Marjorie Muir - 2 Short Poems (1919)

Forgotten Poems #61

  
              —: Finis :—

       Gods upon your mountaintops—
       I hurl you back
       This beating, writhing, pain-filled
       Clod of flesh and blood.
       Did you put it in my keeping as a jest?
       Do you laugh now to see it dead?
  

Marjorie Muir (1900-1976) was born in New York, and studied at the NY University School of Journalism. By the mid-1910s she was publishing 'free verse', appearing in The Craftsmen in 1916. Muir went on to published 3 striking poems in the underground poetry journal Pagan: A Magazine for Eudaemonists, and was featured in both Pagan anthologies in 1918 and 1919. ‘Finis’, in particular, for my tastes, is one of the finest poems anywhere. After 1919, it appears that Muir stopped publishing poetry, and committed her energies to short-stories and novels, and later biographies.

  
              —: Drowned :—

       Dead hair dripping from her head,
       As sea-weed drips over the side of a cliff.
       Dead hair, half-brown, half-gray,
       Coarse, uncombed,
       Thrown back from the uplifted head.

       Two eyes of brown, a greenish brown,
       Like stagnant water
            that shelters weeds and slimy things . . . 
       Two eyes like holes in a shrivelled winter-leaf
       Whose edges are the bruised lids . . . 
       Dead hair dripping from her head,
       And two dull eyes,
       Also dead.
  

In the mid-1920s Muir moved to Paris and joined the expatriate American arts community, including writers and artists like partners Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Ford Madox Ford, Sinclair Lewis, and Man Ray, who photographed Muir numerous times in 1930 as part of his Paris portrait series. Muir would go on to publish 11 novels, and numerous short-stories, appearing in magazines like Vogue, McCall's, Vanity Fair, Harper's, and Cosmopolitan. In the 1950s and 1960s she wrote biographies, including one on the life Louisa May Alcott, famous for her novel Little Women (1868), and another on Héloïse d'Argenteuil, a French nun, philosopher, and writer (fl. 1100s).

Man Ray - Marjorie Muir (1930)

Muir was also an advocate for early education and libraries; “In our endeavor to establish a library for Pioneer Youth, an organisation conducting clubs and summer camps for children from workers' families, a deplorable lack of good books was revealed. The folk lore, myth, and fairy tales that pass as history and the available story material which is either nonsensical or glorifies the go-getter and military hero are not suitable for those curious-minded and alert children. They want truth—facts—and quantities of it! So we have started the big task of building up a new literature—a literature that will stress the heroism of men and women whose victories were peace-time victories... and who fought war, poverty, intolerance, and ignorance in all its manifestations.” (The Survey, 1926)

  
              For Marjorie Muir
                  by Dick Whyte

       mountains
       eaten
       by an old god,—

       these piles of dirt
       are family
       too
  

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