todd moore
Category: poetry books, poetry magazines| January 31st, 2007
Todd Moore | Photo: Pete Jonsson
Todd Moore is 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.”
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
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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14 EURO incl. shipment world-wide
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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14 EURO incl. shipment world-wide
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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9 EURO incl. shipment world-wide
Download listen to an excerpt of this Todd Moore CD
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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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7 EURO incl. shipment world-wide
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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7 EURO incl. shipment world-wide
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
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
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Download listen to Todd Moore | billy and I - from Zerx Volume 27
&
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
Download listen to Todd Moore | blind cherry | Zerx Volume No. 27
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