July 3rd, 2009
todd moore | the central avenue rundown jazz radio show
June 29th, 2009
concrete!
Ruth and Marvin Sackner share their love of words and images with an intimate tour of their Miami Beach home/museum — the largest private collection of its kind. Over sixty-thousand objects from around the word speak volumes about a compulsive and joyful life of collecting art, poetry, and artist books.
The dvd: starring Ruth & Marvin Sackner with Tom Phillips, Johanna Drucker, Albert DuPont. Producer/director: Sara Sackner. Executive producer: Andrew Behar. Director of photography: Hamid Shams. Editors: Andrew Behar & Sara Sackner with music by Terry Riley, Arnold Dreyblatt. Piano played by Christopher Nava. This dvd is available here: http://www.rediscov.com/sacknerarchives
Ruth and Marvin Sackner founded the Archive in Miami Beach, Florida in 1979. Its initial mission was to establish a collection of books, critical texts, periodicals, ephemera, prints, drawings, collages, paintings, sculptures, objects, manuscripts, and correspondence dealing with precedent and contemporary, internationally produced, concrete and visual poetry. The antecedent material had at its starting point, Stephane Mallarme ’s poem, “Un Coup de Des” (Cosmopolis, 1897). The historic examples included works with concrete/visual poetic sensibilities from such twentieth century art movements as Italian Futurism, Russian and Eastern European Avant Garde, Dada, Surrealism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, Ultra, Tabu-Dada, Lettrisme, and Ultra-Lettrisme.
The initiators of the contemporary, international, concrete poetic movement included Oyvind Fahlstrom (1953), Eugen Gomringer (1953) and the Noigandres Group, i.e., Augusto De Campos, Haroldo De Campos, and Decio Pignatari (1955). The Sackners collected their works as well as those of subsequent poets and over the years expanded the scope of the Archive to include unique or small edition artist’s books that integrated text and image or consisted of experimental typography. They added examples of typewriter art and poetry, experimental calligraphy, correspondence art, stamp art, sound poetry, performance poetry, micrography, assembling periodicals, ‘zines,’ and graphic design as well as conventional poetry and prose written by concrete/visual poets and artists in the collection. Further, they collected experimental typographic, text and image works from such contemporary art movements as Fluxus, Transfuturism, and Inism. They included experimental fictional and non-fictional books with uniquely designed layouts such as Raymond Federman’s “Double or Nothing,” Alasdair Gray’s “1982 Janine,” B.E. Johnson’s “House Mother Normal: A Geriatric Comedy,” Avital Ronell’s “The Telephone Book,” and Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves.” Pre-twentieth century examples of pattern poetry were added to the Archive such as Rabanus Maurus’ “Liber de Laudibus Sanctae Crucis” (1503) and Publili Optatiani Porfyrii’s “ Panegyricus Dictus Constantino Augusto ” (1595). The Sackners collected manuscripts, sketchbooks and letters written by poets and artists including Ian Hamilton Finlay, Bob Cobbing, Dom Sylvester Houedard Tom Phillips, William Jay Smith, Jean-Francois Bory, Jake Berry, and F.A. Nettelbeck among others. The Archive evolved into a word/image poetic and artistic resource rather than a restricted collection of concrete and visual poetry.
June 27th, 2009
todd moore | the dillinger convergence: three ways of dreaming the outlaw
A few days ago I was sitting in one of the darkened booths at a local coffee house reading Elliott J. Gorn’s new book DILLINGER’S WILD RIDE when a member of the wait staff strolled by clearing tables. When he saw the book cover, he stopped and said, I see you are a Dillinger buff. Did you know about the new movie called PUBLIC ENEMIES. It has Johnny Depp in it as Dillinger. I mumbled something in hopes he wouldn’t linger but, if anything, he was persistent. He noticed the Kangaroo Court copy of THE NAME IS DILLINGER sitting next to my well worn copy of BLOOD MERIDIAN and said, I’ve heard of Todd Moore. Have you ever met him, do you know anything about him? I let the question hang in the air like a dead crow for a couple of seconds and said, I have no idea who he is.
I’m doing target practice with a kid called Waggs. We are using his 22 Woodsman. It feels good in the hand and all you get is a light pop when you fire it. The targets are beer bottles and soup cans. But after awhile it starts to get boring and Waggs says I know what we can use and goes to the trunk of his car where he pulls a sawed off shotgun out of a tangle of women’s panties and fast food garbage. Waddya think and before I can answer he breaks it open and shoves a cartridge in. Twelve gauge double ought buck he says. It’s only a one banger, but I love it. Then he whirls around and fires a load into an old barn door propped against a tree. See the holes it makes, man. Dillinger couldn’t have done any better.
I was well into writing DILLINGER when I realized that just the name all by itself had morphed into some kind of magical spell. It possessed a mojo all of its own. Talk to anyone from the midwest about Dillinger, especially any of the old timers who were around at the time and suddenly you find yourself entering the country of storytellers, amiable liars, tricksters, and mythmakers. Dillinger wasn’t just an outlaw. He had a little something extra. Call it quality, strut, charisma.
Kidder had buck teeth and maybe the best right arm I ever saw. We’d stand on the railroad bridge above the Pecatonica River and see who could throw a stone the farthest. He always won, sidearm or overhand. Afterward, we’d go underneath the bridge and drink the beer he stole out of his old man’s fridge and he’d tell me stories about how his old man used to run a white lightning speak back in the twenties and thirties and that sometimes Dillinger would drop by to make a connection or maybe pick up a couple of under the counter guns. After the feds made things hot for him, Dillinger stopped coming around and Kidder said his old man missed that because Dillinger always had good jokes to tell.
When I look at the Johnny Depp trailers for PUBLIC ENEMIES, I know I am watching at least two things at the same time. First, I’m watching pure promo because I realize that the people who created this film are hoping to make money, lots of money. I also know that I am looking at something like an action painting by Michael Mann. Mann is the kind of film maker who is going to give me possibly the purest filmic essence of what a contemporary outlaw in america really is. And, when I think of Mann, I think of HEAT because that, for me, is his masterpiece up until now. And, when I think of HEAT, I think of that bankjob gunfight about three quarters of the way through the film. It’s not quite as spectacular as Peckinpah’s gun battles in THE WILD BUNCH but it does come very close. I think of Mann’s signature cinematic style for action but I also think of something else. I think of the classic tension he got between Pacino and De Niro. It just doesn’t get any better than that. Especially that truce scene in the diner where De Niro and Pacino just sit there talking, but there is so much powerful restraint in that scene it reminds me of those classic scenes in THE GODFATHER where the talk is all done quietly but you know there is going to be some serious shit going down as a result. The essence of the Mann style is all the tense homicidal talking. Just that hint of murderous noir.
Note: You can swith off the advertisement while watching this trailer.
And now, somehow everything Dillinger is all coming together in 2009. I haven’t known a year quite like this since 1976. Which is when I wrote The Name Is Dillinger and everything I had ever thought about poetry changed forever then. There have also been a few other years. 1986 when Kangaroo Court started to bring out those sleek, glitzy red volumes of DILLINGER. The year 2000 when Lummox Press brought out The Corpse Is Dreaming. And, 2005 when St. Vitus Press published The Dead Zone Trilogy. All of those times have been mysteriously complex years for me. Moments when something happened but I wasn’t sure what.
However, the year 2009 is becoming possibly the most interesting Dillinger convergence in history and in the culture that I have ever seen. In February, 2009, Lummox Press brought out The Riddle of the Wooden Gun. At one hundred and forty two pages, it is one of the most ambitious sections of DILLINGER I have worked on to date. Along with The Name Is Dillinger, The Sign of the Gun, Dillinger’s Thompson, and The Corpse Is Dreaming, Riddle is one of the keys to Dillinger both as a metaphor and Dillinger as a man. And, DILLINGER, the poem has become THE archetypal long poem about an america that has been shoved down into the cellar id where all the social outlaws and outlaw poets have been locked away from the polite world.
In early June Elliott J. Gorn’s book DILLINGER’S WILD RIDE appeared. A friend called me one day shortly after RIDE came out and informed me that he had seen the book advertised in an Oxford University Press spread in The New York Review of Books. So, the first thing I did that morning was head down to the local Barnes and Noble. I really didn’t expect them to have a copy since the book was officially scheduled for release in early July. But, the clerk surprised me when she said I’ve seen that book on the shelf and took me right to it. I was further surprised to find my name in the index. That’s when I realized that this wasn’t going to be any pedestrian bio/historical rehash of Dillinger. Rather, from a cursory thumb through I realized that this is Gorn’s cultural overview of Dillinger’s life and times. In a way, DILLINGER’S WILD RIDE reminds me of Stephen Tatum’s book INVENTING BILLY THE KID, wherein Tatum tracks the shadowy figure of the Kid through history, novels, films, poetry, as well as many other cultural myths, anecdotes, and various regional fictions.
The third Dillinger convergence is the film PUBLIC ENEMIES. From the few advance reviews that I’ve read, I would be willing to wager that Mann is placing big bets on this movie. If HEAT is a past masterpiece, then PUBLIC ENEMIES is certainly intended to become a current one as well. My first reaction to Johnny Depp as Dillinger is that Depp is too handsome for the role. Dillinger had a kind of roughneck look. Bogart would have been perfect for the part had he been alive and much younger. Warren Oates, who played Dillinger in the Milius film, came close to that look. To compensate for that, Depp seems to be playing Dillinger from the inside out. It’s the Dillinger look gleaned from the Tucson jail footage, the Dillinger look from the Crown Point snapshots. It’s subdued Dillinger. It’s existential Dillinger. It’s New Wave Dillinger. And, I am very sure that Depp sees this as his shot at something as outlaw iconic as Brando or Pacino in THE GODFATHER, Cagney in WHITE HEAT, Bogart in HIGH SIERRA. PUBLIC ENEMIES comes with that built in magical Dillinger look and I think Johnny Depp moved in and has lived there awhile. You can’t buy something like that at any price. It just has to be there and available.
But, it’s the phenomenon of the convergence that interests me more than anything else. It’s this high voltage cluster of multiple Dillingers all appearing at the same time that is both exhilarating and mythical and mysterious. Personally, I have been working on the long poem DILLINGER for more than thirty years. And, when I say I have been working on DILLINGER, what I really mean is that I have been exploring the life, the blood, the legend, the soul of this man as well as his complex mythology which means that I have also been exploring the dark outlaw soul of america as well.
I can’t speak for Elliott Gorn or for Michael Mann, but I would be willing to hazard a guess that both men have been more than just intrigued by Dillinger. They very likely have been haunted by him as well. You can’t go into the Dillinger country without experiencing some kind of mojo, some kind of charisma, some kind of revved magic that takes you all over the psychic map.
So, the dead last thing that I would call myself is a Dillinger buff. I’ll reserve that tag for the gangster and civil war and outlaw reenactors. As for me, I’m not reenacting anything. I am playing it out. I am inventing John Dillinger just as much as Elliott Gorn is inventing him by attempting to salvage what facts of his life that actually apply and by accurately presenting Dillinger’s cultural milieu. And, I am trying to discover Dillinger’s darkness just as Michael Mann is trying to give us all the best live action portrait of Dillinger possible.
In a larger sense, The Riddle of the Wooden Gun, DILLINGER’S WILD RIDE, and PUBLIC ENEMIES are three ways of thinking about Dillinger and his world. You might condense them to just three questions. What is mythology? What is history? And, what is reality or in Michael Mann’s case, what is hyper reality when it comes to an outlaw? None of us may ever actually reach the central dream core of who John Dillinger was. But if we make it as far as Twain did with Huck Finn, or as far as McCarthy did with Judge Holden, or as far as Melville did with Captain Ahab, then maybe we’ve all contributed something to the ongoing mystery of John Dillinger and maybe also a little dark knowledge to the ongoing nightmare mythography of america as well. But, whatever we may have accomplished, we’ve discovered the three ways of dreaming the outlaw.
The Riddle of the Wooden Gun by Todd Moore | Lummox Press, 2009 - Dillinger’s Wild Ride by Elliott J. Gorn | Oxford University Press, 2009 - Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp | Michael Mann, Director | Release July 2009
Todd Moore books are available here…
June 27th, 2009
todd moore | burning the…
burning the
crow
folsom shot
w/the 45
auto the
recoil made
his right
hand dance
across a
dry light
ning sky
then he
splashed
the wings
w/lighter
fluid &
got a hot
fire going
before
sitting cross
legged in
the weeds
i love the
way the
fire pops
its guts
folsom sd
it’s the
last time
the crow
gets to
sing
Todd Moore books are available here…
June 27th, 2009
roger singer | 3 (more) jazz poems
Rufus Reid 1979 | Photo: Mark Weber
I SING THE REMEMBERS
The notes sing to me.
A grandma spiritual; warm evenings,
bugs buzzing on yellow lights,
a fever of warmth. Night solid with dark;
the breath of men gasp tired.I see my youth. A ball of knots.
Tied up in love, broken under the
weight of tears; running eyes, inhaling
life into my soul.The tracks on my bass; cold lines,
heated with fingers, spilling a story,
pages of pain. Fish jump in my head,
pulling me home. The river knows my name.I cry the spiritual alive. Pull at its feet.
Knocking it down, wresting like Gabriel.
Forcing the mist of its shape to surrender
the jazz. Touching the groove in me;
I sing the remembers.
Butch Morris & Frank Lowe 1979 | Photo: Mark Weber
CONCRETE HARD
The music circles;
pebbles of faces
skip the pond on the
crowd.An island of jazz
floats from the city;
drifting on smoke,
danced by
shadows.Concrete hard.
Nights cool into
flashes of neon
arrows.A broken bottle
and hearts,
rattle to a homeless stop;
silence signals
the end of
hope.Car doors clap.
Eyes injected with youth,
fail onto tomorrows
promise.The music burns the blues,
steaming to sharp
creases.
Eugene Chadbourne 1977 | Photo: Mark Weber
WITH HER
Problems got me under the rush
of jazz;
I drown in the pain
while pushing the jive and juice to
the surface,
exposing the dark side of me.The point of music sticks
me good;
I bleed a hole wide like rivers
covering my head,
causing my air to gasp;
glaciers of jam cover me.The neck of my guitar bends to
the warm will of her eyes.The song of words I sing
leads me to the hell I
run from,
when with her.
