The Name is Todd Moore
The Dillinger Poems, book one, Uzzano #8, 1978, $2.00;
The Name is Dillinger, book two, Midwestern Writers
Publishing House, no price given; and The Dark and Bloody Ground, the Browns Mills Review Press, $2.00.
The poetry of Todd Moore extends the past forcefully into the present. There is a lot of subtlety in his poetry but nothing subtle in the force of that pull of the past clinging so tight to certain individuals that to see them clearly is to also recognize how deeply are we immersed in history. Moore's poems are quick, hard, flashy. But they are not the poetry school exercises we all know too much of. They are written out of a desperate need to survive, and they come at you with the slickness of the smooth arc of fear that trails after the bank robber's Thompson machinegun. Moore's Dillinger poems begin with the individual snapshots ‑‑the camera as gun‑‑ of John Dillinger in his many poses. And behind them all is JD the man moving through history as he makes it as it makes him and us:
Dillinger Had That Shiteating
grin
he flashed
fast as any pistol
on hookers
lawmen cameras
& all the fatassed
bank mothers
...
he thought how jesus
perfect things were
going like in the
movies or legends
he'd been told
The Dillinger Poems, book one contains 40 poems. Which at $2.00 is 5 cents a piece. Cheap. But I don't know if there are any copies left. If there are it's first come, first serve for a collector's item.
The Name is Dillinger is a problem. If you are expecting 40 more poems that is. It is one long 23 page chant of piss, pain, and blood that realizes the myth of the man not just the story. It fixes John Dillinger into the hurt that is the essential quality of too many of the names that proclaim our landmarks. And Moore begins with the land, for Dillinger is mid‑west hero ‑‑no mistaking that, and takes us through the many possibilities of the heroic, the fake and fabulous, and the con we too often accept as genuine myth.
where the rivers converge
where the forest line thins to cornfields & apple orchards
where the prairie begins & a man w/a stick stands in a field
...
I sign my name dillinger
...
which rhymes w/derringer cocked & aimed just like that
pistol
...
dillinger
dillinger of the fists
ballpark dillinger
...
dillinger who might have been
son of Butch Cassidy
...
mebbe was
I am Clark Cable Dillinger
...
Douglas Fairbanks high in that
leaping up beyond bullets
hands & history
...
The latest book, The Dark and Blood Ground. This was the name given to Kentucky by the early frontiersmen but Moore shows us that the name applies to too many places in this country which we must claim as ours. There are two poems ‑‑and this is another one of those bargains, 32 poems for $2.00‑‑ on the same page that are similar but with two different time frames and it is this difference that forces us to look all that more closely to what is happening to us now. It is the need for this kind of looking as well as the artistry and the ambition of what he has done that demands that we take this man, this poet, seriously.
FROZE TOLD OF COMING
in a prairie cabin from sweden to
after her husband had america the
run off got bush wisconsin country
whacked or lost in where frozen
snow she'd stuffed bits lakes resemble
of torn dress & quilt blank eyes
in all the chinks & staring at the
cracks around window moon married
& door wrapped herself early husband
tight in a buffalo robe worked the docks
& sat on the chilled came home those
sod floor in front of nights shaking
the fireplace watching couldn't stop
the last chair go up his teeth from
the letter she started clicking or
to write to her sister stay warm all
began the snow the snow he could talk
an icicle was growing about was that
from her hand damned icy
wind knocking
ships' hulls
took sick the
fall of his 36th
year died the
company gave
her a cold sack
of flour
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