CANR
WORK TITLE: A Termination
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.honormoore.com/
CITY: New York
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 191
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born October 28, 1945, in New York, NY; daughter of Paul (an Episcopal bishop) and Jenny (a writer) Moore.
EDUCATION:Radcliffe College, B.A. (cum laude), 1967; attended Yale University, 1967-69.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. New York University, New York, NY, adjunct professor, 1980-82; New School, New York, NY, instructor in creative nonfiction and poetry, 1999—; Columbia University School of the Arts writing program, adjunct professor, 2001—. Visiting scholar in poetry and playwriting at James Madison University, 1980; visiting distinguished writer in creative nonfiction, University of Iowa, 1997, Bennington Workshops, 1999, Wesleyan University, 2000—, and New York State’s summer writer’s institute, 2001—. Has given numerous poetry readings at libraries, colleges, and women’s centers throughout the United States. Founder of the Poetry Series at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Treasurer and member of board of directors, PEN American Center; member of board of directors, Poets and Writers, Inc., 1975-85, Manhattan Theatre Club, 1973-78, and Jenny McKean Moore Fund for Writers, 1995-2000.
AVOCATIONS:Travel (Europe, Asia, and the Soviet Union).
MEMBER:PEN, Poetry Society of America.
AWARDS:Creative Artists Public Service fellowship from New York State Council on the Arts, 1975; National Endowment for the Arts fellow, 1981; Connecticut Commission on the Arts grant, 1992; Humanities Laureate, St. Joseph’s College, 2000; Guggenheim fellowship, 2004.
WRITINGS
Off-Broadway theatre critic, New York Times, 2005-07.
Moore’s poem “I Have a War with My Mother” was recited in Claudia Weill’s motion picture, Girlfriends, Warner Brothers, 1978. Some of her poems are recorded on a long-playing record, “A Sign I Was Not Alone,” Out and Out Books, 1978.
SIDELIGHTS
“Although Honor Moore’s writing spans a number of genres, critics comment without fail on the ‘poetic’ qualities of her language,” wrote Catherine D. Halley in Contemporary Women Poets. Halley found that, as a poet, “Moore is a master of technique. Her familiarity with English, French, and classical lyric traditions demonstrates an erudition that is rare among contemporary poets.” Moore’s play Mourning Pictures began as a series of poems concerning her mother’s death. Susan Braudy in Ms. described Mourning Pictures as “a stunning first play about the exploration of what a daughter and a mother say to each other and to themselves when the mother is dying. … It gives us a deep sounding of one woman’s development as a daughter, a woman and a writer.” Moore’s drama also earned praise from Brendan Gill in the New Yorker: “Moore is a very good writer, and there is scarcely a word too many in her text.” Gill added: “She has pruned it and left room within it for silences that put me in mind of passages in [T.S.] Eliot’s Four Quartets.”
In The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, Moore tells the story of her grandmother, who spent some twenty years as a painter before giving it up and sinking into alcoholism and depression. Sargent “was an exuberant socialite, iconoclastic wit, audacious lover—and mother and wife—from Brahmin Boston,” Massachusetts, explained Betsy Sussler in Bomb magazine. “She was also a uniquely talented and professionally recognized painter who exhibited in New York and Boston, but she abruptly stopped making art in her mid-forties. Suffering from severe depression, using alcohol to quell the growing conflict between her creative and social drives, she spent the last years of her life in and out of sanatoriums undergoing shock treatment or traveling with a chauffeur through Europe, estranged from her family and isolated from friends and colleagues.” Moore, according to Susan Ware in the New York Times Book Review, offers a “haunting and … complex story, part biography, part memoir, of the woman who happened to be her grandmother. … Sargent, sane or crazy, clearheaded or drunk, leaps off the pages.” A critic for Publishers Weekly noted that Moore “oscillates between straightforward biography and wistful memoir.” Donna Seaman in Booklist concluded: “Moore’s insightful resurrection of Sargent is a boon to everyone interested in the lives of women and artists.”
The Bishop’s Daughter: A Memoir is Moore’s story of her often turbulent relationship with her late father, Episcopalian bishop Paul Moore, Jr. Paul had been a much- decorated U.S. Marine in World War II, serving in the Pacific theater. He entered the ministry following his return to the United States and his marriage to his first wife, Boston socialite Jenny McKean, and he created a reputation as one of the foremost liberal clergymen in the United States. Paul spoke out against discrimination and racism in the fifties and sixties, made common cause with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and joined him in the march to Selma, protested the Vietnam War, and ordained the first openly gay female Episcopalian priest in the denomination. He also, unknown to his family and to the public, led a second life with a gay partner, despite the fact that he and Jenny had nine children and Moore remarried within two years of Jenny’s death from cancer. Honor, the eldest of Paul and Jenny’s children, composed The Bishop’s Daughter in part to reconcile this secret part of her father’s life with her own recollections of him. Paul “loved men, but he could never fully accept his homosexuality. The fallout was dire—he divorced Honor Moore’s mother, and a daughter’s loyalty to her mother set her on a collision course with him,” concluded Matthew Price in Newsday. “‘I came to see who my father was in his terms,’ says Moore,” according to Publishers Weekly reviewer Peter Cannon. “‘He saw himself as a normal person who had a conflict and did the best he could with it.’”
The Bishop’s Daughter “is both a probing autobiography and forthright reflection on a man who, for all his flaws, inspired his daughter to understand him,” Price wrote. “Eloquently summing up her father’s inner life, she comes to realize that his power derived from a shadowy existence that both tormented and inspired him.” The volume “can be considered a kind of detective [story], full of dramatic emotional surprises, in which Moore pieces together the secret side of her father’s life,” declared Cannon. “Paul is a sympathetic figure, more human and fallible and somehow more noble than if we had simply been left with the picture of him as the powerful and renowned bishop of New York,” Judith Freeman stated in the Los Angeles Times. “In the end, Honor wishes she could tell him ‘that to me his living of his passion was heroic.’ One feels that both Paul … and his daughter have been set free by this book. There is no shame left, and neither is there blame.” “The remarkable and loving accomplishment of The Bishop’s Daughter, ” concluded New York Times Book Review contributor Kathryn Harrison, “is that in revealing Paul … as he could never disclose himself, in showing him humbled and suffering, … Moore does not diminish but enlarges him.”
[OPEN NEW]
Twelve years after The Bishop’s Daughter, Moore wrote about her mother in Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury. A combination of biography and memoir, the book chronicles the life of her mother, Jenny Moore. This includes being the first woman in her family to go to college, her marriage and role in raising nine children, and then her involvement in the peace and social justice movements of the mid-twentieth century. Honor Moore builds her book on an unfinished memoir that her mother left to her, but Moore also uses letters from and interviews with numerous family and friends to flesh out the portrait of a woman who died at the age of fifty, just as she was hitting her stride.
“A deeply insightful, empathetic family history” is how a writer in Kirkus Reviews described the book. They praised it as a “sensitive” and “sharp” portrait of a “complex, contradictory woman.” They point out that the book particularly captures how both Jenny and Honor worked through the beginnings of the women’s liberation movement. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly called the book a “poignant look at the complexities of motherhood and womanhood” though one “at times overstuffed with detail.” Janny Scott, in the New York Times Book Review, wrote that “Moore takes the trouble to see her mother’s choices in their historical and social context.” Scott called the book “ruminative” and “sometimes lyrical.”
In A Termination, Moore turns to her own life and particularly her decision in 1969, when she was twenty-three years old, to have an abortion. The book not only discusses that decision but also Moore’s sexual life, how that was shaped by the culture of the late ’60s, and how having an abortion has affected her throughout the rest of her life. “Haunting and lyrical,” wrote a reviewer in Kirkus Reviews. They described the “candid, prose poem-like explorations” as “compelling reading,” and they also found that the book suggested the “possible shape of things to come in a post-Roe v. Wade era.”
[CLOSE NEW]
Moore once told CA: “I began writing in about 1968 just as the women’s movement was beginning. That movement and the community of women writers that it encouraged have nurtured me as a writer. Writers, especially writers working with risky and controversial subject matter, need community and context. I write out of the women’s movement. The journalist Annie Gottlieb once said that she defined the women’s movement as ‘women in movement’; it is this movement, both in myself and in women around me (friends, family—I have five sisters) that energizes my art.
“I am a poet first and then a playwright and prose writer. My poems are charts of where I am, psychically and spiritually. Mourning Pictures is a play, but it is also a long poem. My play Years is the chronicle of a friendship between two women in their twenties. Norah and Rachel were best friends in high school and see each other four or five times during their twenties. The play begins with Rachel’s college graduation and ends with Norah’s thirtieth birthday. It is a play about commitment to friendship and commitment to art: Rachel is an orchestra conductor, Norah a poet. The play does not explore the idea that if ‘one sings the other doesn’t’ but rather asks, ‘if both sing, what happens?’”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Contemporary Women Poets, Catherine D. Halley, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.
Moore, Honor, The Bishop’s Daughter: A Memoir, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2008.
PERIODICALS
Bomb, fall, 1996, Betsy Sussler, “Suzannah Lessard and Honor Moore,” author interview.
Booklist, February 15, 1996, Donna Seaman, review of The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, p. 979; September 15, 2001, Seaman, review of Darling, p. 182; June 1, 2005, Seaman, review of Red Shoes: Poems, p. 1742; April 15, 2008, Seaman, review of The Bishop’s Daughter, p. 8.
Boston Globe, May 31, 2008, Judy Bolton-Fasman, “In ‘Bishop’s Daughter,’ a Famous Father’s Life Is Put into Perspective,” review of The Bishop’s Daughter.
Christianity Today, April 24, 2008, “The Problem with Juicy Memoirs: Recent Tell-all Biographies of Parents Are Only Symptoms of Deeper Concern,” review of The Bishop’s Daughter.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2008, review of The Bishop’s Daughter; December 1, 2019, review of Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury; May 15, 2024, review of A Termination.
Lambda Book Report, July, 1996, Lynn Felman, review of The White Blackbird, p. 22; March 22, 2008, Judith Katz, review of The Bishop’s Daughter.
Library Journal, July 1, 2005, Doris Lynch, review of Red Shoes, p. 85; May 1, 2008, Anna M. Donnelly, review of The Bishop’s Daughter, p. 66.
Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2008, Judith Freeman, “Bishop Paul Moore’s Daughter Reflects on Her Late Father’s Closeted Homosexuality,” review of The Bishop’s Daughter.
Miami Herald, November 11, 2008, Amy Canfield, “Father’s Double Life Complicated Their Relationship,” review of The Bishop’s Daughter.
Ms., November, 1974, Susan Braudy, review of Mourning Pictures.
Nation, March 11, 1996, Elizabeth Hawes, review of The White Blackbird, p. 32; June 30, 2008, Christine Smallwood, “Back Talk: Honor Moore,” author interview.
Newsday, June 15, 2008, Matthew Price, review of The Bishop’s Daughter.
Newsweek, May 12, 2008, “Honor Thy Father,” review of The Bishop’s Daughter. p. 57.
New Yorker, November 18, 1974, Brendan Gill, review of Mourning Pictures.
New York Times, May 23, 2008, “Her Father, His Secrets, Herself,” review of The Bishop’s Daughter, p. 29.
New York Times Book Review, April 14, 1996, Susan Ware, “Improper Bostonian,” review of The White Blackbird; May 11, 2008, “Difficult Truths,” Kathryn Harrison, review of The Bishop’s Daughter, p. 12; March 29, 2020, Janny Scott, “The Writer’s Daughter,” review of Our Revolution, p. 18(L).
Publishers Weekly, December 18, 1995, review of The White Blackbird, p. 33; July 9, 2001, review of Darling, p. 63; May 30, 2005, review of Red Shoes, p. 57; March 3, 2008, review of The Bishop’s Daughter, p. 38; March 17, 2008, Peter Cannon, review of The Bishop’s Daughter, p. 27; December 9, 2019, review of Our Revolution, p. 139.
Telegraph (London, England), June 23, 2008, A.N. Wilson, “Gay Bishops Have Changed My Mind,” review of The Bishop’s Daughter.
ONLINE
Honor Moore website, https://www.honormoore.com (June 12, 2024).
MV Times News Corp., https://www.mvartsandideas.com (August, 2015), Laura Roosevelt, author interview.
New School website, https://www.newschool.edu (June 12, 2024), author profile.
Smith College website, https://www.smith.edu (June 12, 2024), author profile.
Honor Moore’s newest book, Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury, was published on by W.W. Norton on March 10.
Moore’s previous memoir, The Bishop’s Daughter, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, and many other journals and anthologies. For the Library of America, she edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems and Poems from the Women’s Movement, an Oprah Summer Reading List pick. She has been poet-in-residence at Wesleyan University and the University of Richmond, visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts, and three times the Visiting Distinguished Writer in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. When still in her twenties, Mourning Pictures, her play in verse about her mother’s death, was produced on Broadway. The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, published in 1996 and recently reissued, was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives and writes in New York, where she is on the graduate writing faculty of The New School.
Honor Moore’s papers are held at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
Our Revolution, The Bishop’s Daughter, and The White Blackbird are available on Audible.com.
A Conversation with Honor Moore
9 years ago Laura Roosevelt Artist Profiles Poetry 0
honor moore vertical by laura rooseveltLast December, the New York Times asked Honor Moore — poet, memoirist, feminist, peace activist, daughter of Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore, and seasonal Vineyard resident — to write a couple of poems inspired by reading the newspaper. The result was a triptych of poems referencing the Ebola virus and Guantanamo Bay prisoners. (See nytimes.com/times-insider/author/honor-moore/.) Arts & Ideas asked Laura Roosevelt to talk with Ms. Moore about the intersection of poetry and politics. Their conversation follows.
LAURA ROOSEVELT: How did the assignment from the New York Times work?
HONOR MOORE: They asked me to read the paper as a poet and then somehow find a poem or poems within it. I found two stories: One was about the evacuation back to the U.S. of an incredibly heroic Ebola guy [a U.S. doctor who had contracted the Ebola virus while treating patients with the virus in Sierra Leone], and the other was about the release to Uruguay of some prisoners from Guantanamo Bay — two situations in which people were being released. I thought, “This is the experience of reading the newspaper; the coincidence of these releases is probably not going to be on the editorial page.” So I made three poems, juxtaposing these two things. The paper mentioned that after working with Ebola patients in Africa, the doctor would have to pour the sweat out of his boots. What an amazing image. And then I thought of the free men walking through the streets of Montevideo, and what kind of poison they would have to pour from their shoes. That’s the place where the poems happened.
LR: Do you often write political poetry?
HM: I think that all poetry is political, in a sense. Poets speak in voices that are usually hidden; every human being has a kind of hidden consciousness, and poetry is a verbalization of that. Often, poetry can say things that can’t get said in any other way.
I get tired of the so-called split between political poetry and poetry poetry — it’s a very American thing that doesn’t really happen elsewhere. For instance, in 1982, Jonathan Schell published “The Fate of the Earth,” in which he said that you have to imagine — personally imagine — a nuclear holocaust, and then you can be against it in a deep way. So I did: I wrote a poem called “Spuyten Duyvil,” in which I imagined a nuclear holocaust in New York City. I thought, “If you really imagine yourself in these circumstances, then you really have to oppose nuclear weapons.” I had the idea, then, in 1982, that I wanted to put the idea of nuclear holocaust into every poem, because we live with that threat every day. Now, since we’ve had these wars that just keep going and going, and people have become numb to them, war keeps edging into my poems.
LR: In your memoir The Bishop’s Daughter, you discuss how, in the 1960s and 1970s, women needed to begin finding their own voices — distinctly women’s voices — in poetry. Can you talk about the politics of that?
HM: The old framework for poetry was dominated by men, particularly white men. The black feminist poet Audre Lord wrote in an essay that, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In other words, if you want your poems to change the world, you must come up with your own tools.
I did an anthology in 2009 called Poems from the Women’s Movement that contained poems written between 1966 and 1982. It’s as if a wind blew through women writing poems. My friend Carolyn Forché said that in the past, there was always the blue velvet chair for the one woman poet in the photograph of all the guys … and then suddenly, there were hundreds of us. That’s what the book addresses — what happened in between.
It’s not necessarily that there is a “woman’s way” of writing poems, but if you look at all the most powerful woman poets, from Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning in “Aurora Leigh,” to Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, and Jorie Graham, you will see that all of these people, while not necessarily calling themselves feminists, are attempting to make new forms. That’s the politics of it — how we free ourselves from the constraints of “the master’s tools.”
Of course it didn’t only mean form; it also meant subject matter. One of my very early poems, called “My Mother’s Moustache,” made facial hair a metaphor for female power and memory.
LR: What do you think made you become a political person?
HM: I was born to it. My parents were not, but they became political. It was a part of my growing up to go to demonstrations, and for several years we lived in a low-income black neighborhood in New Jersey. But I would say that I really became political when it was my own life which was on the line.
I went to Yale Drama School for two years, and then dropped out, be cause it felt as though the opinions [of some senior faculty] were the only ones we were allowed to have. It wasn’t useful after a certain point, in terms of an education. Someone told me that there was a new movement in New York City called “women’s liberation,” and I thought, “Oh. Of course.” So I went to New York in search of it. I found some people, joined a consciousness-raising group, then started my own group, then became involved with women poets, and it all just evolved. It was really that I was starting to find my own voice. That’s when I started writing.
I’ve always had the sense that no one who does anything ever does it alone. Blanche Wiesen Cook points out in her biography of Eleanor Roosevelt that yes, Eleanor Roosevelt was an extraordinary woman, but also, she was in a gang of extraordinary women. Even the great male artists were never just working by themselves. I am not the only woman poet who talks the way I do. And this is my politics as an artist: We come out of the culture in which we live with the ability to speak. Of course some people are wildly talented, but also, they’re somehow nurtured and allowed to speak.
LR: And you have spoken in memoirs as well as in poetry.
HM: Yes, I wrote my first memoir, The White Blackbird,
because — and maybe this sounds corny — I found I couldn’t fit my grandmother [Margarett Sargent] into a poem. I was interested in why she stopped painting, and what happened to her when she stopped, but I couldn’t make that happen on the page until I knew how and why she started painting, who her family was, why she didn’t marry until she was 28, what her bisexuality meant, what all the stakes were for her in making the choice to stop painting.
I really believe that we live inside of history, whoever we are. In that sense, memoir can be a very political, consequential form of writing. When I was a girl, the white men were writing everybody — women, Jews, black people, everybody. But then in the ’60s and ’70s, there came all the movements, and suddenly everyone was saying, “Hello, we’re going to write ourselves.”
Memoir is a developing literary form that has met with a lot of resistance. People say things like, “Oh, it’s JUST a memoir,” or “Oh, you’re writing a ME-moir.” But now that memoir is entering maybe its third generation, people are doing a lot of different things with it, the way writers did with the novel, which met with the same kind of resistance when it started in the 18th century. I see the development of memoir in the face of this resistance as political.
LR: What’s next for you on the literary front?
HM: Well, I’m about halfway through a memoir about my mother, and meanwhile, my poems kind of accrete. I don’t sit down to write a collection. In my recent poems, there’s some feeling about aging, and war, and a lot of them take place in locations other than home, because I seem to write poems when I travel. I’ll leave it to other people to figure out what the theme of my next book of my poems might be.
Digital
Sunday no sooner empty
than Monday begins to fill.
Color on a phone screen,
six released from Guantanamo
to Uruguay. Hours later
another return from the
edge of death, an American
doctor airlifted home,
blood thick with Ebola,
lungs and liver crashing,
forty days, nights, his family
behind glass, as in his dream,
Africa: children play, brothers
whose names are Success and
Courage: in a dark place
they were little cracks of joy . . .
Hard Copy
At the door, Monday’s front page,
in color the American
doctor in Sierra Leone, giant
in white Tyvec, around him
children he helped save.
Though he nearly died, he wants
to go back . . . my skills
meet the need. In column six,
Uruguay release, no photo
till page twelve: black and white,
hospital where the freed
now rest. The president, once
a revolutionary, spent years
in prison, ten in solitary,
says when interviewed: The first day
they want to leave, they can go.
Footwear
He is careful when he goes
into the ward. He went
two or three times a day
for as long as he could stand it.
When he came out to cool off,
he poured sweat from his boots.
Nothing like that from
ex-detainees, though I’ve read
it takes weeks for a prisoner
to get back use of his legs
in freedom. I see a man
walk the streets of Montevideo.
What is the look on his face?
What does he carry?
And what is it that infects
what he will pour from his boots?
Honor Moore
VISITING POET
Honor Moore
Honor Moore’s first collection of poems, Memoir, was published in 1988 to critical acclaim. Equally lauded for her work as a playwright and biographer, she is the editor of The New Women’s Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, and author of Mourning Pictures, a verse play, and The White Blackbird, a “biography with traces of memoir” of her grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent. Moore has held distinguished positions in poetry and theatrical writing at James Madison University, New York University, and the University of Iowa. She is the recipient of a N.E.A. Creative Writing Fellowship, and the Judy Grahn Award for The White Blackbird, which was also a finalist for the Lamda Literary Award. Moore’s much-anticipated second poetry collection, Darling, explores painters and painting, love and sex. In addition to bringing to life the works of painters like Degas, Darling expresses, both explicitly and implicitly, a great range of sexual and romantic experience, including lesbian love in middle age, and fearlessly takes on sensitive topics such as date rape, AIDS, and abortion at Yale in the 1960s. “We are in the presence of a poet to be praised not only for the eloquence and musicality of her voice,” writes Carolyn Forché, “but also for the courage of her moral engagement. [This] is not only beautiful work, it is brave.”
Honor Moore
Part-time Associate Teaching Professor
Email
mooreh@newschool.edu
Office Location
A - 66 West 12th Street
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Honor Moore
Profile
Honor Moore’s memoir Our Revolution, a Mother and Daughter at Midcentury was published in 2020, two days before lockdown. The Bishop’s Daughter was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a LA Times Favorite Book of the Year and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her most recent collection of poems is Red Shoes. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, Salmagundi, The New Republic, Freeman’s, Poetry, Tin House and many other journals and anthologies. For the Library of America, she edited, with Alix Kates Shulman, Women's Liberation: Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution and Still Can (2021); prior titles for them are Amy Lowell: Selected Poems and Poems from the Women’s Movement, featured in the documentary about American feminism, “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry.” She has been poet in residence at Wesleyan and the University of Richmond, visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts and three times the Visiting Distinguished Writer in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. When she was in her twenties, Mourning Pictures, her play in poetry about her mother’s dying, was produced on Broadway and won her a fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts. The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, (1996; reissued 2009) was a New York Times Notable Book. She has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. She lives and writes in New York where she is on the graduate writing faculty of the New School.
Poet and memoirist Honor Moore is the author of three collections of poetry: Red Shoes: Poems (W. W. Norton & Co., 2006); Darling (Grove Press, 2001); and Memoir (Chicory Blue Press, 1988). Moore is also a nonfiction writer, most recently of the memoir A Bishop’s Daughter: A Memoir (W. W. Norton & Co., 2008), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Moore has edited numerous books of poetry, plays, and feminist writings, including Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution & Still Can (2021), coedited with Alix Kates Shulman, and Poems from the Women’s Movement (2009), both published by Library of America. In 2020, she published her first work of translation, Revenge, a novel by the Bangladeshi and Swedish writer Taslima Nasrin (Feminist Press), co-translated with Nasrin. When Moore was still in her twenties, her play in verse about her mother’s death, Mourning Pictures, was produced on Broadway.
Moore has received awards and fellowships from numerous organizations, including from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Moore has been poet-in-residence at Wesleyan University and the University of Richmond, visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts, and has served three times as a visiting distinguished writer in the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa. She is currently on the graduate writing faculty at The New School and lives in New York City.
Honor Moore
b. 1945
https://www.honormoore.com/
Image of Honor Moore
Brittany Ambridge
Honor Moore is well known for her work as a playwright, memoirist, editor, and poet. She has edited selections of Amy Lowell’s poems, contemporary plays by American women, and poems from Russia. Moore is the author of the poetry collections Red Shoes (2005), Darling (2001), and Memoir (1988); the memoirs Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury (2020), The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter (1996), and The Bishop’s Daughter (2008); the play Mourning Pictures (1977); and numerous essays and reviews.
She has said that her poems are “charts of where [she is], psychically and spiritually,” and her poetry has been acclaimed for its ability to be precise and emotionally complex, lyrical and vivid. Poet Fanny Howe likens her poems to paintings, praising her ability to create pleasures that “cross all such boundaries” between the visual world and the written word. Her prose has also drawn much praise, and created some controversy, for its direct treatment of sexuality, faith, family, and coming of age—central topics in much of her writing in all genres.
Moore is also the founder of the Poetry Series at Manhattan Theatre Club. She has taught at New York University, Columbia University, and Wesleyan University, and she is on the graduate writing faculty at The New School. She has served on the board of directors of the PEN American Center, Poets and Writers, Inc., Manhattan Theatre Club, and the Jenny McKean Moore Fund for Writers. Moore’s papers are held at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. She lives in New York City.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Honor Moore
Born October 28, 1945 (age 78)
New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation Writer, poet, memoirist
Genre poetry, memoir
Notable works
The Bishop's Daughter
Parents
Paul Moore Jr.
Jenny Moore
Honor Moore (born October 28, 1945) is an American writer of poetry, creative nonfiction and plays. She currently[when?] teaches at The New School in the MFA program for creative nonfiction, where she is a part-time associate teaching professor.[1]
The Bishop's Daughter, a memoir of her relationship with her father, Bishop Paul Moore, was named an Editor's Choice by The New York Times, a Favorite Book of 2008 by the Los Angeles Times, and chosen by the National Book Critics Circle as part of their "Good Reads" recommended reading list as well as a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Literature.[2]
Biography
Honor Moore was born in 1945 to Jenny Moore and of Bishop Paul Moore.[3] She attended the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University between 1967 and 1979.
Career
Moore has been poet-in-residence at Wesleyan University and the University of Richmond, visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts, and was the Visiting Distinguished Writer in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.[4]
She is the author of three collections of poems: Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir; two works of nonfiction, The White Blackbird and The Bishop's Daughter; and the play Mourning Pictures, which was produced on Broadway and published in The New Women’s Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, which she edited.
Moore has received awards in poetry and playwriting from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission for the Arts and in 2004 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[5]
In 2012, Moore served as the prestigious Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor[6] at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program.
She is the editor of Amy Lowell: Selected Poems for the Library of America and co-editor of The Stray Dog Cabaret, A Book of Russian Poems, translated by Paul Schmidt. She teaches in the graduate writing programs at The New School and Columbia University School of the Arts. From 2005 to 2007, she was an off-Broadway theatre critic for The New York Times. She is on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College, and published work in the debut issue.[7]
Our Revolution by Honor Moore
The Bishop's Daughter, a memoir of her relationship with her father, Bishop Paul Moore, was named an Editor's Choice by The New York Times, a Favorite Book of 2008 by the Los Angeles Times, and chosen by the National Book Critics Circle as part of their "Good Reads" recommended reading list as well as a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Literature.[8] In April 2009, the Library of America will published Poems from the Women's Movement, an anthology edited by Honor Moore. A re-issue of The White Blackbird has been published, alongside the paperback release of The Bishop's Daughter.
Her most recent book, Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury, was released March 2020.
Bibliography
Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury" (2019)[9]
The Bishop's Daughter: A Memoir (2008)
Red Shoes - Poems (2005)
Darling (2001)
The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter (1996)
Memoir (1988)
Moore, Honor OUR REVOLUTION Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $28.95 3, 10 ISBN: 978-0-39-308005-6
A sharp portrait of two women who struggled to shape their lives as their world changed.
Poet Moore (The Bishop's Daughter, 2008, etc.), who has written perceptive, revelatory biographies of her father, Bishop Paul Moore, and maternal grandmother, painter Margarett Sargent, now focuses her attention on her mother, Jenny McKean (1923-1973). Based in part on an unfinished memoir that Jenny bequeathed to her, Moore also draws on letters, scrapbooks, and abundant interviews with family, Jenny's many friends, and lovers to create a sensitive portrait of a complex, contradictory woman. Born into great wealth, Jenny greatly enjoyed the "dinners and dances" of her debutante year, at the same time feeling stimulated by what she was learning at Vassar: comparative anthropology, for example, where, for the first time, she studied race, "an issue that would gather force and meaning for her and inform her moral and political thinking for the rest of her life." So did her marriage to Paul, also born into wealth, who had decided to become a priest. For both, the church offered a sense of meaning and mission. Jenny defied "the limitations of her role as a clergy wife," becoming an active partner in the couple's work in the slums of Jersey City, where they lived in near poverty and, influenced by the Christian radical Dorothy Day, threw themselves "into a life of service, away from the spiritual emptiness and lack of community in which they had grown up." Honor, the oldest of their nine children, competed for her mother's attention not only with her siblings, but also with her mother's consuming social and political engagement; as she grew up, Jenny desired to extricate herself from her roles as wife and mother and forge a new identity. By 1970, with women's liberation bursting into American culture, both the author and her mother "began to stumble toward new terms of engagement--as free women." For each of them, the stumbling exposed emotional wounds, and for Moore, the discovery of her mother's gift to her: "a kind of force within that never allows me to stay still."
A deeply insightful, empathetic family history.
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"Moore, Honor: OUR REVOLUTION." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A606964361/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ed3dfe1e. Accessed 26 May 2024.
Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury
Honor Moore. Norton, $28.95 (464p) ISBN 978-0-393-08005-6
Poet and playwright Moore (The Bishop's Daughter) pays tribute to her mother, Jenny, a social activist and writer who died from cancer in 1973 at age 50, in a touching but overlong memoir. Throughout, she examines Jenny's emotionally turbulent life and strained marriage to Paul Moore Jr., a prominent bishop of the Episcopal Church, and explores the mother-daughter bond. Moore uses excerpts from her mother's private papers to tell the story: "It was time to pull the pages of her writing from their cartons," she says. "It was time to get to know my mother." The narrative spans WWII, the postwar boom years, and the civil rights and women's liberation movements, and covers Jenny's domestic and professional lives and the births of her nine children; Paul's religious career and the couple's efforts to establish a diverse church; and Jenny's late-in-life quest for independence after she became aware of Paul's bisexuality (her mother never did "reveal those suspicions to any of her children.... I consider her heroic"). Moore writes about trying to get close to her busy mother, and speculates about why she had so many kids ("motherhood was an arena in which to excel as a competitor"). This is a languid document, at time overstuffed with detail, but one that nevertheless offers a poignant look at the complexities of motherhood and womanhood. (Mar.)
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"Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 50, 9 Dec. 2019, p. 139. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A609311059/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e5e4c248. Accessed 26 May 2024.
OUR REVOLUTION A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury By Honor Moore
Honor Moore was the first of her mother's nine children. Enough for a baseball team or a small orchestra: That's what Jenny Moore said she wanted. Vibrant and capable, she got her blue-ribbon baby boom brood. But her sensitive eldest suffered from the shrinking of her share of her mother's subdividing attention. ''I worried about you,'' a friend of Jenny's confided to Honor years later. ''You were replaced so many times.''
From what Moore calls that ''wilderness of hunger'' came the seeds of ''Our Revolution,'' her searching new memoir of her mother, the gifted, complicated Jenny McKean, who shook off the straitjacket of her depressive Proper Bostonian lineage and plunged into a life of service, moving in 1949 with her war-hero husband and their first three babies to live among the poor in Jersey City.
By the time Jenny died in 1973, at 50, she had accompanied her husband, Paul Moore Jr., who bucked his robber-baron blood and became the Episcopal bishop of New York, from Jersey City to Indianapolis to Washington to Manhattan; published a well-received memoir; written a play; separated from her husband; moved back to Washington; been accepted into a master's degree program in fiction at Johns Hopkins; and raced through pages of another memoir while dying of cancer.
Honor, the only one of her mother's six daughters who chose not to have children, emerged from ''the labyrinth of that mother's attention or lack of it'' to become the writer her mother might have been. Now in her 70s, she set out to understand how Jenny became the woman she knew -- and to understand their relationship over time -- searching for clues to her mother's interior life in the writings and papers bequeathed to her at Jenny's death.
Moore takes the trouble to see her mother's choices in their historical and social context: World War II, with its impact on family formation and the aspirations of young men and women coming of age; the women's movement, which changed both their lives; the civil rights movement; and the insular society of Jenny's childhood -- ''the intricate social architecture that had held the world of the rich more or less in place since the Civil War.''
''I can't emphasize enough how the culture in which my mother grew up required silence about feeling,'' Moore writes. For her parents and their friends, ''becoming serious about the church and belief provided what psychotherapy might have -- support in freeing oneself from the almost Victorian way of life of their parents'' as well as ''an entrance to their inner lives and a humanist faith that inspired progressive, even radical -- though nonviolent -- activism.''
Moore is sparing with the details of her protracted conflict with her mother -- ''continual criticism, shouting, the occasional slap'' and more. She could not have understood then, she writes, ''physical exhaustion, the intellectual and spiritual effort, the physical toll of pregnancy.'' Her mother, she sees now, was sometimes overwhelmed. Nor could the child have grasped the nature of her parents' marriage, not least her father's extramarital affairs with men and women, made public in her 2008 memoir, ''The Bishop's Daughter.''
Readers of that book and of ''The White Blackbird,'' her 1996 biography of her maternal grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent, will find some of the details in this ruminative, sometimes lyrical memoir familiar. The process of understanding a parent, perhaps like memoir writing, never ends. The writer and the child return repeatedly to a collection of fragments, rearranging and reconsidering them in the shifting light of age.
''Isn't it strange that it's taken so long, all the way into my 70s,'' Moore writes, addressing Jenny at last, ''for me to feel that I am finally your daughter.''
Janny Scott's latest book, ''The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father,'' was published in 2019. OUR REVOLUTION A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury By Honor Moore 400 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $28.95.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: Honor Moore with her mother, Jenny, in 1947. (PHOTOGRAPH BY PAUL MOORE JR.)
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Scott, Janny. "The Writer's Daughter." The New York Times Book Review, 29 Mar. 2020, p. 18(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A618810733/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=59477221. Accessed 26 May 2024.
Moore, Honor A TERMINATION A Public Space Books (NonFiction None) $20.00 8, 6 ISBN: 9798985976922
A distinguished poet and nonfiction writer reflects on the lasting emotional imprint of an abortion.
Moore, author of The Bishop's Daughter and Our Revolution, was a 23-year-old student at Yale's drama school when she terminated an unplanned pregnancy. The year was 1969, a time that also saw the emergence of the Jane Collective, a group that established an underground network dedicated to providing safe abortions to all women. Because the author was an "inheritor of minor WASP money," she was able to get a legal abortion by convincing a psychiatrist that a child would destroy her mental health and paying for the procedure with her own funds. "There were two men who might have made me pregnant," writes Moore: one a photographer who forced himself on her and the other, a professor who would have married her had she told him about the pregnancy. Early on, Moore unapologetically describes herself as Magdalene. "A taint of accusation hovers when I write about sexuality: She's had bad relationships, they say. Fallen woman, the woman who sins, adulteress, slut, a stitch dropped from the fabric of society," she writes. Even though she never wanted to have children, Moore returns to thoughts of the baby to which she never gave birth, imagining that child as a boy. "I was always looking for a great love--the kind that starts at a high temperature and calms over time, embers steady," she writes. "What would I have looked for in a lover if I'd had a child?" The author's candid, prose poem-like explorations of the ghosts of relationships past and the complexities surrounding love and sex for women make for compelling reading. But what makes her work especially affecting is the quiet way it suggests the possible shape of things to come in a post-Roe v. Wade era.
Haunting and lyrical.
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"Moore, Honor: A TERMINATION." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793537253/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6d1c521b. Accessed 26 May 2024.