The Tao of the Non-human: Ineffability, Materiality, and Ecosemiotics in Marianne Moore's Assemblage Poetics

Abstract: Through her engagement with the aesthetic and onto-epistemological principles of Zen and Taoism, Marianne Moore's poetic imagination develops assemblages that foreground the interdependence and entanglement between human and non-human agencies. Moore opposes traditional forms of anthropocentric writing by amplifying a poetics that decenters human subjectivity, acknowledges the limitations of language and reason, and elevates more-than-human agency beyond the recognition of its ineffability by human frameworks of knowledge. In particular, she enables this through the minimalism of her Zen/Tao-inflected later poems and through the drastic revisions of earlier works. The impact of Zen and Taoism on her work enables her to create a universal poetics that amplifies material-spiritual entanglements within heterogeneous assemblages of matter and meaning.