Jim Moore

Some good things happen in Minneapolis. Jim Moore is one of them.
I've read an article on the Star Tribune (which is now unfortunately not available anymore because they remove all articles older than 3 weeks, I wish I had copied it) about Jim Moore and learned that he is Minnesota's poet laureate. I didn't pay much attention to his background of life history but I was mesmerized by his poems. The thing is I can't find any online! - Anybody knows where?

The only one I found so far was the poem below, from the website of A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, a San Francisco bookstore. Jim Moore was also one of the founders of The Loft Literary Center, "nation's largest and most comprehensive literary center, offering programs and services for readers and writers". Writers can rent a studio for $80 a month! Wish I could visit.

Bio from The Fine Arts Work Center
JIM MOORE has published six books of poetry, including The New Body, What the Bird Sees, How We Missed Belgium (with Deborah Keenan), The Freedom of History, The Long Experience of Love, and Writing with Tagore Above the Flaminia: Homages and Variations, based on poems by the Indian poet Rabindrinath Tagore. Jim's forthcoming book of poems, Lightning at Dinner, will be published in August 2005 by Graywolf Press. He has twice been a recipient of a Pushcart Prize and his work has appeared in many magazines including The Nation, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Chelsea, APR, Threepenny Review, and Antioch Review. He currently teaches in the MFA Program at Hamline University (MN), at Colorado College, and for the University of Minnesota's Split Rock Program.
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I Don't Think We Need To Know

I don't believe we need to know what below zero feels like.
Or why we die: that, too, I don't think we need to know.
Why life is hard? I think not.

It's hot inside, it's cold out:
that's already a lot to know. That love comes and goes,
that we grow old slowly and then suddenly not.

It helps to know that snow is a god fallen to earth.
Sometimes it helps to let in the world a bit:
some wind, a few flakes, the sound of ice cracking.

Stars, for reasons we'll never know, help show us
who on earth we are and how to bear it here and how
far away we are from knowing why we are small.

Who knows why we love or why we die,
or what exactly wonder is,
demanding that I touch it as if it were the beloved

and I the young bride, believing.
----

The good thing is Amazon has the "search inside" for the book The Freedom of History. By clicking many times on the "Surprise Me" link, you get different poems from this book.

When we lived in London for a year
I loved the tube most.
Late at night, the smell of cinders
and stale electricity. The buckets
of sand. And the old men
who wait for the last train.
Have you seen how they look
straight ahead at the wall of the tunnel
opposite them? (...)

tags: jim  moore  

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