| To: Retort Via: IB [This evening there will be a unique opportunity to enjoy and to honor the poet, war-resister, syndicalist, and filmmaker Richard Moore. WRITING THE SILENCES has just been published by the University of California Press, a collection of Richard Moore's poetry edited by Brenda Hillman and Paul Ebenkamp from some 900 original poems, 1946–2008. There will also be a showing of two of Moore's film portraits of American poets - ROBERT DUNCAN and JOHN WIENERS - aired in 1965 on National Education Television and almost never seen since. As Steve Dickison puts it, 'Each film is set on the poet's home turf — Duncan at the home he shared with Jess; Wieners revisiting the Hotel Wentley and walking in Golden Gate Park — and takes its concerns from the poet's own work, and the poet-filmmaker's engagement with those concerns.' I recently attended the celebration of Dick's 90th birthday on the Marin headlands; I can attest that his sardonic wit is fully intact and he continues to stand with lissom grace at a most radical angle to the world. IB] The Poetry Center presents RICHARD MOORE Saturday May 8, 2010 7:30 pm Unitarian Center 1187 Franklin (at Geary), San Francisco $10 ($5 low income, SFSU students free, NOTA) RICHARD O. MOORE (born Feb. 26, 1920) is among the longest-lived of the poets from the original Berkeley Renaissance - he studied in the mid-1940s in Ernst Kantorowicz's medieval history class alongside Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser. With Kenneth Rexroth and other poets, he was active in the 1950s San Francisco Renaissance. His earliest published poetry appeared in 1946 in George Leite and Bern Porter's CIRCLE, the first of the local magazines to focus on the new writing and poetry emerging during and immediately after World War II. Richard Moore was one of the anarcho-syndicalist war resisters who founded Pacifica radio in 1946. He left KPFA in 1954 to attend the birth of public television and worked, albeit uneasily, at KQED, San Francisco, and KTCA, Minneapolis-Saint Paul. For two decades beginning in 1960, Richard Moore produced an astounding array of films for television, on subjects from civil rights campaigns to jazz festivals, from mid-60s Cuba to the Najavo nation to cities in China, and focused on individuals including James Baldwin, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Elijah Muhammad, Duke Ellington, Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and Eudora Welty. His 1965 series USA: Poetry, begun in concert with the Berkeley Poetry Festival, offered brief, intimate portrayals of better than a dozen poets, most associated with the New American Poetry — Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, John Wieners, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlingetti, and Ed Sanders among them. For a partial filmography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_O._Moore#Filmography_.28partial_list.29 |