An interview with the poet Richard Moore.

Poet Richard Moore is in the obits in the Boston Globe today.(Dec 2, 2009.) Here is an interview I conducted with him some years ago. He was on my show "Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer" on Somerville Community Access TV.


An interview with the poet Richard Moore.

Richard Moore: A Poet with Rhyme and Wit.





Richard Moore has published over 10 volumes of poetry; one was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and another was a T.S. Eliot Prize finalist. He is also the author of a novel: “The Investigator.” Moore’s more recent poetry books include: “The Mouse Whole: An Epic,” “Pygmies and Pyramids,” and “The Naked Scarecrow.” Moore is listed in “Who’s Who in America,” and articles about his work are in the “Dictionary of Literary Biography.” His fiction, essays and more than 500 poems have been published in a variety of magazines including “The New Yorker,” “Atlantic,” “Harper’s,” etc… Moore has taught at Boston University, the N.E. Conservatory of Music, Brandeis, and others. Poet Richard Wilbur said of Moore’s work: “The best and most serious poetry is full of gaiety, and it is only dreary poets and their too-earnest readers who consider light verse demeaning.” I talked with Moore on my Somerville Community Access TV Show: “Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer.”



Doug Holder: Your poetry often rhymes, and is often funny. Why do you think both qualities are not in vogue today?



Richard Moore: I don’t know. There is a kind of class distinction. There are folks like Ezra Pound who really make it in the academy. For a friend of mine in college, Ezra Pound was a life-long hero. I met my friend after many years and said: “You know Terry I think that Ogden Nash was a more interesting poet than Pound.” He was deeply shocked by this. It was if I said something that everybody knew was wrong. I think the problem is that America is made up of different societies. There is this group and that group. This is an example of what has happened in the poetry world. If you follow Ezra Pound you can’t follow Ogden Nash.



DH: You have attended Robert Lowell’s famed seminars. Can you talk about your experience?



RM: Well Lowell was a fascinating teacher. I’m not all that great a fan of Lowell either. I can see why a lot of people would admire his work.



The Lowell I got to know was before the “confessional” Lowell. He strongly rhymed—there was a metaphysical school that preceded that. I think in the 50’s. Then there was a big shock when he changed styles. I think he was playing the game of: “How will my reputation climb?” “What is going to have an affect?”



DH: Do you think he sold out?



RM: I don’t use the last phrase. To some extent everybody sells out. Everybody will sell out if the price is right. You have to sell out to get along in America. You have to eat. Lowell was about doing something for his reputation in the literary establishment.



There was a side of Lowell that was a brilliant critic. He had a real understanding of poetry.



DH: What makes a poem stand the test of time?



RM: I think if it makes a comment about something deep and lasting about the way we live. I hear a lot of things today that don’t seem to me will last. We live in a time where lots of little things are happening—ephemeral things. It’s that deep quality—you have to be an understander of human nature. A writer of strange, deeply, shocking things.

DH: Does a good poet discover things about himself?



RM: I think poetry is discovery. As part of the poetic experience the reader can ideally sense if the poet is surprised by his poem. The question is whether the poet is saying something he didn’t intend to. It is from a deeper level. This is what makes a poem last.



DH: You are an advocate for “wildness” in poetry. Do you think contemporary poetry is too tame?



RM: I don’t think you can make a formula for it. Once you make a formula for something it isn’t wild anymore. You have to find the truth. You have to do something that you deeply have to do.



DH: You used to run the Agape Poetry Series in Boston. Can you tell me about the series?



RM: It’s no longer around. It was in the Community Church of Boston in Copley Square. There were regulars who came for every event. I had the idea to raise the standards a bit, and get really good readers. The series has been over for about ten years now.



DH: I think the best selling American poet is the late Charles Bukowski. Would you describe this hard-drinking, womanizing, poet as a “wild” poet unconstrained by civilization?



RM: I don’t really know him that well. I don’t find him interesting. I remember Robert Lowell’s comment about Ginsberg’s “Howl.” “The only good thing about it is the title.” There is emptiness in his poetry. I wonder why he is doing this. I think people like him for shallow reasons.



--Doug Holder












An interview with the poet Richard Moore.

Richard Moore: A Poet with Rhyme and Wit.





Richard Moore has published over 10 volumes of poetry; one was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and another was a T.S. Eliot Prize finalist. He is also the author of a novel: “The Investigator.” Moore’s more recent poetry books include: “The Mouse Whole: An Epic,” “Pygmies and Pyramids,” and “The Naked Scarecrow.” Moore is listed in “Who’s Who in America,” and articles about his work are in the “Dictionary of Literary Biography.” His fiction, essays and more than 500 poems have been published in a variety of magazines including “The New Yorker,” “Atlantic,” “Harper’s,” etc… Moore has taught at Boston University, the N.E. Conservatory of Music, Brandeis, and others. Poet Richard Wilbur said of Moore’s work: “The best and most serious poetry is full of gaiety, and it is only dreary poets and their too-earnest readers who consider light verse demeaning.” I talked with Moore on my Somerville Community Access TV Show: “Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer.”



Doug Holder: Your poetry often rhymes, and is often funny. Why do you think both qualities are not in vogue today?



Richard Moore: I don’t know. There is a kind of class distinction. There are folks like Ezra Pound who really make it in the academy. For a friend of mine in college, Ezra Pound was a life-long hero. I met my friend after many years and said: “You know Terry I think that Ogden Nash was a more interesting poet than Pound.” He was deeply shocked by this. It was if I said something that everybody knew was wrong. I think the problem is that America is made up of different societies. There is this group and that group. This is an example of what has happened in the poetry world. If you follow Ezra Pound you can’t follow Ogden Nash.



DH: You have attended Robert Lowell’s famed seminars. Can you talk about your experience?



RM: Well Lowell was a fascinating teacher. I’m not all that great a fan of Lowell either. I can see why a lot of people would admire his work.



The Lowell I got to know was before the “confessional” Lowell. He strongly rhymed—there was a metaphysical school that preceded that. I think in the 50’s. Then there was a big shock when he changed styles. I think he was playing the game of: “How will my reputation climb?” “What is going to have an affect?”



DH: Do you think he sold out?



RM: I don’t use the last phrase. To some extent everybody sells out. Everybody will sell out if the price is right. You have to sell out to get along in America. You have to eat. Lowell was about doing something for his reputation in the literary establishment.



There was a side of Lowell that was a brilliant critic. He had a real understanding of poetry.



DH: What makes a poem stand the test of time?



RM: I think if it makes a comment about something deep and lasting about the way we live. I hear a lot of things today that don’t seem to me will last. We live in a time where lots of little things are happening—ephemeral things. It’s that deep quality—you have to be an understander of human nature. A writer of strange, deeply, shocking things.

DH: Does a good poet discover things about himself?



RM: I think poetry is discovery. As part of the poetic experience the reader can ideally sense if the poet is surprised by his poem. The question is whether the poet is saying something he didn’t intend to. It is from a deeper level. This is what makes a poem last.



DH: You are an advocate for “wildness” in poetry. Do you think contemporary poetry is too tame?



RM: I don’t think you can make a formula for it. Once you make a formula for something it isn’t wild anymore. You have to find the truth. You have to do something that you deeply have to do.



DH: You used to run the Agape Poetry Series in Boston. Can you tell me about the series?



RM: It’s no longer around. It was in the Community Church of Boston in Copley Square. There were regulars who came for every event. I had the idea to raise the standards a bit, and get really good readers. The series has been over for about ten years now.



DH: I think the best selling American poet is the late Charles Bukowski. Would you describe this hard-drinking, womanizing, poet as a “wild” poet unconstrained by civilization?



RM: I don’t really know him that well. I don’t find him interesting. I remember Robert Lowell’s comment about Ginsberg’s “Howl.” “The only good thing about it is the title.” There is emptiness in his poetry. I wonder why he is doing this. I think people like him for shallow reasons.



--Doug Holder

AGNI 70 (autumn 2009) Keeps us Reading

AGNI 70 (autumn 2009) Keeps us Reading


article by Michael T. Steffen



A good deal of imaginative literature, writing that nourishes not only the thoughts but also the imagery and sensations in our minds, consists of cataloguing items, belongings and surroundings, evoking sensuous experience, prior to being analyzed or intellectualized.

Here are excerpts from two prose pieces in the Fall 2009 issue of AGNI:

…The Imperial…a suite of marble and cherry wood, with Porthault linens, Ayurvedic bath oils, and a tranquil view of an Asian courtyard with a serene and shallow ornamental pool at its center…

She had begun with a white silk blouse, a navy cashmere pullover, designer
jeans, brown leather boots, and a burnt umber silk scarf…
(The Nine-Gated City by Melissa Pritchard, pp. 109-153)


Along the Mississippi River, scattered in weedy stretches of factory silos and warehouses, stood small brick sheds marinated in oily exhaust… Straw tufted from scabrous shed vents, tin chimneys, cracks in grime-curtained panes… Shuttered snack shacks. Conoco stations run dry and vaguer ruins angling from soil or cement, gnarly roots tethered to and somehow sustaining the disco present…
(from Time and Temperature, Ben Miller, pp. 86-89)

Juxtaposed, the radically different subject matter of the two writers gives us one hint at why AGNI is one of the best literary journals in America. It refuses superficial definition, denies readers’ expectation for a class or genre of writing. In doing so, the journal whets our curiosity and interest. Instead of turning the pages in a half-slumber for smooth transitions, we keep wondering, What’s next?


The common thread in both pieces is of a principle. They are well-written with specific vocabulary that gives us detailed pictures. When read through, each piece in its own way digests its visual, tactile and qualified spaces with idea: Pritchard’s story stalking a well-off naïve traveler-journalist encountering the intellectually challenging (and dangerous) squalor of Delhi as she investigates the sex trade for an article she is writing; Miller’s essay agilely transcending the idea of an order of idea to his child-explorer’s abandoned landscape on the Mississippi with a term of great insight and acceptance: non-frastrucure.

Both Pritchard and Miller affirm a viable force to chaos over against our society’s technical and personal explorations of, encroachments on and attempts to use and interact with nature, and human nature, on enterprising if not selfish and neglectful terms. It is a probing, urgent theme—a paradox and writer’s risk to portray, this inevitable objective unruliness of the world and of our minds, and trace it in the rule of writing itself.

In his lucid and wonderful memoir Here Were the Two of Us Exactly This Moment, Douglas Bauer demonstrates a similar courage and humanity of observation:

As ungenerous human beings, we are disgusted and frightened by deformity. But when we are children we’re better than that. There’s infatuation in our fear and our disgust is something sensual. As children we want goblins and witches in our worlds… So if I didn’t have a grandson’s easy love for my grandfather [eyes whitened by cataracts, my insert], there was something far more compelling in my feelings for him; he deliciously repulsed me (p. 91).

The French critic Paul de Man often referred to the master romancer Marcel Proust as“the poet.” AGNI 70 offers generous prose with more than occasional brilliance, moments of such careful perception equaled by expression. Yet it is a poet of lines, those meticulously exposed units of written speech, who takes the prize when Eric Rawson finds three words—

The flannel skin

—to describe—to incarnate his daring subject in “The Peach Will Forgive Me” (p. 108). And Nicholas Samaras’ solemnity and acceptance also justify the definition of ample margins for his lines:

…the whitened wind tells me that, with every
person’s death, the world is impoverished
and the earth is enriched (“Prologue/Afterworld” p. 104),

while formal patterns of modest resonance are displayed in Chloe Honum’s villanelle, “Come Back” (p. 169):

The moon has flown, though in its place a husk
clings to the sky. The horses figure-eight
in single file. Through rain-sown drapes of dusk

I try to count them, climb up on the fence.
Their foreheads shine with pearly stars, ghost-lit.
I can’t see all of any horse at once—
they multiply, and shiver in the dusk.

In a sense AGNI enjoys a reputation of distinction in the world of American literary publications—the sense that the pulse and verve of the writing and editing convey enjoyment in the “activity” of this journal. But AGNI really earns that recognition with the consistency (230+ page after page) of quality of the writers and poets it acquaints and reacquaints us with biannually. You trust one who looks for counterpoint will find enough to argue with here as well. Still today as worth weighs again in many buyers’ reluctant consideration, AGNI is easily recommendable for the venture of a subscription.

AGNI, edited by Sven Birkerts
Published at Boston University
is available for $14 at most major bookstores
1 year—$20, 2 years—$38
see agni@bu.edu and www.agnimagazine.org

Life: The Beautiful Struggle by John J. Deleo

Life: The Beautiful Struggle
John J. Deleo
Dade City, Florida
jjdeleo2003@yahoo.com


REVIEW BY Renee Schwiesow


“Life: The Beautiful Struggle,” in its third edition opens with sixteen pages of what Deleo refers to as “Reflections.” These aphorisms are printed as original adages that are meant to inspire us to contemplation. Deleo includes such sayings as:

Rome was not conquered, it committed suicide

or

Being clever is not a virtue but it can buy you time

As a lead-in to the poetry, Deleo ends with a somewhat witty final thought:

Man cannot live by one-liners alone

And with this he segues into his poetry and prose. What follows are Deleo’s contemplations on life, love, and relationships set into short snippets, one strophe wanderings along his journey. And, indeed, he has a poem entitled “The Journey”

The night is darker now,
the sun more my enemy than my friend.
Where did that young boy go?
Our blood ran hotter then. . .
an empty canvas, all the colors yet to come.

His language is basic, the words hung by wooden pins from a bare rope clothesline, rather than strung on silk, making his thoughts accessible to the reader looking for something straight forward, albeit borderline cliché. He speaks often about colors, and in lines here and there we see glimmers of the spectrum begin to emerge. And though he may not paint us a rainbow of imagery, we hear him tell us that he has seen the rainbow and the shooting star.

A fan of the Massachusetts born, Emily Dickinson, Deleo shares his wish for her talent, for her vision in “Emily,”

Emily, dear,
the ease by which you penned your poems
leaves me breathless and adoring.
For try as I might, the energy to write
even one good line makes me appreciate
the treasure of thought and expression you were!
And gives this restless poet pause
in search of rhyme without flaw.

Deleo’s contributing editor, Gary Wroblewski, shares his work in the last few pages of the book. Wroblewski’s poems are longer than Deleo’s one-strophe snippets, and while not written in strict form, he does employ rhyme. He writes of war, friends, and life’s evolution. Wroblewski’s work carries with it his own brand of “truisms” and wisdom he’s gleaned over his lifetime.

Deleo and his editor, Wroblewski, have compiled for the reader “food for thought,” in an honest and to-the-point manner.

Review of DEATH OF TEATICKET HARDWARE by Alice Kociemba

Review of DEATH OF TEATICKET HARDWARE by Alice Kociemba of Falmouth, Massachusetts, 44 pages, no price listed, produced by New Wave Printing and Design, Inc., 2009 (http://jamaicapondpoets.com $10)

By Barbara Bialick, author of “Time Leaves” (Ibbetson Street Press)

Alice Kociemba, who is a poet and a psychotherapist, has created a bittersweet memoir collection that has intriguing symbolism and good nature imagery the reader can enjoy deciphering. The title alone lends itself to scrutiny when you take apart the words—death, tea, ticket, hard and ware, wear, and where. The wear and where of the death are discovered in the cover poem by that name, which sadly reports that the old-fashioned, small-town hardware store that opened in 1918, and was run by “the kindest man in town” had its “soul…stolen by Wal-Mart in 2005.”

The notion of the troubled soul fits in with her poems about nuns, a priest, and mea culpas from her childhood in Jamaica Plain, Boston, but also of nature, especially in the wetlands of Cape Cod where she now lives.

Especially gripping is her poem “Birthday” where she reveals: “My mother told me every year/I was an inconvenient child./Born two days before Christmas/and a month too soon.” But “she was the one moved away/to the City, where there were/Criminals. And Catholics./And worse, she became one.” The family “wrapped” her in “holier than thou.”

“Inconvenient” gives her guilt and also a mixed message, for the day she was born was also to her mother, “the best Christmas I ever had--/thanks to you. I was waited on/
and didn’t have to lift a finger.”

Finally, the notion of life and death are stripped of religion and become draped in nature in poems such as “Wetlands in October: Ecstasy.” “The swamp earns its keep in autumn./Flame-tipped leaves spread/like thighs under a lover’s touch,/across a still body…/until the killing frost strips/trees grey as embers/to remind us of our dying…”

It’s not clear where you can get a copy, but her friends at the West Falmouth Library where she founded “Calliope”, a monthly poetry reading series can probably help. She also facilitates the Barnstable Unitarian Poetry Group and is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets.

In her bio, it reads “When asked: ‘How did you get interested in poetry?’ Alice credits Emily Dickinson with saving her sanity following a severe head injury when she couldn’t read or drive or work for six months. She wrote her first poem ‘seizure’ shortly thereafter.”