: "Studying Interior Architecture by Keyhold: Four Poets" by Reg Saner, in Denver Quarterly (Denver), 20(1), summer 1985; "The Profession of Science Fiction, 46: Grinding Axes" by Farah Mendlesohn, in Foundation (London), 62, winter 1994–95.

Judith Moffett comments:

(1985) As a child I was given no guidance or encouragement about poetry, but I was born into a family of Southern Baptists and heard the King James Bible read and quoted more or less daily throughout my early life, and it seems to me now that those biblical cadences still underlie the way I hear and use language. By the age of ten or eleven I had discovered Kipling's Jungle Books in the library and memorized the small poems introducing each story ("Now Chil the Kite brings home the night / That Mang the Bat set free …") with the purest pleasure. Later I happened upon, and was entranced by, Vachel Lindsay's "Ghost of the Buffaloes," and still later it was Stephen Vincent Benét's John Brown's Body. With each discovery came the urge to imitate, and that was how I started trying to write poems. From the beginning sound was valued more than sense.

Galloping tetrameters were what I responded to and therefore what I tried to write. I marvel now at my best students' intuitive understanding of what poetic language is and does, since I grew up depending almost entirely on the surge or quietness of forms to make language into poetry.

Having come thus far on my own, I stalled for a while in graduate school. Then, in graduate school I had the tremendous luck to be James Merrill's student for half a semester, and the experience of his poetry at that time had the force of a revelation. It quite literally changed my life. Merrill showed me, by his example, how to move ahead. I could see in his work the effects I cared about most in poetry (beauty, metrical skill, narrative) cranked up to a height tremendously beyond my own reach, yet as it were on the same extension ladder. Though we cared, and wrote, about quite different things, somehow the listening and controlling ear was much the same.

Because of this ear, at variance with the sensibilities of all but a handful of my own generation of poets, I learned only slowly and with difficulty to appreciate and then to write free verse, and I still find formal verse more satisfactory in a fundamental way for much of what I want to say.

Eventually I seemed to use poetry more and more often to tell a story; even short lyric stanzas add up, like beads on a string, and carry a narrative line. I have found also that nearly every poem I finished has what a friend has called a "ruminative" quality—that is, it seems appropriate to think things over in a poem—which may explain why, unlike many writers, I have never felt out of place in academe. I have consciously worked to become more restrained in emotional expression, to imply and suggest instead of serving up great shovelsful of feelings, and also to fight clear of my earlier experiments at compressing by way of linguistic density, and I have had fair success. I have also consciously tried to be briefer, but at that have done far less well. In early middle life I have settled most happily into the longish local-color-narrative-cum-philosophical-exploration on the one hand and the unabashedly formal lyric on the other, with various other odes and styles thrown in from time to time. In the impulse to this I recognize a reassertion of my early, much loved influences, but as far as I can tell, it has caused me (pace Harold Bloom) no anxiety. The family resemblance gives me pleasure, but what I have had to say and do is different.

More recently I have been writing science fiction: three novels and a story collection, with a fourth novel in the works.

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Few poets of her generation would undertake the stylistic balances Judith Moffett attempts: an urbane, ethical, and ultimately social tone for which the modern model is Auden and the ultimate model Horace; a range of rhyme and stanza patterns that calls attention to her considerable technical skills, her master in this respect being James Merrill; and an affection for a meditative tone and for autobiographical subject matter that links her to the most interesting poets of her generation. These lines from a sonnet sequence, "Now or Never," in which the woman speaker, childless in her mid-thirties, is considering if she will ever have children, are characteristic:

They gave me in my kindergarten year
What seemed irrelevant, an Old Maid deck.
Gems, wrinkled skin, strange glasses on a stick,
Long gloves, pressed lips, and horrible orange hair,
No child, no husband ever to be hers,

That gaunt crone wasn't anything like me!
I got her meaning fast: ignominy
Is being single in a game of pairs.

The benign contest between the discursive and formal tension is her favorite effect, a moral as well as technical balance. She distrusts the bardic, and the merely personal, or even the very personal unconstrained by formal considerations chosen before the poem, can be self-serving. She has the learning and literary range to strike such poise, for she has a doctorate, has written an excellent book on Merrill's work, and has translated from contemporary Swedish poetry.

Her poems err sometimes toward chattiness ("I always liked even upchucky babies"). And her ability to find poetry in daily life can lead her with cries of delight to the obvious ("Now whatever I glimpse qualifies the vast"). But she is willing to risk such lapses to arrive at lines like these from "Bending the Twig," a poem about a girl who passes through puberty earlier than her peers. It builds on topics we have seldom heard discussed without smirking or melodrama, though it builds, too, on smirking and melodrama, not despising what we cling to:

Looking older than one's age required,
it dismayed me to learn, a decorum
appropriate not to the real but to the apparent.

This intelligent, skillful, and deceptively full-hearted poet is one of the most interesting and quietly ambitious of her generation.

—William Matthews