Remembering Richard Moore, 1927-2009
In memory of the upcoming tenth anniversary of my father's death, I thought I'd take a moment to remember the poet Richard Moore, 1927-2009.
During the last months of his life, Richard wrote the following fragment. What better person to share his accomplishments than himself.
"Throughout a long life, Richard Moore has won through to the belief that the only real reward in the art of writing is the writing itself. The first of his nineteen books was published and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize when he was forty-four. The books that followed have brought the total to a novel, a book of literary essays, translations of a Greek tragedy and a Roman comedy and fifteen books of poetry, which include a sequence of fifty-eight Petrarchian sonnets, an epic of American history and an epic whose hero is a mouse born and raised in a sewer."
A pilot in the Air Force, a university professor, a poet and fierce seeker of truth, to me he was my father. I loved and admired him deeply. Ours was a complicated relationship, one that has found its way into a number of stories over the years. I've reprinted the short memoir I wrote for a tribute issue of Light Quarterly published shortly after Richard's death.
