Richard O. Moore
Richard O. Moore was born in 1920 in Ohio. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he took poetry classes with Josephine Miles. In the late 1930s, Moore attended Kenneth Rexroth’s literary salons, referred to as “the Fridays,” at Rexroth’s home on Potrero Hill. The assembled group included numerous figures from the San Francisco Renaissance, particularly Jack Spicer and Madeline Gleason, as well as Philip Lamantia and Philip Whalen, both of whom would come to be associated with the Beat Generation. For a short time, “the Fridays” also took place at Moore’s Bay Area apartment. During the Second World War, Moore became a pacifist, left Berkeley, and pursued ballet and poetry. On April 22, 1947, at the First Festival of Modern Poetry, organized by Gleason at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery in San Francisco, Moore was the first poet to read.
Moore published only two collections of poetry, making his literary début at the age of ninety: The Particulars of Place (Omnidawn, 2015), which was published posthumously, and Writing the Silences (University of California Press, 2010), a collection that spans six decades of his work, which was edited by Brenda Hillman and Paul Ebenkamp. Moore also privately published Selections for Ruth (1996), a book of poems for his wife.
Moore is, perhaps, best known for his long career in public broadcasting. He co-founded the first listener-supported radio station in the country, Pacifica Radio (KPFA), which often featured friends from Rexroth’s literary circle as guests. In the mid-1950s, Moore went on to television broadcasting at KQED, and eventually led a team there that produced documentary films for national public television. He made over one hundred documentaries, including USA: Poetry (1966), which featured John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Denise Levertov, and Anne Sexton, among others. In 1978, Moore produced The Writer in America, a profile of Toni Morrison. On Moore’s documentaries, scholar Olivier Brossard writes: “That Moore was first a poet is not a mere biographical detail: his intellectual formation and aesthetic disposition account for his cinematographic treatment of poetry […] Moore’s films were not about the poems; rather, they can be seen as extending and continuing them. They offer to do with sound and image what the poems say with words.” Moore retired from broadcasting in 2000 and focused on poetry during his elder years.
It was Brenda Hillman who convinced Moore to publish his poetry. Hillman wrote the foreword to Writing the Silences, in which she remarked that Moore’s poems were “haunted by images of barren landscapes and resistance to violence […] this resistance has to do with negotiating silences […] a poet’s struggle is in relation to meaning itself, the idea of meaning in a world that has no easy gods or moral codes, a world in which institutions refuse to cooperate. Such resistance—and the provisions made by the mind in relation to non-human nature—are the main motifs and methods of this volume.”
Richard O. Moore died on March 25, 2015, at his home in Mill Valley, California.