Todd Moore was a poet in the shockism style. He says, “For your information gansta poetry in this country isn’t Bukowski’s invention, it’s mine. I’ve been making this kind of stuff since 1970 give or take. And, it has nothing to do with Bukowski’s style or subject matter. Bukowski was the pornagrapher of pussy and a damned good one at that. I’m the pornographer of violence.”

LAST CALL: The Legacy of Charles Bukowski

© 2004 Lummox Press. A collection of writings that demonstrate the remarkable influence on literature in the small press in the ten years since his death.

Poetry & Fiction by: CC Russell, G Hagen Hill, Rebecca Morrison, Jayne Lyn Stahl, Micheal Lefanto, Bretton Holmes, Doug Draime, Ron Lucas, Alan Catlin, SA Griffin, Scott Wannberg, Will Taylor Jr., Larry Tomoyasu, Michael Meloan, Dan Fante, Iam Rawkinrec, Gerald Locklin, Éric Dejaeger, Issac Edwards, Joe Speer, Lindsay Wilson, Todd Jackson, Mark Terrill, Henry Denander, Linda Lerner, Jack Foley, Joy Buckley, Jay Alamares, Gerald Nicosia, Ed Jamieson Jr., Edward Field, Christopher Presfield, Charles Ries, Roger Lahu & RD Armstrong

Essays by: Todd Moore, Will Taylor Jr., Charles Potts, Frank Palmisano III, Ann Menebroker, Michael Basinski, Alex Thiltges, & William Morrison.

Illustrations by: Claudio Parentela, Henry Denander, Iam Rawkinrec

124 pages – soft cover – perfect bound. Edited by RD Armstrong – Layout by Yazoota for Lummox Press

20 EURO incl. shipment cost world-wide

You

don’t even have to say that this is a book about Charles Bukowski. You can just say Bukowski and nearly anyone who claims to be well read will recognize the name. This is the hallowed place in pop culture where all you have to say is the last name, like Hemingway, Faulkner, Chandler, and Steinbeck. Just say the name and you are there. You have entered that man’s territory. And, each one of these writers has created an unmistakable plot of ground. For Hemingway, it was Paris, Key West, Havana, and Upper Michigan. For Faulkner, it was Yoknapatawpha. For Chandler it was forties L.A. and for Steinbeck, it will always be the thirties with the Joads on the road. Last name recognition simply means that along with Hitchcock and Kafka and Celine and Thompson, you have finally become an icon.

Last Call: The Legacy of Charles Bukowski, if it had been published in say Berlin, would have been called a festschrift, which is a collection of poems, stories, short memoirs, and essays honoring a well known literary figure. Instead, Last Call was published in San Pedro, ironically a place that Bukowski called home the last decade or so of his life. And, instead of a festschrift, which implies high culture and everything that goes with it, this book is more like one of those rowdy parties Bukowski used to throw when he was in his prime.

Several of Bukowski’s contemporaries are here. Ann Menebroker, Alan Catlin, Gerald Locklin, Edward Field, Gerald Nicosia among others. And, the feel for the memory of Bukowski is here, but as Raindog, assures us in his introduction, Last Call really isn’t meant to be a “lovefest” of Bukowski, the man or the myth. However, the spirit of Bukowski resonates throughout Last Call. One thing I’ve noticed over time is that, like Hemingway, the images of Bukowski have become almost as important as his books. And, we are a people who are hungry for images. The famous shot of Bukowski’s typer on the front cover, Bukowski rolling a sheet of paper into it, the sketches of the long haired and bearded Bukowski throughout all capture the essence of the look of the man. And, somehow that look has become part of Bukowski’s style. And, has even added something to the legacy of that persona.

One point that Raindog makes is that for him as well as for many others in this collection, Last Call is a way of coming to terms with Bukowski’s legacy and of attempting to create a singularly distinct voice in writing. And, what exactly was Bukowski’s legacy? The question is almost too simple and yet too complex to answer with an essay, a book, or several books over the course of the last decade or even for that matter, decades to come. In fact, this simple question, I predict, will keep a cottage industry of professors and pop culture pundits busy for at least a generation to come. However, I can attempt to lay out a simple roadmap for anyone interested.

There is a scene in the movie Rio Bravo where Sheriff John Wayne tells his drunken deputy, Dean Martin to enter the front door of a saloon in pursuit of a killer and Martin balks at the idea. Wayne’s reply is, they wouldn’t expect to see you come through the front door. It’ll be a complete surprise, and it was. The same holds true for Bukowski.

Nobody expected Bukowski, the small press borracho, to enter the front door of American Literature. The MFA professors are still trying to swallow large chunks of that crow. Nobody expected Bukowski to be the next huge American Icon. Certainly, Robert Lowell, James Dickey, or James Wright would’ve qualified, but NOT Charles Bukowski. Hide the china and send your daughters on a very long cruise or at least get them the hell out of town before Bukowski arrives for the ritual vomiting and then the reading.

What Bukowski did was defy the rules. First, he wasn’t the product of any writing program. Second, he wasn’t a writing teacher for any college or university. Third, he wrote authentically out of his own blood and bones and self. Fourth, he didn’t give a rat’s red ass what anyone thought. I can almost hear some of my contemporaries yelling in the background, but I did that, too. Probably true, but Bukowski did it with such marvelous style that he kicked almost everyone else’s ass through the bar’s front door.

The other thing that he did, or that happened to him, because these things that occur in writers, these subtle changes morph or take place in the cells and dreams of a poet so subversively that not even the poet realizes it until that change has happened. Somewhere between 1950 and 1960 Bukowski started to write like Bukowski. Before this change took place, Bukowski’s work lacked life and flare and style and hustle. Nothing popped, none of the words had his authority. But, after 1960 something happened to his poetry. Something so subtle and mysterious and commanding that I don’t think even he could account for it. And, it doesn’t matter if you see Bukowski’s early publishable work as surrealist and his later work as minimal. Even in that early surreal period Bukowski acquired a sound that became his sound. Most of his imitators have never really looked that far into his work. They see the wise guy with the beer bottle up to his face wandering down some city street and they write from that, the stance, the image. I would be willing to bet that most of his imitators were sucked into writing like Bukowski not so much from the way he wrote, but from the way he looked. It’s a carryover from going to a really great movie and coming out wanting to look like Humphrey Bogart or James Dean or Marlon Brando or, well, you fill in the blank. Some people give us back our magic faces by sacrificing their own and Bukowski was someone like that.

Which, I guess, is part of legacy but then what the hell is legacy anyhow except a game that the critics and professors play. What was this guy’s impact on blah blah. What was that guy’s influence on the generation of blah blah. The fact is you don’t really recognize legacy until you feel it as a writer. You can read a stack of books on French poetry, the Beat Generation, The Angry Young Men, or Outlaw Poetry, but until you’ve actually been up close and personal with say just one poem by Gulling, Weber, Moffeit, Locklin, Micheline, or Robertson and that poem has somehow entered your blood and your soul you’ll only have a vague idea what’s going on. Some poems have the power to rip out your guts, kick your ass, tear your eyelids off. This is where legacy enters the domain of the real. And, this is the effect that the best of Bukowski’s poetry has had and will continue to have in the future.

I’ve noticed that some critics are saying that part of Bukowski’s legacy or importance is that he wrote about the ordinary. My only reply is just what the hell is the ordinary. Is it ordinary for a man to live in bare bones apartments and flophouse hotels. How many people that you know have lived that way? I know a few. Micheline was one. Kell Robertson was another. And, I would make a third. I’m pretty sure Ginsberg didn’t live that way. I’m pretty sure Kerouac didn’t live that way. As for the critics who claim that this is the life of the ordinary, I’ll bet the farm they never lived that way.

If anything, what Bukowski did was give us a birds eye view of what it felt like to be down and out. Really down and out. Not fashionably down and out. Down the way Tom Kromer was down and out the way Jack London was out. And this is not the life of the ordinary but the life of the sub ordinary. Life under the floorboards. A life where the notes come from underground. Shades of Dostoevsky or Gorky with a dash of Henry Miller thrown in for good measure.

On another level, legacy might as well be a stack of chips a writer gets when he buys into the high stakes game of poetry and make no doubt about it, poetry is a high stakes game even though it pays you nothing and claims your time, your blood, your work and your soul.

And, the game? Lets call it blackjack because somehow you get blackjacked into it, you get blackjacked during the game, and when death claims you, you are blackjacked out of it. And, no matter how much money Bukowski made off the game, he still took a pretty good blackjacking while he played. Legacy might just as well be the way in which a writer plays the game, even against the odds. Style figures in here just like style figures in the way a writer whips that line onto the page. Style, in spite of the game, in spite of the winnings and the losses. Style right down the line until there isn’t any more breath to put the words in. Which translates into a kind of heroism. Because, maybe like Bukowski, you made the money, or you made the rep, or you found that sound in your voice the same way that Bukowski found that sound in his. That’s where the legacy begins and ends. When you have found the sound and the sound has found you. And, that’s where you beat death. The way Hemingway did, the way Faulkner did, the way Bukowski did.

One important thing about Last Call is that the cumulative effect of this collection gives us all a better look at Charles Bukowski. Here, in some rare moments we can see that Bukowski the Icon really was a human being instead of some bloodless legend. And, because we see him as a human being, we are somehow given permission to be human beings as well.

Last Call is not just about Bukowski’s legacy which seems like that has always been obvious. A book like this is never completely about the man it is about. Instead, this book is about a whole generation of writers who are or have been attempting to come to grips with not just Bukowski’s legacy but their own separate legacies as well. For that reason, Last Call: The Legacy of Charles Bukowski is important in the same way that the memoirs of A. D. Winans and John Thomas are important. Books like Last Call help us understand Charles Bukowski. And, they also help us understand ourselves maybe just a little bit more. — Todd Moore

20 EURO incl. shipment cost world-wide

The Long Way Home

The Best of the Little Red Book series – 1998-2008. Edited by: RD Armstrong. Genre: Poetry, Trade Paper. Publisher: Lummox Press (PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733-5301). Pages: 164. ISBN: 978-1-929878-04-8. Publishing Date: March 2009

If you own one of the Little Red Books, then you know what this series represents: good, solid poetry. If you don’t, here’s a chance to sample what’s available in this series.

Over the past ten years (1998 to 2008), the Lummox Press has published the Little Red Book series, featuring poetry/prose collections by these writers: RD Armstrong, Pris Campbell, Alan Catlin, Patricia Cherin, Leonard J. Cirino, Glenn Cooper, Rene Diedrich, Hugh Fox, Bill Gainer, Scott Holstad, Edward Jamieson Jr., Larry Jaffe, Marie Lecrivain, Frances LeMoine, Linda Lerner, Lyn Lifshin, Gerald Locklin, Philomene Long, Laura Joy Lustig, Errol Miller, Terry McCarty, Angela C. Mankiewicz, Todd Moore, Rebecca Morrison, BZ Niditch, normal, nila northSun, Rob Plath, Bill Shields, Rick Smith, Belinda Subraman, William Taylor Jr., John Thomas, Scott Wannberg, Patricia Wellingham-Jones, Mark Weber, Lawrence Welsh, Harry R. Wilkens, Lindsay Wilson, AD Winans, and Anita Wynn.

This collection of poetry reflects the best of nearly all of the 59 titles in this series so far. These poems are drawn from the Little Red Book (LRB for short) series from 1998 to 2008.

“The Little Red Books is a sturdy series.” — John Berbrich

“The presence of Lummox Press in San Pedro adds luster to the southern California literary scene.” – Robert Peters

25 EURO incl. shipment cost world-wide

The Riddle of the Wooden Gun

by Todd Moore

Copyright 2009 Todd Moore.

ISBN 978616929878-01-07

First Printing. 144 Pages

Published by Lummox Press, POB 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733.

Todd Moore runs with language and makes every word count. –Elmore Leonard

Todd Moore slaps you in the face and kicks your ass with ink & paper. –Joe Pachinko

Todd Moore is the real deal. What you see is exactly what you get. There’s no fakery in his poetry. It’s all meat, no filler. –John Yamrus

Todd Moore’s Riddle of the Wooden Gun serves as a metaphor for our recently collapsed American dream. But, of course, one can never count the U.S. out, just as one should never underestimate the power of a wooden gun. In Moore’s world, it taunts and lies and struts and deceives and turns into a well-oiled death machine once placed in appropriate hands. Now, with this brilliant book, Moore has proved, without question, what many have whispered for decades: That he’s one of our most important and influential poets, and that he should be read by all. –Lawrence Welsh, author of Skull Highway and Rusted Steel and Bordertown Starts

15 EURO incl. shipment cost world-wide 

America

is a nation of fierce and unforgiving images. Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry pointing a 44 magnum at a outlaw he is about to kill. John Wayne as the Ringo Kid spinning a Winchester 30-30 in STAGECOACH. Charles Bronson standing sideways while he points a pistol in a movie still for DEATH WISH. Kevin Bacon aiming his gunfinger at Sean Penn in MYSTIC RIVER. A blood smeared Warren Oates leaning into that lethal Browning fifty caliber machine gun in THE WILD BUNCH. The list is practically endless. Simply because the capacity for violence in America is also endless. Endless, hypnotic, and perversely and enormously attractive.

I’m staring at the iconic photograph of John Dillinger standing on the lawn outside his father’s house in Mooresville, Indiana. He’s holding a Thompson sub machine gun in one hand and that infamous wooden gun in the other and he’s got the biggest smile in the universe plastered across his face. I don’t know how many times I’ve studied this image but right now the more that I look at it the more I realize it isn’t just an offhand snapshot that Billie Frechette took as a whim. This image is really so much more than that. On the surface, it’s Dillinger giving the FBI the biggest finger in the world, simply because the photograph was taken shortly after he had escaped from Crown Point. Below the surface, if you know anything about Dillinger you know that the machine gun he actually carried on bank raids was streamlined. It had no wooden stock and Dillinger preferred using clips because they were lightweight. In the snapshot, this Thompson has a fifty slug drum attached beneath the barrel which would make the weapon much heavier, so you realize that this is a staged shot, meant for newspaper reporters, law officers, and the voyeur public at large. Posing for this photograph was a simple act of provocation, meant to invoke both wonder and anger from practically everyone. Or, to put it into contemporary terms, Dillinger is trying to push all the hot buttons.

However, it’s the wooden gun in his other hand that, over the years, has created the most interest. This is supposedly the piece that Dillinger used in his jail break from Crown Point. But, did he? This question, among several others, is what has made Dillinger’s wooden gun so irresistibly interesting, so undeniably desirable.

Another question, maybe more to the point of the whole Crown Point episode, is why would a man like Dillinger take such an unbelievable risk with nothing more than a wooden gun when that jail was so heavily guarded? The chances for being shot were just as good if he had been armed with a real weapon. While asking myself this question, I am for some strange reason reminded of the Russian writer Isaac Babel who rode with the Cossacks during the Russian/Polish War of 1920. Babel was a war correspondent who had somehow had insinuated himself into the thick of the action and was carrying a pistol at the time, but the pistol was not loaded. Now, why did he do that? Why would he put himself at such insane risk? Was he tempting the gods? Nobody really knows the answer to either question, and because this is the case, these actions become mysterious, enigmatic, and ultimately dangerous little psychic riddles.

In fact, that photograph of Dillinger holding the wooden gun is in itself a riddle. Superficially, it is evidence of Dillinger’s joke on J. Edgar Hoover and law enforcement in general, but in a larger sense it may also be his joke on America and in an even larger sense his own personal cosmic joke on the universe, even oblivion itself. We will never actually know. But, that won’t keep any of us from fantasizing.

What we do know is that the riddle of the wooden gun is very much a mystery that hints at darker, maybe demonic things, among them the pure sense of apocalypse in America. Naturally, we could say that the wooden gun is really nothing more than a wooden gun, maybe even a toy and leave it at that. We could also be just as superficial regarding Poe’s Raven, Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter A, Ahab’s white whale and all of its subsequent dreamings and meanings, Huck Finn’s raft, Hart Crane’s Bridge, the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg in THE GREAT GATSBY, and Faulkner’s mythic bear. But, we won’t, or rather, I won’t because these are the kinds of images, these are the haunted emblems, these are the riddles, the limitless possibilities and the dark impossibilities that both obscure and define America.

I’ve been haunted for a long time by both the story and the mythology of Dillinger’s wooden gun. Twenty years ago when I visited the Dillinger Museum in Nashville, Indiana, I saw the wooden gun displayed along with other personal effects in a glass case. Or, lets say I saw one of several extent variations of it. Since that time, I couldn’t get the image of that gun or its impact on me out of my mind. In fact, even before that I used the idea of it briefly in The Name Is Dillinger. But, I was never completely satisfied that with that version. It works fine for the section but somehow it lacks finish, fleshing out, expanded imagination, psychic daring.

At any rate, that wooden gun image boiled around inside my subconscious for at least thirty years. From time to time I might have mentioned it in a few other Dillinger sections as well, but I never really dealt with it the way that it needed to be explored. Then, one day last year suddenly and almost by surprise I began to think about the wooden gun again. Earlier in the day I’d been imagining Dillinger holding the wooden gun in that photograph and I just let that image become a kind of dream movie that looped itself around in my mind. This was going on while I was sitting in a local restaurant up near the mountains called The Flying Star. In fact, I was writing down fragmented lines on the back of a receipt from a bookstore when I glanced up and looked out on the restaurant’s patio. It was April first, ironically April Fool’s Day and the weather was deliciously warm. It was the kind of day when you knew you could literally do anything.

I was working on an ice tea and a huge chocolate chip cookie and the way the sun was slashing in at very bright yellow angles and the way the wind was blowing lightly and the way the mountains looked thrusting far up into the blue on blue sky made it all feel as though this was the first day of the earth. Then I glanced around at the people sitting out on the patio the way you usually do when you are casually eating and thinking and enjoying the feeling of just being alive and that’s when I saw Cormac McCarthy. He was sitting at a table near the wall of windows with a friend, talking, gesturing, signing a large bundle of papers one at a time. At first, I doubted that this was Cormac McCarthy but the more that I stared at this man the more I realized I was right.

I knew that McCarthy was not open to strangers and I also realized that there was something magical about this moment and approaching him for any reason would have almost certainly destroyed it. I am a great believer in signs and portents and I just wanted to enjoy what was happening because something I didn’t quite understand was taking place. Call it a kind of spontaneous duende or just simply hooking up with the power circuit of the universe; it doesn’t matter but a poem was really starting to race through me and I realized that this was not going to be a short poem. And, it wasn’t going to be something that would reasonably fit into a quick twenty pages either. This definitely was going to be longer than that. Much longer and then I was scrounging my pockets for scraps of paper to write on.

Every once in awhile I’d glance up and see McCarthy still sitting there, still as alive, still as animated as ever. I’d found a few blank pieces of paper in Chandler’s THE BIG SLEEP, a novel I’d gone back to simply because I love Chandler’s screwball narrative. I like to carry extra sheets of paper in a book I might have with me when I go out just in case I get a poem I wasn’t looking for. After nearly an hour I’d filled up all of that paper with random lines of pseudo historical and mythological references to Dillinger’s wooden gun and when I looked up again, Cormac McCarthy and his friend were gone.

The fact that he was gone made me feel as though I’d lost a secret ingredient of the poem, but by now I was so far into writing The Riddle of the Wooden Gun it really didn’t matter. I felt hugely and immensely propelled into something that for me was as important as writing The Name Is Dillinger, The Sign Of The Gun, Relentless, and The Corpse Is Dreaming. The moment I arrived home I sat down at the computer and just stayed there writing for the next two hours. The following day I did the same thing. And the next and the next and the next and the next. I worked on The Riddle of the Wooden Gun beginning with that first day in April and finally put the finishing touches on it sometime during the eighteenth, though I think I really only worked on it for fourteen days. I needed to take those few extra days to see how it would sound. It had to somehow resonate inside me. It had to light me up. I had to feel the poem fly through me like some kind of manic crow.

As far as the poem is concerned, it runs to almost five thousand lines. At least as long as Crane’s THE BRIDGE, probably longer than Lorca’s POET IN NEW YORK, nearly as long as Dorn’s GUNSLINGER. And, while Riddle is an integral part of DILLINGER overall, it could easily stand on its own as a finished piece of work. And, I believe it could easily be compared to all of these poems as well.

However, while Riddle will certainly hold its own as a long poem, what it does beyond all that is it works as one of the central keys to understanding DILLINGER. The poem, like that iconic photograph of Dillinger holding the wooden gun, and the actual wooden gun itself, is a kind of riddle much the same as the scarlet letter, the white whale, or Faulkner’s bear. None of these riddles will ever be solved to anyone’s particular satisfaction, but it isn’t really a solution that anyone is after. It’s the rich cluster of possibilities that these kinds of riddles offer. These are the riddle clusters that we all dream from. In fact, these kinds of riddles arise from a national core of dreaming, the place where we all get our faces from. And, I remain alive in the mystery of

Dillinger and the riddle of the wooden gun.

AN EXCERPT FROM THE POEM from page 118

never told
nobody this
but i always
took the
toy wooden
gun my
daddy whittled
out of hick
ory for me
it was a nice
shiny well
made little
pistol that
fit right into
the palm
of my hand
& if you
are thinking
as i know
you are
what good
is a wooden
gun against
a machine
gun then
you know
why my
heart is
going so
fast it feels
like it
will jump
right up
my throat
but some
thing in
side me
way back
in the dream
ing place
is telling
me that
the wooden
gun will
keep me
warm

Blind Whiskey & The Straight Razor Blues

by Todd Moore | Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books | 5 EURO | 44 pages | ISBN 1-877968-41-2 | P.O. Box 54 | Manasquan, NJ 08736

Maybe it’s the attitude. Maybe it’s the intelligence. Maybe it’s the wit. I don’t exactly know what it is, but there’s something about Todd Moore’s in-your-face approach to poetry that has fascinated and entertained me right from the beginning, so many years ago. The prolific movie director, Roger Corman, the king of quickie movies…a director of talent and nerve, who wasn’t afraid of succeeding or failing by following the adage “first thought, best thought” (although in Corman’s parlance it was more likely “first shot, best shot”) once directed a 1958 gangster movie titled “I, Mobster”. For some reason I can’t seem to get that movie out of my head. It starred B movie legend Yvette Vickers and even had a part for aging strip club goddess Lili St. Cyr.

It’s a wonderfully tacky movie, filled with all the blood, gore, sex and guts that 1958 would allow.

Why all the tackiness? Why all the blood, gore and guts? I don’t know. Maybe we should ask the same question to Todd Moore, because his latest book of poems, BLIND WHISKEY & THE STRAIGHT RAZOR BLUES gives us all of that…and more. Starting off with that great title, the book takes us on a roller coaster ride through a wet-slick, rainy night world with a cast of characters who seem to have come straight out of the pages of a Mickey Spillane novel. There are no muted colours here. Everything is vivid, sharp and bright. The characters in the poems all have names like Whitey and Sonny and Taggart and Rio. Tough guy names. And you know it without it even being said that all the women wear red dresses and have garters and nylons with seams up the back of their legs. The book is consistent. Of course, consistency has always been a hallmark of Moore’s poetry. All but 2 of the 36 poems describe violent and deadly activities of some kind. Shootings. Stabbings. Beatings.

These poems are film noir on steroids…

the complete John Yamrus review can be read here…

5 EURO incl. shipment cost world-wide

DILLINGER: The Name is Dillinger

The Name is Dillinger

Volume 1 of 13
by Todd Moore

First Edition, 1,163 Copies. 950 Trade, 50 Signed and Numbered by Author. 100 Review, 50 Author/Publisher, 13 Out of Series.

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14 EURO incl. shipment world-wide NO LONGER AVAILABLE VIA METROPOLIS | THE SHOP

Download listen to Todd Moore | Dillinger backed away | Zerx Volume No. 14

DILLINGER:Billie F

Billie F

Volume 3 of 21
by Todd Moore

First Edition 1987, 1,163 Copies. 950 Trade, 50 Signed and Numbered by Author. 100 Review, 50 Author/Publisher, 13 Out of Series

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a

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Download listen to Todd Moore | Mackley was knocking | Zerx Volume No. 14

Dillinger : Dillinger’s Faces

Dillinger’s Faces

Volume 2 of 13
by Todd Moore

First Edition, 1,163 Copies, 950 Trade, 50 Signed and Numbered by Author. 100 Review, 50 Author/Publisher, 13 Out of Series.

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a

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Download listen to Todd Moore | the last bar | Zerx Volume No. 13

DILLINGER

Todd Moore & J.A. Deane

Zerx #039 - double-CD

6 years in the making this blows any other “spoken word” CD out of the water. With a .44 magnum. ( I usually run for cover whenever someone uses that term “spoken word” - leave that one for the wussies.) Todd illuminates the abandoned soul of John Dillinger. Dino breaks open the Gates of Hell. Not for the squeamish. When an hour of Dillinger was broadcast over the radio one Sunday afternoon back in 1997, KUNM was inundated by calls from frightened listeners, huge flocks of crows blackened the skies over Albuquerque, and the churches had record attendances for that evening’s observances. Mark Weber

First, it is a great thing to have Dillinger reborn again being read this time you hear his voice in poem Dillinger and Todd Moore is reading his poem of American hero. His voice (Moore’s) and poem enhances J. A. Deane’s music and the music fits like a knife in the rare cooked steak of Dillenger served up by Moore. The opening track asks (that is Dillinger via Moore asks) am I gone? Of course, the answer is, no. And above and also more than ever on this CD Todd Moore’s poems intoxicate as he moves throughout the Dillenger poemscape. It is a wonderful achievement to create a great realm of poetic imagination with such diversity and spikes and spices of emotion and the crash of cars and breaking glass of words and storms of the mid-west breaking panoramic in it is a pantheon of the Gods singing in chorus and a hero emerging from the darkness of the America and becoming a voice that you hear at the post office, at the gas station, in the hardware store, and liquor store and you can feel the human chemicals in Todd Moore’s voice as he drives you about the country, the empire of John Dillinger, radio playing the music of J. A. Deane. Michael Basinski

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Download listen to an excerpt of this Todd Moore CD

a

tell the corpse a story

dillinger stuck

his trig
ger finger
thru the
bullet
hole in
the ford’s
front door
& sd a
nother
inch or
so & i’d
be pissing
thru my
guts yeah
makely sd
laughing
that is
if you
hand any
guts left

copyright 2008 by todd moore “dillinger dreamt” originally appeared in Artcrimes 2006.

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Download listen to Todd Moore | Lady on the radio | Zerx Volume No. 5

relentless

as a hum
the noise
going in
side baby
face’s head
while
watching
dillinger
count the
money
hammer
spur chec
kered grip
the frac
tured de
tails slic
ing his
eyes…

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Download listen to Todd Moore | I used to | Zerx Volume No. 7

RELENTLESS

by Todd Moore, 2008, Albuquerque, New Mexico | a review by Tony Moffeit

Todd Moore continually redefines the outlaw spirit in American poetry. In his one-poem volume, “relentless,” he does it again. In one work, “relentless,” he is the poetic embodiment of Jimi Hendrix’s performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, a performance in which the rock musician capped an enormous performance by burning his guitar on stage in a sacrificial act, then smashed the burning guitar to bits on the floor of the stage.

Todd Moore’s one-poem chapbook is as relentless as Jimi Hendrix playing the guitar with his teeth, doing a backward somersault while playing his guitar, then setting his guitar on fire. Instead of a guitar, Moore uses the machine gun of language. Instead of a rock n roll stage, it is the landscape of the getaway car. Instead of playing the guitar with his teeth, the main character, Baby Face Nelson, is knocking demon flies off his face. But the intensity is the same: the getaway car cutting through the blackness of the night, the guitar going up in flames.

Todd Moore is the Jimi Hendrix of poetry. Todd Moore is the Sam Peckinpah of poetry. Todd Moore is the John Dillinger of poetry. Through the use of violence and death, Moore transcends violence and death. It is only through the brutality of the intensity of art that man has a chance. The only answer to war, the only answer to crime, the only answer to external violence is the internal power of art: matching the intensity of the external violence with the intensity of the internal violence. And, it is not through politics that the answer lies, it is through poetry. Nothing is more dangerous than poetry, because it stands alone. Nothing is more dangerous than poetry, because the outlaw stands alone. Nothing is more dangerous than poetry, because the man standing alone with the weapon of his art is indefatigable. Nietzsche knew this. Artaud knew this. Garcia Lorca knew this.

Todd Moore delivers this message with one word: relentless. Todd Moore delivers this message with one poem: “relentless.” Todd Moore delivers this message with one chapbook: “relentless.”

Shotgun Weather

by Todd Moore & Dennis Gulling

Cover: Junior Walker

Copyright 2007 by Todd Moore & Dennis Gulling. St. Vitus Press/Crawlspace Press

this chapbook can be read entirely here…

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9 EURO incl. shipment world-wide NO LONGER AVAILABLE VIA METROPOLIS | THE SHOP

Download listen to Todd Moore | Bonnie sat | Zerx Volume No. 4

love & death & teeth in the blood

by Todd Moore 2007

Cover art: Josh Howard

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9 EURO incl. shipment world-wide NO LONGER AVAILABLE VIA METROPOLIS | THE SHOP

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Download listen to Todd Moore | billy and I - from Zerx Volume 27

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Blood on Blood

Todd Moore & Gary Goude

Front & back cover design and layout: Theron Moore for St. Vitus Press 2006

this chapbook can be read entrirely here…

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click on the covers for bigger image sizes please !

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9 EURO incl. shipment world-wide NO LONGER AVAILABLE VIA METROPOLIS | THE SHOP

Download listen to Todd Moore | blind cherry | Zerx Volume No. 27

maybe you are also interested in these THE SHOP cd's and books:

1. Todd Moore (1937 – 2010) | A Memorial Reading | Vox Audio
2. Todd Moore Reads | Vox Audio
3. todd moore | the riddle of the wooden gun
4. Todd Moore and Lawrence Welsh Read at Acequia Booksellers | Vox Audio
5. mark weber
6. Mera Wolf and Todd Moore Read at Acequia Booksellers | Vox Audio
7. zerx | mark weber
8. tony moffeit
9. vox audio by bruce holsapple