An Interview with Robert Moore
by Stephanie Yorke
SY About how the poems work on the page: one thing I really liked about how BOAE worked on the page was how often there were surprises over the line break, like the arrival of the pizza in poem twenty, or the very unexpected “a week at the bottom of the ole swimming hole” in poem forty-six. To me this doesn’t read as mere pyrotechnics. It seems to add to the gravity of the poems. How’d you do that? Where did you learn that?
RM Key to the approach I take to poetry is generating, by various and occult means, a position of maximal choice, a space where surprises happen. I think there’s a principle of improvisation that’s applicable here. Maybe the first thing you learn as actor is to always accept whatever’s offered by the situation you’re in, by the other actor(s) you’re building a scene with. That is, you never say “no” to what’s presented to you, however much it frustrates or otherwise thwarts the direction you’d hoped, or anticipated, things might take. In poetry, in that you’re only, as it were, playing with yourself, you have to be prepared to follow whatever trail of associations your mind manages to conjure up at any given moment. More often than not, of course, the trail to which you merrily commit yourself leads nowhere or down a path you can only follow for too few steps. But sometimes—rarely—something inserts itself into the moment that’s superficially unlikely and yet deeply appropriate. If there is, as you put it, “gravitas” to the results of this approach, I suspect it’s because the poem has managed on some level to reproduce the way a mind actually works. No one in the history of thinking has ever managed to generate a pure thought. They’re always a weird concatenation of the sublime and the ridiculous. Postmodernism which, as it were, invited Daffy Duck (as in John Ashbery) to rub shoulders with Hegel, has also been a great boon to this approach.
SY On the subject of surprising things rubbing shoulders with one another: the poems in BOAE move in a weird way from one poem to the next, yet that movement always feels natural, if not organized.
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[Distillate © HA&L + Stephanie Yorke I Robert Moore {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]
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