Two Celebrations of Richard O. Moore

As Garrett Caples writes in to the City Lights blog, there are two events this month that are be-there-or-be-square terrain for the East Bay poetry crowd: on Saturday, October 25, from 8 p.m. to 12 a.m., KQED TV will air a retrospective of four public television films of Richard O. Moore and on Friday, October 9, at 6:30 p.m. at the Mythos/Firehouse Gallery in Berkeley, there will be a celebration of the life and work of Richard O. Moore, featuring readings of his poetry by his friends Brenda Hillman and Paul Ebenkamp (co-editors of Moore’s first book, Writing the Silences) and Garrett Caples (co-editor of Particulars of Place, Moore's second volume). Richard’s daughter Flinn Moore Rauck will also read and share recollections of her father. More via the City Lights blog, Abandon All Despair Ye Who Enter Here:

With the death of poet-filmmaker Richard O. Moore (1920-2015) this past March—two days before his second collection, Particulars of Place, was published by Omnidawn—American poetry lost the last surviving member of the original SF Renaissance, that group of anarchist poets centered around Kenneth Rexroth in the 1940s that also included Philip Lamantia, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Madeline Gleason, William Everson, James Broughton, and Thomas Parkinson. Those who knew Richard continue to mourn his death even as we celebrate his long and extraordinary life. Not the least extraordinary aspect of this life was the intensity of his devotion to writing poetry, even in blindness, virtually up to the day of his death. As a result, a number of poems post-date Particulars of Place, and he grouped these under the title In Passing, an understated pun reflecting his wry sense of humor as he observed himself in the process of dying. [...]

Continue at Abandon All Despair Ye Who Enter Here for more info about the events, but also, and most importantly, go to read Moore's last completed poem!