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: "For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives." In a Roundtable discussion, you once said that poetry is "the verbalization of thought or dream, the hidden voice, the dream voice..." How does that life of books and dream voice coalesce to form Lowell’s poetic imagination?

HM: Amy Lowell had her first revelation about poetry by reading in the library of the Boston Athenaeum. She read Leigh Hunt’s Imagination and Fancy, a critical book written in the Romantic period, and wrote that "Guided by Hunt, I found a new Shakespeare, one of whom I’d never dreamed..." What she meant was that reading a critic’s response allowed her to look at Shakespeare entirely differently, to get below the surface of what she had been taught by unimaginative teachers. Once a young poet gets a sense of where the great dead poet she or he is reading is coming from as a human being who dreams and imagines, she herself can enter that domain, which I call the dream voice–-the voice that comes from the self who does not speak in ordinary daily life.

EL: How does that "formal feeling," after the "great pain" that Emily Dickinson talks about, help to loosen the flood gates of the imagination?

HM: Using a form can force a poet to use words she might not have thought of using had she not been compelled by the form to repeat a word or to rhyme one. In that way, a form can be an oracle, fishing words up from the unconscious, the imagination. Thereafter, one can remember the feeling of having gotten the strange word and fish it up oneself. I wrote a poem, "In the Dark", that is in my book Darling, in which I decided that every line had to end with the word "love" or a word that rhymed with it, or a word that began with "stra–"--in one case I cheated and used "stru–" But it was a great exercise and the poem is quite mysterious.

EL: What particular (or peculiar) challenges did you face in editing the Lowell Collection?

HM: The challenge was to become familiar enough with the work that I could judge it on its own terms, since she has been so sparsely republished, badly represented in anthologies, and insulted by the keepers of the canon. I had to separate myself from literary history, enter her consciousness and world, and figure out who she was and what a "great" Amy Lowell poem was. Mysteriously she came to life and was great company. I wanted to honor her-–and also to provide in an introduction a frame of reference for coming to her fresh.