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love & death & teeth in the blood Todd Moore Pitchfork Poetry Press P.O. Box 146399 Chicago, Illinois 60614 www.pitchforkpoetryprojects.com $9
Reviewed by Victor Schwartzman
Some people would call the people populating Todd Moore’s poems thugs, some would call them knights, certainly they are all outlaws. None of them fit into nice society, none of them would want a day job in a cubicle. They live for the moment. They do not have registered retirement savings plans. Moore’s new chapbook contains around fifty poems, virtually all of them about outlaws. These aren’t your nice outlaws from Hollywood westerns either. The one movie Moore mentions, three times I think, is The Wild Bunch, hardly your typical Hollywood western. In one poem, you can get a taste of Moore’s take on how people see violence as entertainment in darkest America: having a beer w/lee stokes who turns in the middle of a swig gets it down & sez re member in the wild bunch when warren oates swiv els that ma chine gun around they shda had him w/his head shot off to his mouth so that the scream he makes is just the sound of blood
Moore’s style is pared down to begin with, but as you can see from the above work, it is even more pared down in most of the poems in this chap. There is elementary poetry—by elemental I mean basic. There ain’t no flowers, no rhymes, no bull. It’s all down to the fundamentals, and that’s reflected in both the style and the content. The titles of the poems are all also the first lines, leading you right into it, also befitting the style.
I did not see one poem in this chap about how blue the sky is or what a lover’s kiss tasted like. Thank God. Instead I saw poems based in reality—a tough reality, even a scarey reality. You might not want to invite a lot of Moore’s characters home for dinner, and you definitely don’t want any of them dating your children. Moore’s characters prefer the outlaw life to the cubicle world:
Standing
outside my back door watching larry haul 2 big buckets of grease out the back door of the Clifton café most of the time he never sd anything but that day I had my switchblade out & was punching the button on the side of the blade to see how good the action was he walked past on his way to dump the slop between garages when he got close he sd you think that knife makes you something i waited til he got done w/the grease & was walking back then i sd i’d rather have this then be fucken w/grease he gave me a look he was covered w/ flies So much for yearning for the day job.
If you are not familiar with outlaw poetry, this chapbook is as good an example as any, which means it’s damn good. This is poetry with guts. It is full of passion, lust, violence, and probably one huge pile of lost souls. Here are my notes to Moore, as I read the chapbook, after reading some of the poems: For starters, I'm glad I'm not Packy. I'll admit I like Mickey Spillane. No matter what anyone says, I think his writing was honest. He also knew what readers wanted & gave it to them, but also kept to his own style, when others around him were generally writing in a totally different, more 'literary' style. I like the gangster underlying the lines, the outsider. I like the bluntness.
There is a sort of increasing purity to your writing style, in terms of the sharply reduced line length, packing as much as possible into as few syllables as possible. It's a bit of a challenge to read in comparison with "regular" poetry in that it does not try to be pretty, it's prepared to certainly throw mainstream 'rules' about poetry through the window (not out the window, but through it, with lots of broken glass cutting everyone up).
You certainly have to have danger or you'd be bored. The three rules in writing are a lot like Leary's about LSD: tune in, turn on, drop out. Is writing or reading like using drugs? (This is the type of thought that came to me while reading that poem.)
Stone shot is one hell of a poem, very vivid images. I gather Stone had issues with Carla. Do you ever watch "Dexter", the Showtime cable series about a pathologist who is a serial killer?
Liked the mix of sexuality and violence and criminal themes in Etta's hair, and the two explosions coming (haha) at once. There is a novel, or a real long short story underneath the text of this poem--but then the ones I've liked the best in this chap are like that--lots of subtext.
When I read 'after the', about people getting mementoes from dead 'celebrity' bank robbers, I thought of ol' OJ, who was just busted for stealing his mementoes back. Nice exploration of the gorier side of 'celebrity' for the outlaws. Reminded me a little of Annie wilkes in King's 'Misery'--these are number one fans.
Or the further urge, always, for more violence, in the next poem about the guy's thoughts on the Wild Bunch, wanting even more.
Liked that Abilene was a cop who beat people up like a thug.
'the best place' is small, nice, evocative. Liked the ending in particular.
'put the' is a nice, short, direct image. One gotta wonder about their relationship.
'bottle of' is a good piece about hills & valleys.
Liked peewee--is the black dahlia you mention the one I'm thinking of--the notorious LA murder?
Liked after sonny--the style was different from what I've read in this chap so far.
There's also a hell of a story in 'you don't', that's only hinted at, which is fine. Liked the car running over his hand three times, just to get the job done.
'standing'--outlaw and working man. Yeah, I think I'd rather have the blade than be hauling grease & be covered with flies, what kind of life is that?
I hope you did not have to stay at the Clifton Hotel more than one knight. For that matter, I'm no longer so sure I wanna visit Kansas. Last update : 05-10-2007 16:57
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