Honor Moore

Medium: Poem

Location: New York, NY

The Bishop’s Daughter, Honor Moore’s 2008 memoir, was published in paperback in May 2009 along with a reissue of her 1996 biography, The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter. The Bishop’s Daughter was named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times, a “Favorite Book of 2008” by the Los Angeles Times and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2009 Library of America published Poems from the Women’s Movement, an anthology edited by Honor Moore, and in 2010 the Feminist Press published Honor’s translation of Taslima Nasrin’s Revenge.

She is the author of three collections of poems: Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir, and her play Mourning Pictures, 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 in non-fiction.

In addition, 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 is on the faculty of the graduate writing program at The New School. From 2005 to 2007, she was an off-Broadway theater critic for The New York Times.

Elsewhere:
http://www.honormoore.com/

Interview

Your Name: Honor Moore

Where you live: New York City

Where you came from: New York City

Name of your work: Will have to think about that! Can I let you know?

1. What was your first reaction to the fragrance? (thoughts, memories, pictures, narratives)

Believe it or not my first reaction was wow. Then I started writing. At the laptop. So thoughts memories pictures and narratives are all in the poem.

2. If you had to choose one word to sum up the scent what would it be?

Delicious.

3. What emotion did it elicit?

Desire, if that’s an emotion.

4. Take me through your process a little (from getting the scent to your creation or anything you want to share).

Literally, Sally left my house, and I sat down with the perfume – saturated piece of paper at my nose. Then I began to type. Then I picked up the perfume scrap again and brought it to my nose. Then I typed more. Then I delicately ran the saturated piece of paper back-and-forth across my upper lip, hence the image of the cello. Basically I continued this process until the poem was done. Then I went back and try to make sure that I had not included anything that was thought rather than the synesthesiastic transcription of sensation.

5. Are there certain choices you made which mean something specific to you that the observer might not know?

Maybe a knowledge of synesthesia. Which means the substitution of something apprehended by one sense with another sense, as in giving smell a color.