Robert Moore
Biography
Robert Moore - Photo Courtesy of UNB
Robert Moore was born in Hamilton, ON, and currently lives in Saint John, NB where he works as an English professor at the University of New Brunswick. In addition to his academic work, Moore is also a poet, actor, director, and playwright. His publications include over a dozen plays that have been performed on stages across Canada, and four books of poetry: So Rarely in Our Skins (2002), Museum Absconditum (2006), Figuring Ground (2009), and The Golden Book of Bovinities (2013). In addition to these published collections, Moore's work has also appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Fiddlehead, Wascana Review, Ink Magazine, The New Quarterly, Canadian Author, Prairie Fire, Maisonneuve, Pottersfield Portfolio, The Gaspereau Review, CV2, and Quadrant.
Moore was the 1987 recipient of the Edmonton Journal Literary Award for poetry, 1987 recipient of the Pottersfield Portfolio Award, and the 2001 recipient of the Alfred G. Bailey Prize. His 2002 collection So Rarely in Our Skins was a finalist for both The Atlantic Poetry Prize and the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, and also long-listed for the ReLit Award in Poetry, while Museum Absconditum (2006) and Figuring Ground (2009) were also long-listed for the ReLit Award.
For a more extensive biography of Moore, please visit the New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia.
Moore was the 1987 recipient of the Edmonton Journal Literary Award for poetry, 1987 recipient of the Pottersfield Portfolio Award, and the 2001 recipient of the Alfred G. Bailey Prize. His 2002 collection So Rarely in Our Skins was a finalist for both The Atlantic Poetry Prize and the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, and also long-listed for the ReLit Award in Poetry, while Museum Absconditum (2006) and Figuring Ground (2009) were also long-listed for the ReLit Award.
For a more extensive biography of Moore, please visit the New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia.
Additional Information:
Author's Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moore_%28poet%29
Write a Poem and Rule the World (lecture): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GLSNy4PGEI
Author's Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moore_%28poet%29
Write a Poem and Rule the World (lecture): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GLSNy4PGEI
Poem: "Watches"
Oh a new watch has the cleanest hands of all.
See, every spoke of the morning sun is wearing one.
If you just watch a watch, you become a sort of performance artist
offering suggestive insights into the failure of the English language.
Bulova is too beautiful a word to languish
on a list of copyrighted brand names. Bulova. Bulova.
People replace watches either before they stop working
or after. There can be no exception to this rule.
If you buy someone a watch, write this on the card:
Please find enclosed the most precious gift of all.
With every new watch, you are given a little time
to start all over again.
If you die soon after the purchase of a watch,
you’re apt to be buried with it as a kind of joke.
There is nothing in the stomach of a new watch.
It is looking forward to your arm and all of its appetites.
Persons who keep their watches on during sexual intercourse
are bound to arouse suspicion.
Wearing someone else’s watch always constitutes
an invasion of someone’s privacy.
The statistical research indicating that persons who refuse to wear watches
live longer and more productive lives than you or me is hereby deemed
fantastical.
If you ever lose a watch, try not to picture the following:
one of the Fates holding it up to her nose and savouring your scent.
Even a stopped watch is accurate twice a day.
If you think that the person who came up with that one is named Reg or
even Alice
you could be easily wrong until the end of time.
There should be a rest home for old watches:
they have been through so much and are owed some sort of explanation.
Why don’t they make a digital watch that ticks anyway
for old time’s sake?
A surprising percentage of suicides remove their watches before taking the
plunge.
Most of the time, this makes absolutely no sense to me at all.
Bulova.
Bulova.
Published in So Rarely In Our Skins (J. Gordon Shillingford, 2002).
Used with permission of the author.
Critical Analysis: How Horological Tools Give Meaning to Our Lives in Robert Moore's "Watches"
Daniel Britt (for ENGL 3403: Canadian Poetry)
In his 2002 collection So Rarely in Our Skins, Robert Moore’s “Watches” delivers potent messages about the unreliability of the English language and the necessary relationship humans have with time. Throughout the poem, Moore places emphasis on the horological tools used by humans to measure time and its mystery. These tools, Moore argues, can be used to explore time, while nonetheless maintaining a sense of the ineffable.
The word “Bulova” (5,6, 37, 38) — to which Moore makes passionate reference intermittently throughout the poem—at first seems imaginary. Moore's speaker appears to appreciate it purely for its aesthetic and auditory value, as it “is too beautiful a word to languish / on a list of copyrighted brand names” (5-6). However, he is actually referencing a manufacturer of luxury watches and clocks, which thereby reiterates the watch imagery in the poem. Despite this allusion, Moore still places great value in the evocation of “Bulova” (5) itself, not only with its denotative value, but an auditory one as well.
Moore explores language's inadequacy to represent experience and internalized meaning, demonstrated by the epigraph which opens the section Dead-ends and Celebrations, of which “Watches” is the first poem: “most of the words we have are not the words for what we really want” (Baxter, qtd. in Moore 29). By retreating to one word with a single connotation, Moore uses “Bulova” as an example of breaking the boundaries of restrictive linguistics and appealing to a more evocative and immediate sensation—the ubiquity of wristwatches and a collectively intimate relationship with them which characterizes humanity.
Moore's speaker ponders deeply on the meaning of watches and their relationship to us. The purchase of a watch (9), the loss of a watch (22), the wearing of a watch during sexual intercourse (17), the removal of a watch by a person intending to commit suicide (31)—all of these specific situations give insight into the nature of watches, evoking a metaphysical weight in each and every wristwatch we come to possess:
Oh a new watch has the cleanest hands of all.
See, every spoke of the morning sun is wearing one.
[....]
If you ever lose a watch, try not to picture the following:
one of the Fates holding it up to her nose and savouring your scent (1-2, 21-24).
Ultimately, Moore recognizes deep meaning in wristwatches, which are conventionally written off as simple and banal objects. A small, yet complex mechanism designed for the arbitrary measurement of the abstraction that is time, a wristwatch proves to be linked to human beings in an intimate and almost organic way: “With every new watch, you are given a little time / to start all over again” (10-12).
Works Cited (for analysis):
Moore, Robert. “Watches.” So Rarely In Our Skins. Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford, 2002. 31- 32. Print.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Moore, Robert. “After Theatre and Theory: Robert Moore's Poetry.” Interview by Anne Compton. Meetings with Maritime Poets: Interviews. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2009. 305-335. Print.
---. “Benedetti was a Classicist.” Descant 40.3 (2009): 20. Print.
---.“Excerpts from the Golden Book of Bovinities” Maissoneuve: (2008) 23-24. Print.
---. Figuring Ground. Hamilton: Wolsak & Wynn, 2009. Print.
---. “From The Golden Book of Bovinities.” Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada. Ed. Anne Compton, Laurence Hutchman, Ross Leckie, and Robin McGrath. Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2002. 62. Print.
---. The Golden Book of Bovinities. Montréal: Vehiculer Press, 2013. Print.
---. “The Land of Lowell,” a review of Robert Lowell’s Collected Works and James, Bishop, Lowell & Co., Books in Canada 33.4 (2004): 34 – 35.Print.
---. Museum Absconditum. Hamilton: Wolsak & Wynn, 2006. Print.
---. “No Confucius in the Curriculum: Allan Bloom and the Closing of the American University.” Dianoia 1.1 (1990): 35 – 52. Print.
---. “Orison.” Descant 40.3 (2009): 21. Print.
---.“Plath and Hughes: A Special Case Indeed,” Books in Canada 31.9 (2002): 36. Print.
---.“Poems for the Soul Reborn into an Age of ‘Stringent Myths'.” Rev. of Dove Legend by Richard Outram. Books in Canada 31.6 (2002): 36 – 37. Print.
---.“Reading Between the Canon and the Curriculum: Issues of Legibility and Legitimacy.”English Studies in Canada 27.4 (1991): 421 – 435. Print.
---.“The Redress of the Selected,” a review of Robert Priest’s Blue Pyramids and John Steffler’sNew and Selected Poems, Books in Canada 32.9 (2002): 39 - 40. Print.
---.“same old, same old.” Maissoneuve (2004): 28. Print.
---. “The Skin You Wore.” Compton et al. 64. Print.
---.“The Very Age and Body: Naturalism and the Illusion of the Natural in Nineteenth-Century Theatre,” Parabasis 5 (1993): 143 - 154. Print.
---. “Truths Told Slant. ” Rev. of Shameless by Marlene Cookshaw, Garments of the Known by Norm Sacuta, and Hamburger Valley California by David McGimpsey. Books in Canada 32.2 (2003): 33 - 34. Print.
---.“Westward Ho!” Descant 40.3 (2009): 22-23. Print.
---.“A Writers Series from Guernica,” Books in Canada 31. 2 (2002): 23 – 33. Print.
Secondary Sources
Craig, Heather. “Images to Amuse and Move.” Telegraph Journal [Saint John] 4 Apr 2009: G6. Print.
Nowlan, Michael O. “Moore Excels with Imagination.” Rev. of Figuring Ground by Robert Moore. The Daily Gleaner [Fredericton] 1 Aug. 2009. D4. Print.
For a more comprehensive source list, please visit the New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia.
