NUCLEAR THOUGHTS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 912, 1 February 1957, Page 26

NUCLEAR THOUGHTS

R. MERRILL MOORE is doubtless a poet of distinction, though I have not yet read any of his work. But as a radio performer, in the programme Three to One, which I heard last week, he leaves himself wide open to parody Some of us perhaps have difficulty in being able to take quite seriously anyone who talks of weighty matters with an American accent; discounting that, I am left with Dr. Moore’s soap opera responses to some of the questions given him by Anton Vogt, Denis Glover, and Alistair Campbell. Ezra Pound was men: tioned. "Alas poor Ezra: I knew him well," said Dr. Moore. Dylan Thomas arrived in the discussion. A deep, deep sorrow in his voice, Dr. Moore said: "Although he has left us, he did not live in vain." One can imagine all too readily what Dylan would have made of an epitaph like that! Dr. Moore has written 100,000 sonnets. This makes him without doubt the most prolific poet in the history of the world. A little arithmetic will prove it. Dr. Moore is fifty-three. Let us assume he wrote no sonnets before the age of three. In that case, for fifty years, he has written an average of 2,000 sonnets a year, or about six for every day of his life. Remarkable! Dr. Moore is also a psychiatrist, and commutes every day to Boston. He composes sonnets while en route, dictating them into a sound-scriber. "I get what I would call nuclear thoughts: liddle ideas from which the poems will be made," or to vary this metaphor, the ideas are cooked in the kitchen basement of the subconscious mind and are then sent by dumb waiter up the stories to the conscious mind, where they emerge as poems. Three to One (pointless title) turned itself without design into the funniest programme I have heard for

some time.

B.E.G.

M.