Honor Moore
Poet, Memoirist & Writer
“The streak of white daubed inside each poem is like a secret ticket to lightness and shining. Are these poem or paintings? Hard to say because their pleasures cross all such boundaries, placing Honor Moore among the happy poets.” —Fanny Howe
“Moore's poems are perfectly formed yet impassioned...incantations recited to transform confession and grief into liberation and warmth.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist
Honor Moore is the author of three collections of poems: Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir. She is the editor of Amy Lowell: Selected Poems for the Library of America and co-editor of The Stray Dog Cabaret, A Book of Russian Poems translated by Paul Schmidt. Her biography, The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, was a New York Times Notable Book in 1996 and was re-released in paperback by W.W. Norton in May 2009. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 for The Bishop’s Daughter, a memoir, published in 2008 and was released in paperback in May 2009, by W.W. Norton. Her play Mourning Pictures, was produced on Broadway and published in The New Women’s Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, which she edited. From 2005 to 2007, Moore was an off-Broadway theatre critic for The New York Times. She is also the editor of the Library of America's Poems from the Women's Movement anthology.
Honor Moore has received awards in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and in playwriting from the New York State Council on the Arts. Poems and prose have appeared in The American Scholar, Salmagundi, Conjunctions, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Open City, the Paris Review, and other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the graduate writing program at the New School and Colombia. She has taught nonfiction in the graduate programs at the University of Iowa and Columbia University School of the Arts and poetry at Wesleyan University. She lives in New York City.
About THE BISHOP'S DAUGHTER (2008)
“The Bishop’s Daughter is an unsparing portrait of a glamorous but elusive father and his daughter’s search for the truth about his secret life and conflicted loyalties. What makes Honor Moore's memoir so arresting is the effect of the author’s cool and penetrating gaze on her beloved subject. Before the life and book end, the god-like hero of New York's crisis years has climbed down from his pulpit to reveal the hidden tenderness, joys and fears of his all-too-human heart.’—Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind
Paul Moore’s vocation as an Episcopal priest took him—with his wife Jenny and a family that grew to nine children—from robber-baron wealth to work among the urban poor of postwar America, prominence as an activist bishop in Washington during the Johnson years, leadership in the civil rights and peace movements, and two decades as the bishop of New York. The Bishop’s Daughter is a daughter’s story of that complex, visionary man: a chronicle of her turbulent relationship with a father who struggled privately with his sexuality while she openly explored hers, and a searching account of the consequences of sexual secrets. With a depth of questioning that recalls James Carroll’s An American Requiem, this memoir engages the reader in the great issues of American life: war, race, family, sexuality, and faith.
About RED SHOES (2005)
Moore's third collection begins with a tango and never loses the keyed-up, elegant, ritualized eroticism of the push and pull of that dangerous courtship dance. The abrupt turns, the dagger stares, the barely sustained restraint, all this is found in Moore's sexy, telegraphic, edgy, and rapt poetry. Gloves, suits, silks, shoes—all are talismans of desire, tantalizing and thwarting. Reveries, memories, and dreams pitch from the vividly concrete to the uninhibitedly surreal as the poet dreams of her deceased parents, remembers a family home, gazes out windows at sunsets and rain, and considers the touch of fugitive lovers. Recurrent images appear like birds landing on ledges or suddenly remembered songs, as the poet's musings shift from the erotic to the spiritual in "Gnostic," the aesthetic in an homage to Wallace Stevens, and the elegiac in a graceful cycle of poems portraying photographer and friend Inge Morath. Exquisitely visual, cuttingly witty, Moore's poems are at once cool and searing. —Donna Seaman, Booklist
About POEMS FROM THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT (2009)
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” These lines by Muriel Rukeyser epitomize the spirit that animated a whole generation of women poets, from the 1960s to the 1980s, who in exploring the unspoken truths of their lives sparked a literary revolution. Honor Moore’s anthology presents 58 poets whose work defines an era, among them Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Sonia Sanchez, May Swenson, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Ann Waldman, Sharon Olds, Diane Di Prima, Lucille Clifton, Judy Grahn, Alice Notley, and Eileen Myles. Here is a fresh and revelatory look at a crucial time in American poetry that presents the full range of its themes and approaches and a generous sampling of its most compelling voices.
