HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (AP) - Home to Dogfish Head, one of America’s most famous craft breweries, the sleepy town of Milton, Delaware (population 2,879), isn’t a place you usually find yourself unless you are a craft beer lover.
Or unless you are Mary Barbara Moore, and you’re just there to spread and celebrate the word.
Since retiring from Marshall University in May 2014, Moore, who taught literature classes and expository writing for 18 years at Marshall, has been on her A-game, racking up poetry prizes like LeBron James racks up NBA championships.
In the past two years, Moore has published three books and won four poetry contests - including the aforementioned 2016 Dogfish Head Poetry Award judged by Carol Frost, Baron Wormser and Jan Beatty and for her second full-length collection “Flicker” (Broadkill River Press, 2016).
Her latest poetry book, “Amanda and the Man Soul,” has been selected by Dorianne Laux for the 2017 EMRYS award.
Other recently published poetry books include “Eating the Light” (Sable Books, 2016) chosen by Allison Joseph for the 2016 chapbook contest.
She won the second place award, in 2017, in Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Poetry Contest, and the poems appeared in the 2017 awards issue. And Moore also has poems in the “Voices on Unity: Coming Together, Falling Apart” anthology of contemporary writers in Appalachia that is out now.
A California native who also taught for seven years at UC-Davis, where she got her Ph.D. in Renaissance poetry and prose, Moore said she is grateful that this time (after spending 25 years teaching) has been so fruitful and filled with a daily exercise and love of her wild craft.
“The reason I have been able to do this is that I am retired, but it is also like a flood gate has been opened,” Moore said. “I write every day. Sometimes I literally look out my window and write what I see. I keep journals of beautiful or surprising words and phrases I’ve read or overheard, including inspiring phrases from other poets. I brainstorm random lists of words and start a poem using them … When I have a current obsession, I stumble on and also keep an eye out for objects or events related to it. Right now I am obsessed with redbuds, such a beautiful thing that evokes all of these other things, but it is so beautiful itself.”
Her latest work, “Amanda and the Man Soul,” is an example of an obsession of a persona and character - Amanda - who is a product of vanishing twin syndrome, in which one of a pair of twins dies in utero and the dead twin’s DNA or actual tissue becomes incorporated into the living twin’s body. About two years ago, Moore began putting the Amanda character together with that biological/genetic condition and began a journey that has turned into dozens of poems.
“I have this weird character called ’Amanda,’ and I had her around to mainly talk about subversion and conformity to female stereotypes. During that time period, I did a writing project - 30/30 with Tupelo Press, a poem a day for a month and get your friends to contribute to the press. During that time, Amanda started changing and becoming more of a full-fledged character,” Moore said. “When you are writing a poem a day you had to grasp at straws, and one of the straws I grasped at was Amanda, and she took on more form and structure and more character. Those Amanda poems became the framework for another collection, called ’Chimera,’ which means both illusion and monster, so that is the name of a full-length manuscript, and ’Amanda and The Man Soul’ (which is 40 pages) is a smaller manuscript, and what comes into it and ’Chimera’ is the concept of the vanished twin.”
Moore said she isn’t sure why the subject fascinated her so much, but perhaps it was because she always wanted a sister.
“I was a lonely only child, and, maybe in some sense, writers are kind of outliers anyway. So I think that I was able to infuse Amanda with both revulsion and longing toward the vanished twin. She sees herself as a monster because she has the DNA of another person in her, and the longing comes from the fact that she would not like to be alone, and in a perverse way she isn’t alone because Gloria, the vanished twin, has a name and a voice.”
Moore, whose poems have been called “breathtaking and sometimes heart-stopping” (by Sandra M. Gilbert), said it took a good bit of life to find her voice in writing.
“It wasn’t some linear thing that I always knew. I didn’t, but my mother was into poetry and read me poetry,” Moore said. “When I was a little kid I wrote a couple of rhymed verse Christmas cards to her, one of which I just found - fortunately I can’t remember it. … I never thought of writing as a thing to do.”
Moore jokes that back in ancient times (she was in undergrad at UC-Riverside from 1963 to 1967) she knew she wanted to study English, but it was before the days of creative writing specialties, so she studied mostly the classics at a time when few women modernist writers were even introduced in college.
“My junior year I took creative writing, and it was no big turning. It wasn’t like, ’Oh this is my life’s work,’” Moore said. “After I graduated I started writing poetry on my own, in the early to mid-1970s. I met some poets in Sonoma County where I lived. I started taking it more seriously and submitted poems to magazines, and they published, and that was fabulous, and that set me on the path of always writing. So I kept writing and I didn’t even think about submitting very much.”
Moore, who was married and working full-time as a social worker writing at night, said her love of writing poetry took a deeper dive when she divorced and moved to Sacramento where she found The Sacramento Poetry Center (www.sacramentopoetrycenter.com/).
“I became connected through a friend to the Sacramento Poetry Center. It is a community-based poetry center with no university affiliation, and it has been in existence for over 40 years,” Moore said. “It has always been itself, and it finds room in different buildings. It is right now in a theater complex in downtown Sacramento. There I had an avenue for reading and submitting and had a group of friends, and we would read each other’s work.”
Working at the time as as technical writer, Moore said her heart yearned to pursue English further, and she did.
“I was making a lot of money for me, but I felt like my brain was not being used, and I went back to grad school (at UC-Davis) to get my Ph.D. in literature. My thought was, ’Even if I don’t get a job I can have these years doing what I love in grad school.’ UC-Davis had tons of great poets, including Gary Snyder, Sandy McPherson, Alan Williamson - and I studied with Sandy and Alan - but I was mainly still a lit person. But all of this time I am writing and revising and saving drafts. When I finished I amazingly got a tenure-track job at Marshall and started teaching.”
Moore, who began teaching at Marshall in 1995, said although she had been East (she had a friend in Louisville, Kentucky), she was not sure what to expect. But she quickly learned to love the people and the rugged, sparsely populated mountains of West Virginia.
“I had no concept of a small town like Huntington or of Appalachia per se. When I was first here, I was like, ’Where is the cappuccino?’” Moore said, bursting into laughter. “But the second summer I was here, on the spur of the moment I went whitewater rafting. I had been once to the New River Gorge, knowing it was the oldest river still in its banks in North America, and that it runs north, and that it is totally beautiful. I wanted to get down there, so I decided I am not a hiker, so I decided to go rafting. I went all by myself with a bunch of strangers, and it was a pretty good time of the year in a pretty good year and it was really good. I was terrified, but I was laughing my a— off. I always say that was my conversion experience to grow to love the land. I had already grown to love the people because of my teaching and how they always surprised me, how people who - first of all there are some totally brilliant students from Marshall, and some of them with real accents, and some kids whose grammar wasn’t real good, but when you asked them to write about their father’s hands, they can write just so beautifully and so full of imagery and metaphor, even though their grammar might not be that great. It almost makes me tear up, thinking of those kids that blow you out of the water.”
Moore said Katharine Rodier, who was a friend at Marshall, helped her put together her first poetry book, “The Book of Snow,” published in 1997. Moore also had a critical book, “Desiring Voices, Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism,” come out in 2000 from Southern Illinois University Press.
“Then I was just working so much as a teacher. I was still writing but just sending out occasionally and getting accepted,” Moore said.
Unlike some other published genres, Moore said there’s a whole complex hierarchy with publishing poetry - what she calls the “Po-Biz” - where poets try to get into the best journals and then try to win a prize to get their poem collections published by small indie presses, a university press, or - in rare cases - some of the larger private publishers such as Copper Canyon and Tupelo Press.
“The thing is that once you learn the craft you have to get it published in magazines and journals. There is this whole complex hierarchy among the magazines. Some magazines that are very well thought of, and some that are fine, but they do not have a big reputation, and the same with the presses. Most people who write poetry feel lucky to have a book published period. I did get quite a few publications (in) it was just over 14 years.”
Moore said poet friends such as Art Stringer, who has always been helpful to critique her work, and Greg Fraser, who helped her order and edit “Flicker,” which won the Dogfish Head prize, have always been essential for helping her hone her craft.
“Sometimes poets start out to write a collection, but most poets like me collect poems they have written,” Moore said. “The mind body who is writing the poems have certain obsessions, so themes and common images come out, and you use those when you are organizing a collection. So in all cases those poems that came into the books already existed. Lately, I’ve begun totally rewriting poems in entirely different directions than the first draft suggested. With all of this in mind, I say that it’s associative, really like jazz improv, but then once I get something resembling a draft of a poem I like, I revise and revise and revise. I have critiquers I rely on, especially my dear friend Art Stringer.”
Moore said it is through Stringer’s legacy with Marshall University’s Art Stringer Visiting Writer’s Series and Writers Can Read at Empire Books and News that more people have been exposed to what she thinks is a real renaissance era of poetry in Huntington.
“Right now in Huntington, there is a huge amount of good poets, and who knows why? It is partly the university and maybe something about the place and Appalachia that there is a lot of good writing in general going on in Appalachia, but there is an awful lot of good poets centered right now around Huntington,” Moore said. “So there’s Art Stringer, Ron Houchin, Joel Peckham, Sarah Chavez, Rachael Rhinehart - she just won a major prize, the Philip Levine Prize - and Eric Smith, Mary Imos Stike, Laura Treacy Bentley, Nicole Lawrence and Cody Lumpkin, and Kent Smith and Carrie Oeding just left Marshall last year, and they have had a lot of poetry published, so it is just like this concentration of a whole bunch of poetry energy and karma.”
Moore, who has traveled as far afield as Postignano, Italy, for writing conferences, said there have been many opportunities recently to read.
In the past few months she has been in Wheeling, at the invitation of Marc Harshman (West Virginia’s poet laureate), and was just in Pittsburgh doing a campus reading at Carlow University with Chavez, who also teaches at Marshall.
While Moore doesn’t expect poetry to ever reach mass audiences, she does hope the average person will give it a chance to just listen once, and listen again, to see if the words that come raining down into poets’ heads can move them.
“Like, how many people in America care about the kind of paintings that are in museums and how many people in America love classical music and improv jazz? So I am not saying it is the same level of - I don’t know what you want to call it - fancy art, but except for greeting cards verse, a lot of Americans don’t find poetry accessible, and therefore they are not interested in it. It could be partly to do with the way it is taught in schools, because really poetry is music and imagery made of words, and if it were presented as stuff to listen to and enjoy then some people would love it.”
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Information from: The Herald-Dispatch, http://www.herald-dispatch.com
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