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Carolyn Moore’s “The Great Uncluttering”

From PCC's Humanities & Arts Initiative

Blue cover of the book title "The Great Uncluttering" in yellow serif font, with a picture of a leaf skeleton on the cover

Cover of “The Great Uncluttering”

This posthumously published collection, The Great Uncluttering: The Collected Poetry of Carolyn Moore, is Portland Community College’s first literary publication (PCC Panther Press, 2022). Drawing from Moore’s chapbooks and her prize-winning full-length book What Euclid’s Third Axiom Neglects to Mention about Circles (White Pine Press, 2013), this collection also includes a handful of unpublished poems as well as an introduction written by Carolyn’s writing partner and fellow poet, literary scholar Laura D. Weeks, who coedited the book with PCC faculty member Justin Rigamonti. The initial copies of the book were printed by the PCC Print Center.

The design and printing of this book was made possible through the generous gift of Carolyn Moore’s estate, which also gave rise to the Carolyn Moore Writing Residency in 2021.

“In the poetry of the late Carolyn Moore, a faithful and restless intelligence animates a world built from sharpened senses and a long apprenticeship to the accumulated wisdom of the world, both what she gleaned from human study and what she gained from her own trenchant observations. […] Their sorrows and their titters and their blacks and blues and their cleverness and intellectual spryness [are as] taut as a clothesline in a Pacific gale.” —Tom Daley, author of House You Cannot Reach and winner of the 2012 Dana Award in Poetry

A sample page from The Great Uncluttering

“The Selkie Discovers the Information Age,” pgs. 58-59 of “The Great Uncluttering”

A sample page from The Great Uncluttering

“Potluck” and “What the Thunder Never Said,” pgs. 18-19 of “The Great Uncluttering”

A sample page from The Great Uncluttering

“A Brief History of Nails” and “Persephone and Demeter in Ethiopia,” pgs. 10-11 of “The Great Uncluttering”