Night Singer: The Collected Poems of Frank D. Moore
Personal Responses
Frank D. Moore’s poems document the journey of a life lived, an arch that began in a small Appalachian town in Kentucky and concluded in the desert of Santa Fe. It is a spiritual journey, uncovering the layers and secret histories of the past in order to move forward into the unknown, singing all along the way.
His final poem, an entry found in his notebook dated less than two months from his own death, is a haunting lyrical elegy sung to the self that distills the essence of Whitman’s immortal tribute to Lincoln.
It is this fraternal bond that runs like an erotic current throughout in poems like “The Kiss,” “The Root Cellar,” “Night Singer,” and “Song of Your Voice on the Phone” that bestows a lasting blessing upon those who must live on.
Timothy Liu
New York City
Reading the poems of Night Singer I can hear Frank as if he were standing beside me speaking, voice by turn grave, ironic, warm. But singing is the metaphor here and Frank, like the Night Singer of the poem, the whip-poor-will, never apologizes for what he feels, but hits over and over without effort the true note. The mysteries of family that bring perfect strangers together with no glue but blood: “The Wall,” “Hail,” “Father in the Dark”--striking and disturbing poems. Love poems, “The Kiss,” “Song of our Voice on the Phone.” Poems of memory, re-enactments rich in detail and beautifully rendered, like “In the Morning Before Light.” Present, with every sense alive, that’s Frank in his poems, that’s Frank’s poetry. I think of his postcards and letters, the writing space filling, words turning finally at the corner where they tilted and kept going. So the poems keep going until all that is necessary is said.
Elaine Terranova
Philadelphia
I first met Frank in the summer of 1954, when he was living in Hamilton, Ohio, north of Cincinnati. It was clear to me from the beginning that here was an unusual young man--sensitive, intelligent, and, not least of all, possessing a marvelous sense of humor. As time ran into months and then years, I came to understand something else: he possessed the gift of being able to write remarkable poetry.
On the surface “The Rocker” is an engaging picture of a child singing songs as he rocks away on his front porch. The scene is humorous and seemingly innocuous, until midway through the poem three events occur: first the smiles of passing farmers are “slightly withheld;” next, the farmers comment that the boy is as “crazy” as his father; and finally, the child no longer just sings but bellows, open-mouthed. With such details we are forced to begin rereading the entire poem. We find near the beginning that the child comes close to “rocking over the edge;” but then keeps going until it is finally “too dark to see.” Moreover, some of his chosen songs have disturbing lyrics--”Throw out the lifeline,” for instance, and “Someone is sinking today, and “[harbor lights], they only told me you were leaving.” Taken as a whole, the evidence points to a traumatic problem that has caused the boy’s compulsive behavior. The problem is one he cannot control and for which he has no words of his own.
In contrast, “Shading into Fall” is a satire focusing upon an obsessed clothing store salesman, but by extension upon all of us who tend to venerate the superficial. The events of the poem are developed in a wonderfully imaginative way. Our salesman becomes both director and chief performer in a gala dance, assisted by the hanging clothes (with shoulders “slightly titled”) as chorus. Becoming ever more sensual, the dancing salesman “inclining himself” toward the consumer, strokes the material “its entire length”, and brings it “closer.” The dance climaxes in a frenzied presentation of fabrics of bewitching colors and shapes, and concludes with a reverential bow, not to the customer, but to the objects being worshiped.. Finally, however, enticing as all this may be,, sanity returns as the poet dryly points out that we are not shading into fall at all--winter is almost upon us.
“At the Shrine of D. H. Lawrence” opens with a pun on the meaning of sangre, coupled with images of heat and color (both red and white) that will reappear throughout the poem. These images are to be contrasted with the “cool eye” of the silver phoenix, a traditional symbol of regeneration and thus appropriate to Lawrence, who had so often censured his own society for , among other things, its conventionality and consumerism. The “blaring” red and white Coke can, which is treated with contempt by the narrator, is a modern symbol of a society still in need of change. On the other hand, as another symbol of regeneration, the pinecone is offered in appropriate tribute to the phoenix. In a final nod to Lawrence, a snake (subtly foreshadowed earlier) appears as a positive symbol, much as one had done in Lawrence’s poem “Snake.” In Moore, the snake is the color of a pomegranate, symbol of health and long life; and it is said to be as “innocent as ourselves,” meaning all those saved by Lawrence’s anger from becoming part of “normal” society. The poem is intense, but at the same time charming in its humor. Frieda Lawrence, for instance, known for her many stormy quarrels with her husband, is finally secured by a fence, and thus kept “in her place.” However, her passionate nature yet resonates “in amorous dance, pelvic clicking.” And in the chapel, the Lawrence disciples, notorious for their competing and never-ending claims on the master, are still heard in a “merry squabble of voices.”
Frank Moore’s genius was such that reading his poems just once is a powerfully moving experience, but reading them again--and yet again--reveals with every new insight how richly conceived and developed they are.
Hurst R. Sloniker
Batavia, Ohio
I’m Marsha Larsen.
Frank and I met in a poetry-writing group in 1998. Frank lasted and I didn’t, with both the group and poetry. But our friendship lasted for both of us. In March of 1999 we began meeting monthly for coffee dates, with special celebrations in December for the holidays and in May to commemorate our birthdays, which are 3 days apart. It didn’t matter one bit that we no longer had poetry in common, for Frank was a very large person, with a sky-scraping emotional, intellectual and social life. We still had loads to talk about.
Frank energized and elevated me. Our talks were the equivalent of a trip to New York, complete with museums, theater, movies, all kinds of music, and maybe a little anti-Bush demonstrating in Central Park thrown in for good measure. At the same time Frank made a person feel enlarged and ventilated by his company, he nonetheless made a visit feel intimate and protected too; he did not talk about his other friends, reserving all his attention for you right at that moment. He was an intensely private man, though very open and giving; a man who had a lot of rich friendships, but each maintained with a regard for its confidentialness. My husband once said that he’d reached a point in life where everyone he met looked something like someone else he’d known, except Frank, who wasn’t like anyone but himself. This compliment applied to Frank on the inside too; he was singular and special in every way.
For the first couple of weeks after Frank died, when I thought of him and talked out loud to him, every time a small white butterfly would flutter by. I don’t know if it was Frank, of course, but how like him if it was!—responsive to a friend even beyond the end, and appearing as if from a poem, symbolic and meaningful: white for purity and truth, butterfly for metamorphosis, transformation. Frank told me one time that in his whole life he’d only ever wanted one thing, to be good. Today, like all of you, I am here as a demonstration of Frank’s gift for friendship. I also want to acknowledge Frank’s other great personal quality, his gift for goodness.
Frank D. Moore’s Night Singer is not set in the barren landscape of academics who write for other academics, where intellectualizing masquerades as Truth and words carry no more weight that the hyphens separating their many syllables. Moore understood from the beginning that truths both big and small would come from his heart’s responding to place and family, both blood kin and heart kin: the geography shaped his gait, and the people whose footprints intersected his own led him back where he always need to go. In the poem “Light” he rejoiced that “back home” spanned the continent: Traveller’s Rest, Kentucky, the big cities, the New Mexican desert. “Back home” has the heft of grinning catfish with no lips, perfumed aunts with painted lips, a furious hat the color of bullets, descending ravens churning yellow into mustard, silk ties teasing the eye with wheat gone copper, and the setting sun gilding his beloved Sangre de Cristo Mountains and Cerillos Hills (whose ridges he could never keep quite straight). Those images and others were the map to get Moore from Here to There, from place to understanding. Readers who hitch a ride with Night Singer will bump along in grief, nestle down in Plymouth comfort in a loved one’s arms, and detour on country lands and city streets in laughter, but they will always end up where they needed to go, to the There of the poet’s heart.
Pat Gregory
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
I first came to know Frank Moore when he came to teach in the English Department of the Community College of Philadelphia in the 1970s, where I had been since 1962. For me, as for everyone, Frank quickly became a cherished friend. I always enjoyed conversations with him, no matter the topic. It could be the pleasures of fast foods or the wonder of ballet. But mostly I loved just to listen to him. When I read the poems in Night Singer, each occasion was again like having a conversation with Frank, hearing that rich, deep, soothing Southern voice once more--rather like having a shot or two of Jack Daniels.
Of Frank‘s family I met only his mother, his first teacher. A warm portrait of her shines through in “Miss Anne.” In “Grandfather, I hear Frank‘s voice--young, questioning, learning--telling me of (I believe) his mother‘s father. Seldom did Frank speak to me of his father. However in “Burning the Tobacco Bed“ and “The Furious Hat“ I glimpse a stern man of the earth. I can remember when Frank received in Philadelphia the news of his father‘s death in Kentucky. “The Visit“ vividly recalls this memory. Frank’s relationship with his father seems to have been a rather bifurcated paradox.
The poem for Jeremy on his first birthday was written for the son of dear friends of Frank‘s and mine. Jeremy‘s mother was so pleased by the poem, she had it framed and put upon a wall of their home.
On occasion Frank would mail me a copy of a poem he had just completed. I still have these, and treasure them. Reading them again I can hear Frank’s voice..
Joe Hanley
Frank Moore was a dear and long-time friend, as well a a wonderful poet and human being. Today, on the train from Boston to Philadelphia, where I met and taught with Frank at Community College, I spent hours re-reading Night Singer and being beguiled by the power of the poems. My favorites are from the “Traveller’s Rest Poems, 1995”--perhaps because I too am intrigued by memories of families--”Poem for Grandmother,” “Traveller’s Rest, Kentucky, “The Rocker.” In the section entitled “Philadelphia” I like “For Jeremy on his first Birthday “ (one of two poems Frank wrote about my son), “Shading into Fall,” and “The Need to Sing,” and of the later poems I like “The Two Aunts,” “Haircut,” “Woman in a Yellow Dress” and “Lilacs and Grape Arbor.” All the poems are evocative of Frank--his humor, passion, gentleness and humanity.
Marian Brown Lorenz
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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