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.Her reality would be a confluence of presences, images,and uses that make up the changing phenomenal world.America, Ezra Pound complained, was a half-savage country, andMoore may well be echoing his phrase when she writes, in New York (CP,54), of a savage s romance. The Progressive era was beckoning America toan out-of-date romance a glamorous master narrative of theunconquered wilderness and inexhaustible resources.The unruliness of thisland, its expanse, its ingenuity, its untamed splendor, stimulated theimagination.Those growing up in America at the turn of the centuryindulged a taste for Cooper s 1826 romance The Last of the Mohicans, with itsnoble savages. The hunter, like the savage whose place he filled, seemed toselect among the blind signs of the wild route, with a species of instinct,seldom abating his speed, and never pausing to deliberate (116).But as thehunter displaces the savage, so the consumer displaces the hunter in ourcultural logic.The savages are the consumers as much as the objects ofromantic fantasy.Is the New York of the title and first line the modern city,Moore s new home, or the wilderness of the Catskills and the Adirondacks,the site of American nostalgia for origin? The tone of the word savage isas ambiguous as its referent and grammatical function.Moore had taught savages at the Carlisle Indian School the civilized skills of commercialaccounting and stenography, and much of her poetry pays tribute to thecivilized behavior of so-called primitives.How civilized is a culture thatannexes land as it needs the space for commerce, that has appropriatedwildly within the last century? The commercial lust and reckless exploitationof resources exhibited by an urban culture that can only imagine thelandscape in terms of its desire for consumption, can indeed seem savage.Moore s imagery demonstrates how fashion culture has adopted the veryways of the savage.New York City is peopled with foxes, its populationparading the streets in pelts and wrapping themselves in tepees of ermine. Moore s reversible phrase the savage s romance replaces the 436Bonnie Costellooppositional rhetoric of nature and culture with a reciprocal one.In this wayMoore s ambiguous reference to New York anticipates and complicatesWilliam Cronon s view of Chicago as nature s metropolis. The linksbetween city and country are intricate and not all one-way.But a reciprocityrequires distance as well as association.Moore s poetry maximizes proximityverbally, but then works to reestablish distance, to remind the reader that ourimages are not reality.The consumer s America is a warehouse for the furtrade dotted with deer-skins and picardels of beaver-skin. New Yorkcommercial culture literally skins reality for material goods and self-aggrandizing images, forgetting nature s otherness.And yet it would be toosimple to read the poem as the shame of culture against the tragic glory ofnature.Nature can be appreciated as well as plundered in the name ofculture, may indeed require the lens of culture to be seen at all.In this sensethe proximity can be useful.Moore likely admires the imagination of thewriter she quotes from Field and Stream who compares a fawn s markings to satin needlework [that] in a single color may carry a varied pattern. He hasnot appropriated nature for art but rather has appreciated the art of nature.Moore s note tells us that the fawn was discovered in a thicket and broughtto the hotel. Whatever ambivalence she may have felt about thistransplantation, she knows it is within culture that its markings can be seen.Moore was a devoted museum visitor, and most of her knowledge of naturecomes from books, films, and exhibits.She had climbed Mt.Rainier, but inturning to write about it in An Octopus she does not transcribe herexperience so much as collect and assemble various representations of it.The contact sought by Thoreau and revived by Muir remained elusive; thesearch for authentic experience must acknowledge the fact of mediation.These inversions of value and attribution the savage look of fashion,the refinement of nature bring the two worlds of New York into closeproximity through the power of imagination, just as they exist in closeassociation through the power of commerce, in the first, long, embeddedsentence of the poem.But in the next sentence Moore works to reestablishdistance, to separate the two worlds of consumer and consumed, pointingtoward a wilderness beyond quick acquisition.Moore is perhaps thinkingof her own journey, not from the old center of the wholesale fur trade, St.Louis, to the new one, New York, but her more recent migration, fromCarlisle, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh and the conjunction of theMonongahela and the Allegheny, to Manhattan, when she asserts:It is a far cry from the queen full of jewels and the beau with the muff, 437Moore s Americafrom the gilt coach shaped like a perfume-bottle,to the conjunction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny,and the scholastic philosophy of the wilderness.Romance takes on a new tenor here, evoking the glass slipper and the silkrather than the leatherstocking.But the conjunction of the Monongahelaand the Allegheny rivers is not a romance but a locality existing a far cry from the images of adventure and plunder proliferating in the brains andbowels of the culture and disseminated through postcards of NiagaraFalls, the calico horses and the war canoe. (Moore s family owned an oldlandscape painting representing the scene of this conjunction of rivers,leading out into the open west.) But she knows all too well that, thanks tothe New York barons Carnegie and Frick, industrial Pittsburgh has grownup on this site.What does Moore mean by wilderness here? Not, it seems,what John Muir praised and William McKibben mourns.This is a newkind of wilderness, one of man and nature together; we can no longer mapreality into neat binaries of city and country, where the city is near andthe wilderness far. Even when culture is geographically close to thelandscape, however, it remains distant, other.Places must be distinguishedfrom their representations.There is a dense geography and human historybehind a dime novel exterior. The effete beau with the muff and theperfume-bottle-shaped coach might be signs of urban decadence.ButTeddy Roosevelt neo-primitives, bred on urban luxury but seeking innature a cure for the malaise of culture, who borrowed images ofmasculine prowess from the backwoods atmosphere of ingenuity, are notso different.Their barehanded, anti-modern conquest of nature, of theotter, the beaver, the puma skins / without shooting irons or dogs was aweekend affair, not a real encounter with the wilderness.Nature is stillobject, not other
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