"horizon of expectations"

Friedlander, Benjamin.  "Marianne Moore Today."  Critics and Poets on Marianne Moore: "A Right Good
        Salvo of Barks."  Ed. Leavell, Linda, Miller, Cristanne, and Robin G. Schulze.  Bucknell, PA: Bucknell UP, 2005.
        222-39.

        Friedlander solicited commentaries on the significance of Marianne Moore from contemporary avant-garde poets, with the intention of gauging exposure and tracing lines of influence.  Interspersed are his comments on the vagaries of Moore's reception, and an inchoate argument that Moore's poetry should be a lot more important to contemporary poets than it is.  Rachel Blau Duplessis calls her "a precursor without acknowledged followers," and then claims a mild affinity for the "collage textures of poetry and discursive slides" that also appear in Pound, Eliot, and Williams, but which Moore employed to feminist ends.  Jena Osman looks behind the texture of the poetry to Moore's compositional practice, admiring "her use of footnotes/citations, her delight in and recycling of newspaper items, and her ‘research-based' writing strategies," and most of all Moore's practice of inserting clippings into books dialogically, which Osman calls "material hypertext." 

        Friedlander ultimately suggests two conclusions: first, an unfair prejudice against Moore results from the popular, genteel persona she cultivated in her later years, the period when most contemporary poets came of age; second, the texture of contemporary poetry and its practice of laying bare the mediation of truth comport with Moore aesthetically and philosophically to a greater degree than with her peers.  The significance of this discussion for my project is that contemporary poets who admire Moore admire the way she samples from non-literary texts.  Arguably, then, one of the most productive aspects of Moore's poetry in the present moment intersects with one of the most discussed concepts in intellectual property law, sampling.