This weekly series highlights people in my writing circles who are exemplary literary citizens. I encourage you to look them up, buy their books, find them in the library, or otherwise read or support their writing lives. This week, we meet literary citizen Daniel Edward Moore.
I met poet Daniel Edward Moore in an unlikely place: a sleep technology conference in SeaTac, Washington. Daniel is the lead sleep technologist at Whidbey General Hospital in Coupeville, WA. It was fun to learn that one of my fellow “techs” was also a poet.
When I announced that I was having a launch party for my new book, he immediately and without hesitation offered to help me out however he could. That’s the kind of guy Daniel is, which makes sense if you know he is also the organizer of the Oak Harbor Poetry Project, which sponsors regular community poetry readings.
About the time that I received his offer to help out, I was in a crisis situation myself as I realized that a launch party of any kind really needs an emcee. Then Daniel appears in Facebook Messenger out of the blue and it was like the universe was just waiting to make this connection stick.
Naturally, because that’s the kind of guy Daniel is, he agreed to be the party host and emcee, and suddenly I could sleep again. (A lame-o pun, but I was certainly anxious about having a party 10 days off without a host.)
It made all the difference, as I felt anchored and supported going into this first official unveiling of Intention Tremor. Daniel is a fantastic speaker and a tremendous ambassador to the poetry community at large. I was super lucky that he was there to have my back. Thank you, Daniel!
Read Daniel’s work
Here are two of Daniel’s three books that I own (because yes, I buy my friends’ poetry books and you should, too… it’s writer’s karma!).
His collection, Boys, revolves around the emotional complexity of being a boy in modern culture. You can bet there are references to toxic masculinity, fishing metaphors, references to cars and auto mechanics, the heartbreak of a boy’s military future, and more.
Confessions of a Pentecostal Buddhist takes the reader on an extended meditation into the triptych of religion, sexual identity, and gender. This entry into the poem, “Feeling Tones,” still grabs me and won’t let go:
1.
Who said the lonely
need to find homes
for the hours
nothing inside them loves,
for the minutes in wheelchairs
on long covered porches
watching the sea’s turbulent blue
wash away memories
of when they were loved,
those few and
forgotten seconds?Someone did.
Daniel’s newest book, Waxing the Dents, came out right at the head of the pandemic. In a sense, he is facing the same challenges that I am, trying to find readers without live events to make these necessary connections. Most of his launch events calendar was also wiped out with the lockdown of the state.
The poet Ace Boggess wrote of Waxing the Dents that it “is less like reading a book and more like sitting in the audience for a performance of Beethoven’s 9th.” That is some serious praise, right there.
[…] I had the good fortune to link up with Daniel Edward Moore to host my first virtual book launch, there was scarcely a week left to find a second host for the […]