Q & A: Honor Moore

Honor Moore recently edited a collection of poems by Amy Lowell. Read this series of questions from Esther Lombardi, with Moore's answers.

EL: You have published a biography of your grandmother, a verse play, and several books of poetry. Can you give us a little bit about your background? What caused you to want to become a writer, editor and teacher?

HM: I was always a voracious reader; when I was tiny my mother read to me and my father made up stories he told us. My mother was a great reader who always was talking about a book she’d read and my father was an Episcopal clergyman, who preached, celebrated Holy Communion and read scripture in the church right next door to the house where we lived when I was a small child. I was exposed early to beautiful language and to the notion that expression in language powerful and important. When I was ten, I wrote part of a novel which the teacher read aloud to the class, and later I started to write poems. I began to write before I wanted to "become a writer." Becoming an occasional editor and a teacher of writing followed naturally on writing, as each are part of the literary life one enters on becoming a published, professional writer.

EL: Amy Lowell once said, "Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in." As you say in your introduction, Lowell published more 10 books of poems, a collection of Chinese translations, a biography of Keats, and three books of literary essays. How did Lowell infuse the "reactions of her personality" into these works?

HM: Each writer eventually develops a voice in which to express the reactions of her (or his) personality to the world in which she lives. Amy Lowell grew up the much younger child in a family of five children--essentially an only child–-and she had a condition which made her overweight which exempted her from the conventional life she might have led. Instead of closing the door behind her and taking to her bed as many women of the era did, Amy Lowell, with the support in particular of her brother Percival, began to write when the intensity of her response to the world overcame her at a performance of the great actress Eleonora Duse. She was in her late twenties when she wrote her first poem the night of that performance and then set out to train herself as a poet–-to become "worthy" as she put it--a process that took eight years. It was not until after her first book of poems was written that external influences inspired her to break out of the limitations of conventional poetry of the time--she read Emily Dickinson, HD, and Chinese poetry, and these influences led her to her own unique voice. A long term relationship with another woman, Ada Dwyer Russell, a former actress, gave her the emotional support to write courageously of her experience of sexuality and the natural world. Her work as an editor and critic were a campaign to create a context in the literary world for herself and other innovative poets of her time.

EL: What is your favorite poem from the Lowell collection? What about the poem do you enjoy? And, how does the poem relate to the body of work?

HM: I would be hard pressed to choose a favorite in the collection, but I will talk about a poem that I think is very unusual, "Madonna of the Evening Flowers." In the poem, the speaker (presumably Lowell herself) addresses a "you", presumably her partner Ada Russell. This is a romantic poem written in the context of a domestic situation which manages to be both loving and erotic. "Suddenly I am lonely: / Where are you?" When the speaker encounters the companion, what is spoken is domestic "You tell me that the peonies need spraying, / That the columbines have overrun all bounds, / That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and rounded", but the address manages in its music (the o's of columbine, overrun, bounds, japonica, rounded) to sonically express the lover’s ardor. The evocation of the garden here and a natural environment of great beauty and richness is a hallmark of Lowell’s work, as is the speaker’s unusual vulnerability and candor--an extremely moving quality that is unusual even now, and certainly for its time.