Richard O. Moore

Richard O. Moore (February 26, 1920 – March 25, 2015) was an American poet associated with Kenneth Rexroth[1] and the San Francisco Renaissance.

Over the next fifty years he was active as a documentary filmmaker and public television executive, at KQED,[3] San Francisco and KTCA, Minneapolis-Saint Paul.

Four years later, Frances Elizabeth Flinn Moore died of Tuberculosis and her son, by then a teenager and a writer of wistful poetry, lost all trust in God and State.

He became a leader of anti-war demonstrations at Sather Gate and for a short while the editor of the Berkeley student literary magazine.

Overnight his supposedly pacifist friends, members of "The Yanks Are Not Coming", became, following Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, passionate supporters of the war.

No longer at home in Berkeley, Moore moved to San Francisco, closer to the Rexroth circle[8][9] and to a new and unexpected interest in modern dance.

At the end of World War II, Moore, together with Eleanor McKinney moved to Duncans Mills, a former lumber town on the Russian River.

The first three voices were: Ed Meece (chief engineer), Lewis Hill, and Richard Moore, presenter for the first program: Anglo-American Folk Ballads.

During this period Moore retained his connection with the Rexroth circle, and it was he who persuaded Kenneth to undertake what became a celebrated series of ad lib monologues.

Moore left KPFA and Pacifica Foundation[10] in 1952 but in 1954 returned to broadcasting, this time in television as an early staff member of KQED in San Francisco.

In 1960 he received a CBS Fellowship for a year's study at Columbia University, during which time he took classes in linguistic philosophy and began his reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Moore returned to KQED in 1961 with the aim of producing documentary films for national public television using recently discovered cinema verite techniques.

For the next eight years Moore and his film unit produced an astonishing number of documentaries in current affairs, literature, art, and music.

[11] From 1968 to the 1980s, Moore produced television programs for both KQED and his own PTV Inc., and in 1981 joined the staff of KTCA in Minneapolis-St. Paul as head of Special Projects.

It was during this time that he completed, but did not submit for publication, "Ten Philosophical Asides," "This Morning," and most importantly the nine short poems that make up the sequence, "Holding On."

At the Squaw Valley Writer's Conference, Moore met the poet Brenda Hillman, who encouraged him to submit his poems for publication.

Finally out of patience with Moore's reluctance to publish, she suggested that they, with the help of one of her students, Paul Ebenkamp, edit a selection of poems.

A second volume, Particulars of Place, edited by Hillman, Ebenkamp, and Garrett Caples, with an introduction by Cedar Sigo, published April 2015 from Omnidawn and is largely composed of poems written after his first book.

"Writing the Silences" edited by Brenda Hillman and Paul Ebenkamp, University of California Press, Spring 2010[12] Although in 1949 Moore received the Emily Chamberlain Cook Prize in Poetry for the best unpublished verse submitted by an undergraduate, it appears not to have encouraged him to seek publication of his poems.

The challenge of supporting a growing family, plus a continuing interest in radio and television programming, left little time for what he has described as "the secretarial work" of assembling and submitting poems to a publisher.

Moore's media career covers fifty years, from KPFA in Berkeley in 1949 to his retirement from KTCA, Minneapolis-Saint Paul in 2000.

In 1975, The Writer In America series included Robert Duncan (a second film), Janet Flanner, John Gardner, Ross Macdonald, Wright Morris, Toni Morrison, Muriel Rukeyser, and Eudora Welty.

Is he a poet, an ex-dancer, a radio and television voice and image, a filmmaker, a TV executive, a peace activist, a family man, a withdrawn loner?