When the French poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote “You must change your life,” he set the tone for future poets, including Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore. Born in 1940 in Oakland, California, Moore’s first book of poems, “Dawn Visions”, was published in 1964 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books. This was the Beat Generation era, when Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (another book published by City Lights) was changing the poetic landscape. In 1972, Moore followed up with another City Lights volume, “Burnt Heart/Ode to the War Dead”, about the human carnage in Vietnam.
In the late 1960s he founded and directed The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company in Berkeley, California and later presented two major productions, “The Walls Are Running Blood” and “Bliss Apocalypse”. The world was changing and for some that meant a reinvention of the Self.
For Moore, a then self-described Zen Buddhist whose normal routine was to get up early every morning, “sit zazen, smoke a joint, do half an hour of yoga, then read the Mathnawi of Rumi, the long mystical poem of that great Persian Sufi of the thirteenth century,” this reinvention happened when Moore met the man who would end up as his spiritual guide, Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib.
“The man looked like an eccentric Englishman,” Moore writes. “He too had only recently come out of the English version of the Hippie Wave. He was older, refined in his manners spectacularly witty and intellectual, but of that kind prevalent then who had hobnobbed with The Beatles and knew the Tantric Art collection of Brian Jones firsthand. He had been on all the classic drug quests — peyote in the Yucatan, mescaline with Laura Huxley — but with the kief quest in Morocco he had stumbled on Islam and then the Sufis, and the game was up. A profound change had taken place in his life that went far beyond the psychedelic experience.”
Moore converted to Sufi Islam in 1970, riding a wave of spiritual self transformation that affected other writers and poets in the Bay area, most notably Eugene Rose, an atheist and Marxist whose devotion to Nietzsche nearly drove him mad before his discovery of the wisdom of the early Desert Fathers. Rose, who would go on to become an Orthodox priest and co-founder of Holy Trinity monastery near Redding, California, is now considered by many to be a future saint of the Russian Orthodox Church. As for Moore, his spiritual transformation inspired him to travel to Morocco, Spain, Algeria and Nigeria, but finally back to California where he would publish “The Desert is the Only Way Out”.
In many ways, Philadelphia would prove to be Moore’s desert, although he did not move to Philadelphia until 1990. Before that he lived for a while in Boston’s North End, where he remembers meeting the poet John Weiners, the shy, gay Irish Catholic poet whom Allen Ginsberg once referred to as “a pure poet” and who was really the Walt Whitman of New England.
While living in Philadelphia, Moore published ”The Ramadan Sonnets” (Jusoor/City Lights) and “The Blind Beekeeper” (Jusoor/Syracuse University Press). San Francisco poet, playwright and novelist Michael McClure has written that Moore’s poems are like Frank O’Hara’s, where “there are no boundaries or limits to possible subject matter” and where “imagination runs rampant and it glides.”
In his poem “Great Cruelty and Heartlessness”, Moore writes:
We’re living in a time of great cruelty and heartlessness
where instead of a sun they’re throwing up
anvils
Instead of sunlight there’s the sound of
hammers beating
Instead of walking there’s kicking
Instead of thinking there’s talking
It’s almost as if there’ve never been times like
these before
Even shadows thrown by cartwheels on dirt roads
resemble the grimaces of armies as they
slide across rocks
In the palaces of power clocks go off but no one
wakes
Decisions are made by pouring acid down drains
or waiting for nightfall in a room lit by
neon tubes
If anyone speaks all eyes are upon them
I saw a sparrow fly over a fence
An ant stop and not go on
But laughter has turned to pebbles
falling on zinc
And children have been torn from their futures
One might say the line “torn from their futures” refers to destroyed lives through drugs. This poem reminds me of a talented musician acquaintance of mine, “T,” who threw away a lucrative career as a Hollywood filmmaker when he turned to heroin. “T” left Philadelphia for a post-rehab life in Austin, Texas with his recovering girlfriend, but his sobriety didn’t last long. After just one month of bathing in frothy Texas streams, strumming guitars and playing with an adopted ferret, the drug demon returned to haunt “T” with a vengeance. When this happened, the girlfriend took off for parts unknown (ferret in tow), leaving my friend desolate and, as his Facebook page indicated, in a major depression. He has since dropped out of sight after a posting a disturbing October 11 Facebook message. Since then his distraught mother has contacted me and asked me to pray for him. I’m not good at praying for people, much less myself, but I will give it a try at my local Orthodox parish.
I profile Moore’s poetry extensively in my new book, “Literary Philadelphia” (The History Press). As a believer in something beyond himself, you might say that Moore is not a poet of empty things and ideas like some modern poets. Instead, aspects of the spiritual and the divine seem to invade every word he writes. He also finds a way to say the unspeakable. Moore, it is said, was viewed as a legend in the California of the 1960s, in part because he was able to be “spiritual” without losing his sense of humor. One could almost say that he is the spiritual poet with the comedic wink. Others call him a surrealist of the sacred.
In this age of ongoing dialogue among Muslims, Christians and Jews, the sacred personage known as the Virgin Mary, mentioned some thirty-four times in the Koran, stands out as important on the historical and the dogmatic plane. The sacred person concept is not lost on Moore, who writes in “Five Short Meditations on the Virgin Mary”:
I saw Mary board a bus at Broad and State
her head covered and her face radiant
small and held within herself
careful and preoccupied
a heaven seeming to be wrapped around her
her cheeks red her lips dry her eyes lowered
interior moisture her preferred cloister
the bus passengers sudden ghosts before her
her shoes small and tattered
her hands carrying a book
If any had spoken to her she might have become lost
If she had spoken to anyone
they might have become saved.
Maybe my friend “T” will meet a mysterious woman wearing small and tattered shoes during his lost travels in Texas.
