Daniel Moore (poet) - Early Career and Conversion

Early Career and Conversion

His first book of poems, Dawn Visions, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books, San Francisco, in 1964. As recompense for publishing. Ferlinghetti insisted Moore do oil paintings on a large number of Dawn Vision books that Fertlinghetti wished to present to friends. Manuscripts of these poems won the Ina Coolbrith Award for poetry and the James D. Phelan Award. From 1966 to 1969, Moore wrote and directed ritual theater for his Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company in Berkeley, California. City Lights also published his second book, Burnt Heart: Ode to the War Dead, in 1972.

In 1965, Moore lived in Boston's North End and worked at odd jobs to sustain himself and his wife of that time. He appeared on the radio reading his poems, and translated essays by Antonin Artaud, under the tutelage of his friend, poet and editor, David Rattray. He was also acquainted with the Boston poet John Wieners. He returned to San Francisco, and then to Mexico, where he suffered a serious car accident and was bedridden for a month and a half with a broken pelvis and chipped socket of his right elbow. Returning to Berkeley, he became involved in the cultural world of that time, and inspired one night by the very name that came to him, The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, and sensing a visionary need to bring his poetry into a spatial and theatrical dimension, he inaugurated the sacred theater company. At this juncture in American cultural history, the so-called literary and drug-culture of San Francisco became increasingly energized in the climate of the anti-war movement. He wrote and directed two major productions which were presented at night (with few exceptions) by torchlight in an outdoor amphitheater in North Berkeley, at Hinkel Park, and attended by large numbers of people, always free of charge (a book of the texts and photographs is in preparation for publication as of 2010).

In 1970, about six months after the disbanding of The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, Moore met Ian Dallas, aka Abdal-Qadir Shaykh Dr. Abdal-Qadir as-Sufi in Berkeley, and entered Islam in the Sufi Shadhiliyya Tariqat of Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib, of which Abdal-Qadir was then the muqaddem, or deputy. Moore was given the name Abd al-Hayy, and began traveling extensively in Europe and North Africa, living for a time in Nigeria, and in Andalusia, Spain, where he was a participant in the Islamic Renaissance there in the mid and late 70s, a movement that is still growing today (2009). He also spent time with his family in Blanco, Texas, in the community of Shaykh Fadhlallah Haeri and Imam Da'ud, but left it with his family and moved to Santa Barbara, California, aided by his long-time friend, Hakim Archuletta, who was also an actor in Moore's sacred theater company and who presently offers lectures on Wisdom Healing all over the world.

Regarding Moore's poetic work, Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote of this period: “Moore a Sufi and, like Rimbaud, renounced written poetry.” But after ten years of not writing while traveling and under the tutelage of Shaykh Abdal-Qadir, Moore “renounced” his renunciation and published three books of poetry in Santa Barbara, California in the 1980s: The Desert is the Only Way Out, The Chronicles of Akhira, and Halley's Comet. He also organized poetry-readings for the Santa Barbara Arts Festivals and wrote the libretto for a commissioned oratorio by American composer Henry Brant, entitled Rainforest (available on CD in the Henry Brant Editions), which had its world premiere at the Santa Barbara Arts Festival on April 21, 1989.

Since 1990 Moore has lived in Philadelphia with his wife, Malika, and two children, now grown, and has participated in Fringe Festivals with poetry and music, and local poetry readings, as well as traveling to England, Cairo, Marrakech and universities in the United States to present his poetry.

See below for the titles in Moore's current publishing project, The Ecstatic Exchange, of his life's work in poetry.