In Outlaw spirit I'm going to rip off OW's own Victor Schwartzman's intro to his Todd Moore interview from a while back, just because I can. "Todd Moore is the real deal as an Outsider Writer. Arguably America's finest underground poet..." (Get more of him at www.saintvituspress.com.)
And then there's this, which is about The Name is Dillinger, Moore's most important work and a poem that marked a life change for him: "...Someday it may be said that Todd Moore was the greatest of the American poets since Sandburg. Why wait? Read anything you can get by him, now." That wasn't from some little litzine either, it was from the L.A. Times.
This may be one of the most reasonable "rants" you ever read at Outsider Writers, but it is no doubt worth a read. Enjoy. And learn. (JDF)
NAMING THE OUTLAW: WHERE IT BEGAN
Todd Moore
If you are looking for the origins of Outlaw Poetry, you’ll have to dig through the rubble of much that has gone before. You might have to go as far back as Francois Villon the French poet priest who was also a thief and a murderer. Before that, maybe you could refer to Dante’s INFERNO for the names of the poets who were also criminals. Before that the mists of time set in but I am sure that outlaw poets have been with us from the beginning of time. Wherever you find a civilization which has oppressed its artists and thinkers, you will find poets who have made the existential decision to speak out against it, to write poetry in extremis, to use the blood and the scream as the central metaphors of their work.
The origins of Outlaw Poetry in america are easier to trace. And, before I do that, let me emphasize that when I say Outlaw Poetry, I am referring to poetry written by men and women who are not necessarily felons. First and foremost, Outlaw Poetry is poetry written outside the mainstream of american literature. Outlaw Poetry is written at the margins, outside the safe confines of academia, but essential to the core of american culture, the psychic center of who we are.
We can start with Hart Crane, the twenties, his rebellion against T. S. Eliot and THE WASTE LAND. We can start with THE BRIDGE with all of its warts and shortcomings. We can start with a man who truly wrote and played his life outside the accepted boundaries. And, we can go from Crane to Tom McGrath and his LETTER TO AN IMAGINARY FRIEND. Even though McGrath taught at several colleges in his life, he was probably the best prototype of the real political, social, and artistic outlaw poet we have prior to the Beat Generation and the radicalized seventies. McGrath also worked as a labor organizer in the late forties, was a member of the Communist party, and was called to testify before HUAC before he was subsequently blacklisted in the mid fifties. McGrath’s LETTER is, along with HOWL, a real testament to the outlaw heart of american poetry.
HOWL dates from 1956; the first installment of LETTER TO AN IMAGINARY FRIEND was published in 1962. These two books along with Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD, and Burroughs’ NAKED LUNCH are important american precursors to Outlaw Poetry. Lets throw in Rimbaud’s SEASON IN HELL, Baudelaire’s FLOWERS OF EVIL, and Lautreamont’s MALDOROR, and Nietszche’s THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA for good measure, even though those books were written nearly a hundred years before Burroughs, Ginsberg, and McGrath were on the scene.
Other precursors to Outlaw Poetry were Ray Bremser, d. a. levy, and Jack Micheline. None of them attained the stature that Ginsberg or Kerouac achieved. Their lives were lived marginally and closer to the bone. Bremser was an actual outlaw serving time in the Bordentown Reformatory for armed robbery and this is where he wrote and published his long poem THE DYING CHILDREN on a prison printing press. Cleveland was d. a. levy’s home where he self published much of his work including THE NORTH AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD. He was hounded by the local police for drug use and eventually committed suicide. Jack Micheline is probably the best known of the three. He spent much of his life in San Francisco as a street poet and died in his late sixties while riding a BART train. The poetry that all three men wrote was definitely outside the acceptable limits of the contemporary scene of endowed poetry chairs, McArthur prizes, and the approving eyes of Helen Vendler and associates.
One other poet I didn’t include in this group is Kell Robertson. He was also associated with the San Francisco Beats. Then sometime in the sixties or early seventies he moved to New Mexico where he still lives today. His work is less Beat urban and more Outlaw western. Because he grew up hard scrabble in Kansas, has spent much of his life on the road, has worked at all kinds of shovel end occupations, has experienced the life of a cowboy without becoming a cowboy poet, Robertson’s life style is certainly that of an Outlaw Poet. He stands outside the system and exemplifies what the Outlaw Poet is all about. He writes about and for the common man. He represents the down and out poet, free and unencumbered by any one or any thing. While his body of work is small, the force and example of that work is an inspiration for a whole new generation of poets currently writing.
Charles Bukowski was also writing and thriving during this period. He began to gain a certain notoriety in the early sixties in Los Angeles and by the late sixties and early seventies he was quickly becoming famous. Bukowski was a one man show. Once he began to write and publish fiction as well as poetry, he acquired first a national and then an international reputation. The only nonfiction Bukowski wrote during the sixties was collected under the title NOTES OF A DIRTY OLD MAN. Mostly, it was Bukowski’s rowdy life style coupled with both poetry and prose written in a straight forward no bullshit style about life on the cheap and the down and out which made Bukowski famous. He definitely lived outside the system and it was his life style which made him an outlaw. I am not really sure whether or not he called himself an Outlaw Poet, but even if he didn’t, he certainly deserved the title.
After Bukowski, there is my generation. And, it is with my generation, which begins roughly in the late sixties that you can really begin to see the full force and lunge of the Outlaw Generation. By 1969, I was up against the proverbial wall. I had failed as a novelist and short story writer. The culture was coming apart at the seams over the Viet Nam War. I really didn’t know who I was or what I wanted. But I was ready for something, anything as long as it gave me some sense of direction and purpose. And, that’s when I started to write poetry.
I didn’t find my voice and style all at once but by 1973, I was on the verge. I found Dillinger. By 1975 I was writing poems I could live with, poems that began to tap into an inner darkness. And, in 1976 I wrote The Name Is Dillinger. That poem changed everything for me. It opened psychic doors that prior to that time I had no knowledge of. And even, though I had made the breakthrough I had to wait four more years for it to be published. But, it didn’t matter because I already knew what I had accomplished just as Whitman had to have known what he had accomplished with Song of Myself.
The Name Is Dillinger is one of the few poems, if that, that I can go back and read straight through without being embarrassed. It’s also maybe the best long poem of that decade published anywhere. Yeah, I know, I’m dealing with half horse half alligator shit here and I’m not ashamed to admit it. But think about it for a moment. Is there another long poem from the seventies that can compare to The Name Is Dillinger? Michael Ondaatje’s THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY THE KID, maybe. But, I think Dillinger weighs in with a whole lot more power. McGrath’s LETTER TO AN IMAGINARY FRIEND, a work still in progress in the seventies, maybe. LETTER wins through sheer lyricism, Dillinger wins if you count absolute intensity. And, of course, GUNSLINGER by Ed Dorn. We’ll have to settle that by arm wrestling in in hell.
And, I know, to continue along this line constitutes a pissing contest. So, lets get back to the main thrust of this essay which is Outlaw Poetry origins. My major contention is that Outlaw Poetry derives from The Name Is Dillinger written in 1976 and first published by Midwestern Writers Publishing House in 1980. In the interim between 1976 and the early 80s Outlaw Poetry also emerged in the kinds of small poems that I wrote and published in THE MAN IN THE BLACK CHEVROLET, ACES AND EIGHTS, DRIVING, and DOA from 1976. This is where I first started to write the compact twenty and thirty line poems about bar, back alley, and street violence. As far as I know, no one had ever used these subjects before or had written about murder in the style that I had, cinematically, viscerally, and infamously. Many poets have imitated my style and subject matter in the last thirty years but no one has exactly got it right.
At that time no one that I know of was calling himself an Outlaw Poet. It really wasn’t until Tony Moffeit sent me a small untitled manuscript of poems that the term actually surfaced. This was in 1983 and the poems were about juke joints, gunfighters, dark alleys, voodoo dreams, and after writing back and forth awhile we came up with the term Outlaw Poetry. I’m not exactly sure which one of us was the first to think of it but it seems as though it was a collaborative effort and before we realized what was happening, his chapbook was titled Outlaw Blues and I published it through Roadhouse Press. Again, let me emphasize, this was in 1983, sixteen years before THE OUTLAW BIBLE OF AMERICAN POETRY was published by Thunders Mouth Press in 1999.
THE OUTLAW BIBLE OF AMERICAN POETRY is most certainly the most important anthology of American poetry since the early sixties. And, it has had an immense influence on the scene even though such important poets as Charles Bukowski, Kell Robertson, Ron Androla, Tony Moffeit, and Mark Weber, to name only a few, were excluded. Still, THE OUTLAW BIBLE deserves to be mentioned here because it took a term which had been in play in the small press poetry underground for years and made it a well known popular culture term. Even if the term Outlaw Poet had been coined nearly two decades before, THE OUTLAW BIBLE practically made it a household phrase.
From 1999, lets do a quick segue to 2004 when Tony Moffeit and I decided to issue several manifestoes proclaiming Outlaw Poetry a movement. We decided to take Outlaw Poetry to the internet because in our estimation the old strategies of the writing schools which had been around since the 1970s were becoming stale. The poetry that academia cranked out was and still remains no longer vital, no longer speaks to a culture which has itself reached a dead end.
In 2003, just a year before Tony Moffeit and I began issuing Outlaw manifestoes, my son Theron founded and began publishing St. Vitus’ Dance, a poetry magazine devoted to the promotion and publication of Outlaw Poetry. Within a year Theron brought me in as coeditor and we have gone from publishing the magazine as hardcopy to bringing it out as an online zine. As far as I know, it is the first small press zine that can call itself Outlaw.
Outlaw Poetry and the Outlaw Generation are much more than literary tags. They represent new ways of thinking, new ways of writing, new ways of opposing a mainstream literary tradition which has become corrupt at the core, devoid of great stories, and cluttered with large money prizes and awards for boring and very mediocre works. And even though we live in a culture which neglects its important writers, we more than ever need the great novels and all those brave poems again.
Last update : 14-05-2007 23:12
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Todd and Carl
By: David Blaine (Guest) on 15-05-2007 04:51