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Arts & Entertainment

Poetry Alert: Richard O. Moore, with Brenda Hillman & Paul Ebenkamp

See the poets read Tuesday night at this monthly library event as Poetry at the Albany Library begins its fall season.

begins its fall season with legendary poet Richard O. Moore reading alongside fellow poets Brenda Hillman and Paul Ebenkamp. All three writers are known for their explorations of poetic form and language. They first came together in the project of producing Moore's Writing the Silences (UC Press, 2010), making their appearance together in Albany a widely anticipated event.

Richard O. Moore’s Writing the Silences is a 2011 Northern California Book Award nominee that offers up more than six decades of Moore’s work as a poet. After more than 40 years of work in public communications media while writing poetry in relative solitude, Moore finally reconnected with a literary community through The Squaw Valley Community of Writers in the late 1990s. There his poems drew the interest of Squaw Valley faculty member and award-winning poet Brenda Hillman. It took almost a decade for Hillman through, as Moore describes it, "loving persistence" to convince Moore to make public his poetry from eight manuscripts of mostly never before published poems.

The last of his generation of San Francisco Renaissance poets (a literary circle that included Kenneth Rexroth and was the precursor to Beat poetry), Richard O. Moore is also known as a photographer, filmmaker and an original founder of KPFA public radio. In addition, he is credited with contributing to the documentary as an American genre through his films for KQED public television in the 1960s, with subjects ranging from civil rights and Cuban politics to technology, 1960s jazz and contemporary literature.  

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With the publication of Writing the Silences, Moore, who had not sought an audience for the poetry he wrote between 1948 and 2008, illuminates 60 years of literary history and his personal dedication to freedom of form and to language. Moore, now in his ninth decade, has become a strong voice for the 21st century, contributing his unique artistic perspective and commitment to social justice and to the environment.

Brenda Hillman has published eight collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press. The most recent, Practical Water (2010), which won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, is part of her larger project of meditations on the natural elements that includes Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005) and Cascadia (2001). Hillman has edited an anthology of the poetry of Emily Dickinson and co-edited, with Patricia Dienstfrey, The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003). In 2010, she co-translated Jeongrye Choi’s book of poems, Instances (Parlor Press). Parlor Press recently published Hillman’s co-translation, with Diallah Haidar, of the selected works of Libyan poet Ashur Etwebi, Poems from Above the Hill (2011).

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Hillman has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Society of America. She holds the Olivia Filippi Chair in Poetry at St. Mary's College in Moraga and is on the permanent faculties of Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. In her writing and in her work as a private citizen, Hillman dedicates herself to peace and the environment. She participates in non-violent antiwar activism as a member of the Code Pink Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Paul Ebenkamp worked with Moore and Hillman to select and organize the poetry for Moore's collection, then applied his editorial talents to its completion and publication by UC Press. Ebenkamp is a writer, editor, and assistant academic coordinator. He has published poetry in Try!, RealPoetik and The Walrus. His editorial projects include Song of Myself: Selected Poems of Walt Whitman (co-edited with Robert Hass, Counterpoint Press); The Etiquette of Freedom: Gary Snyder and the Practice of the Wild (Counterpoint Press); as well as Writing the Silences: Selected Poetry of Richard O. Moore (co-edited with Brenda Hillman, UC Press). He is currently at work on An Anthology of Early Women Modernist Poets (forthcoming, 2012, Counterpoint Press).

A tribute to the spirit of collaboration and the power of writing shared with a receptive public--as Albany's citizens surely are--September's second Tuesdays promises to enlarge and enliven the historical-aesthetic-philosophical-political-environmental conversation.

Come join us for a historic evening that will include time for discussion and further exchange of poetry through our traditional open mic. (.)

For more information, visit albanylibrary.wordpress.com.

And, to hear Richard O.  Moore reading his poetry, click here.

Everybody makes mistakes ... ! If there's something in this article you think should be corrected, or if something else is amiss, call editor Emilie Raguso at 510-459-8325 or email her at emilier@patch.com. 

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