Interview with Robert Moore • by Stephanie Yorke 1

Hamilton Arts & Letters   SY Based on Actual Events (BOAE) carries this very engrossing structure over the length of a book and makes it look easy, which makes me suspect it was difficult. Was it difficult? Which of your five poetry books was the most difficult to write? RM It was difficult to structure, but that’s when—and why—I rely so heavily on my editor, the inestimable Carmine Starnino. Carmine takes the unruly hoard I present to him, slaughters the weakest members, and makes the rest go sit in the corner of the room best suited to their relative charm. I tend to write poem to poem, with very little sense of an overall structure (with the exception of my fourth book, The Golden Book of Bovinities). In terms of degree of difficulty for BOAE, it wasn’t nearly as difficult as my first book, which took much longer to write (forty years?), likely because I hadn’t yet found anything approximating my own voice and because I was trying to figure out exactly how poems work on a page.  [  >>>>>  FORWARD ]   + [Distillate © HA&L + Stephanie Yorke I Robert Moore {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]