Thursday, February 21st, 2008...10:53 pm

todd moore | blood calls to blood

Jump to Comments

Blood calls to blood. Blood always calls to blood. That happens whenever I read THE NAME IS DILLINGER. I promise myself to relax, to take it easy, breathe normally, just say the lines in a natural way but the last thing I can be is laid back when I read NAME. It’s like answering to a throwdown, a personal challenge, a psychic slap in the face, a long blood curdling yell from the void. I read the first line out loud and suddenly I am sucked into the current of the poem, in and down and around the roaring flow of the lines. Current and flow are words that apply because THE NAME IS DILLINGER is a big river of a poem, a tsunami of a poem. A torrential flood of a poem and all I can do is swim in the crowd of water, the overpowering rush.

Blood always calls to blood because a poem is made of breath and spit and soul stuff and come and THE NAME IS DILLINGER is the history of all those things plus dreams. Also, the history of the way the blood goes in the veins. The map and the history of the way the voice tries to crack a door in the void. The map and the history and the nightmare strut of my shadow while I try to read it to a wall or to a room full of people. Wall or people it doesn’t matter once I get into the rhythm and the motion of it because once in I am lost to everything but the words and whatever it is that pulses and shakes underneath the words. I get so lost there that I have to read my way out of it, I have to talk my way out of it, I have to chant my way out of it. THE NAME IS DILLINGER is a violent labyrinth of a poem that I have to dive into and then wander around in with exuberant fear, nervous ecstasy, and bushwhacked desire before escaping its hypnotic drag. And, escape is the only way out of NAME. Or, maybe release. The poem releases me, I never release it. I could never release it. It has that much power over me, over who I am, over the way that I am compelled to read it.

Release because the built up energy inside NAME is so intense that it has a way of holding me all the way through it no matter how many mistakes I may make, no matter how many lines I may have skipped or in my excitement have been totally blind to. Release because the pent up energy is so intense that it holds me the way ten thousand volts may hold an electrocuted man to the murder chair until the plug is pulled, the juice is cut. Release because during the reading or performance or whatever defines this intricate dance of words, I am tangled and tied to this blue volt forest fire of words.

And, when I am released, I am almost always exhausted. I can’t think of any other american poem of the nineteenth or twentieth century which is as intense as THE NAME IS DILLINGER. I write this not in arrogance, though it may seem so, but because for the last thirty plus years I’ve compared it to all of the best long poems that I know. I’ve even gone so far as to try reading SONG OF MYSELF aloud, to myself, and found that while it is and will always be the primal american long poem, SONG lacks the blood and breath intensity of THE NAME IS DILLINGER. SONG reminds me of a large gently flowing river, really the first river, while NAME is almost certainly the most violent of large rivers. SONG is a leisurely first stroll into the archetypal american psyche including and incorporating and naming practically everything. NAME is anything but leisurely. It roars through the smashed canyons of angst and rage; it slams the velocity of line against and through the reader’s blood, it is a nightmare longing for a nearly impossible outlaw lingo.

Of all the long poems of the twentieth century only HOWL might match THE NAME IS DILLINGER for intensity. But the intensity in HOWL is that of madness. It’s the madness of Munch’s SCREAM painted into words. It’s the madness of Goya’s black paintings splashed into an archetypal yelling. It’s the anarchic black pourings spilling from Jackson Pollock’s hands. Ultimately, HOWL is the human recoil from war, establishment, authority, nuclear weapons, mindless conformity, and money. HOWL is the sound of the human reeling from the wreckage of the contemporary world.

THE NAME IS DILLINGER is anything but a reeling back or recoiling from any of those things. NAME is the exact opposite of HOWL. Human beings react in one of two ways during extreme situations. It’s either fight or flight. HOWL may be many things, but it is the most extreme form of protest during flight. HOWL makes profound poetry and sublime noise in response to the craziness of the world. What else can you do when you have seen the best minds of your generation destroyed?

If HOWL is flight, THE NAME IS DILLINGER is all about fight. Dillinger refuses to be Allen Ginsberg. Dillinger refuses to be Franz Kafka’s Joseph K. Dillinger refuses to wait for that ominous knock at the door or go howling through the streets, a dark voice in tatters. He’d rather blow the shit out of everything. For every Joseph K. there has to be a John Dillinger. For every HOWL there has to be THE NAME IS DILLINGER. These two poems stand at opposite poles, the extremes of the american psyche. They help us understand what it really means to be an american.. They define the edges of the american dream and the american longing.

Except for SONG OF MYSELF’s primal long chant and HOWL’s white heat of madness, there are no other poems that match THE NAME IS DILLINGER for its careening intensity, its violent and unrelenting bravado, its primal sense of murder danced in and out of words, its complex rage.

I remember the whole time I was writing THE NAME IS DILLINGER it felt as though some unseen presence had grabbed me by the shirt front, by the lapels of my coat, by great handfuls of my hair and skin and was shaking me so hard that all of the breath had just about come out of me. Was shaking me so hard I could barely speak. Was shaking me so hard that I could almost taste the salt and spew of blood at the back of my mouth.

And, while I was writing, I could feel myself shiver but the shiver was going in and not noticeable from any outward appearance. The chill must have resulted from going into the darkness of the blood and the dream. And, I could hardly get the words down because it felt as though my hand was about to jump away from the pen I was holding. And, the times I was working on the old black steel Royal typewriter my hands were almost frightened of the words that were pouring out of them. It felt like a double shot of exultation and enormous fear.

Was it exultation and fear that Rachmaninoff felt when he was composing his third piano concerto? Was he shaking and sweating into the cadences of his nightmare crescendoes?

Aside from HOWL and SONG OF MYSELF, the only thing that can stand up to THE NAME IS DILLINGER for the sheer sake of spiraling intensity is the Rach Three. The violent lyricism of it. No other poem in English from the twentieth century that I know of can equal NAME in this way. Not THE WASTE LAND. Not PATERSON. Not LETTER TO AN IMAGINARY FRIEND. Not MAXIMUS. Not THE DREAM SONGS. Not even any part of THE CANTOS. Maybe Vicente Huidobro’s ALTAZOR. But that’s a poem written in Spanish. Still, I wonder.

I sometimes wonder what it could have been like reading THE NAME IS DILLINGER against Walt Whitman reading SONG OF MYSELF. In his prime, maybe down on the seashore with the waves rushing in. He could read a part of SONG and I could read a part of NAME, against ourselves, against each other, and against the ocean. And, we’d go back and forth mano a mano with the wind trying to one up everything. Or, in his stead, Ginsberg could read HOWL. At Vesuvio’s. Or, at Six Gallery if there is a Six Gallery anymore. Or, how about City Lights Bookstore for one last go round? Let her rip and let it be total war during the reading. Make it a reading with all of the stops pulled out. A reading with no time limit. And none of that cheap slam third rate acting bullshit. This would be several notches above amateur night. All we’d need was just the frenzy and the fury of the human voice where the vocal chords nearly crack in two. And then, make it a draw. Because it has to be a draw. Because between them both poems form the equivalent of the american psyche.

I haven’t read THE NAME IS DILLINGER much lately, though there are times when I ache to hear it echo all the way through me like the deepest dream voice I’ll ever know. It isn’t because I don’t love it. I love it the way Beethoven had to love the Ninth, the way Goethe had to love Faust, the way Shakespeare must have loved Hamlet, the way Mozart had to love Don Giovanni. I don’t read it because it is like wrestling with a monstrous demon. It is like getting into the worst of fistfights with someone who is eternally young and undeniably strong and unbelievably quick. I rarely read THE NAME IS DILLINGER anymore because it is a power source that I normally think twice about before tapping into.

It is said that Lorca, before giving a reading, would invoke the duende much the same way that a shaman would call down the energy for a healing ceremony. When I read THE NAME IS DILLINGER, I never have to do this because NAME is all duende. And, except for THE CORPSE IS DREAMING, it is a poem that is directly hooked into what Ted Hughes has called “the elemental power circuit of the universe.”

The thing is it doesn’t matter whether or not I read THE NAME IS DILLINGER. The fact that I wrote I means that somehow or other I will float in that river of energy forever. And, it is there that blood will always call to blood.

Todd Moore books are available via the Metropolis Shop Page here…

some related articles are listed below:

  1. todd moore | outlaw bonfires and dillinger’s blood
  2. todd moore | leaving a little blood on the floor
  3. todd moore | that terrible shaking in the blood
  4. todd moore | washed in the blood of the outlaw moon
  5. todd moore | the blood of america
  6. todd moore | the long way home and the blood on the floor
  7. todd moore | the blood of the poet
  8. todd moore | the machine gun blood of the poem
  9. todd moore | writing dillinger in the eye of the hurricane
  10. todd moore | billy the kid in the theater of blood
  11. todd moore | reading the dark
  12. todd moore | i write in the blood
  13. todd moore | night blood, red hands
  14. todd moore | blood and fate under mad stars
  15. todd moore | mythic blood, psychic movies, outlaw dreams
  16. todd moore | machine guns, guernica, and the outlaw poem
  17. todd moore | walking around in the blood
  18. todd moore | love & death & teeth in the blood
  19. todd moore | gimme danger
  20. todd moore | gary goude | blood on blood
  21. todd moore | tasting the blood
  22. todd moore | the great american poem
  23. todd moore | coyote death mask outlaw
  24. todd moore | the dark country
  25. todd moore | i don’t want
  26. todd moore | pure blood primal: the poetry of kell robertson
  27. todd moore | all the dark talking to the angel of death
  28. todd moore | the treehouse reading
  29. todd moore | what are the stakes in american poetry?
  30. todd moore | reading the movies, watching the poems
  31. todd moore | the exalted scar and the annointed cure
  32. todd moore | falling asleep in outlaw country
  33. todd moore | death rides the blood
  34. todd moore | I work the shattered line
  35. todd moore | glistening with blood | a bellyfull of anarchy by rob plath
  36. todd moore | the nightmare of reading
  37. todd moore | cold fire, molten ice
  38. todd moore | the fevers and sweats of the nightmare poem
  39. todd moore | the last good movie I made was a poem
  40. todd moore | damage, genius, courage
  41. todd moore | danger beyond danger, where the outlaw lives
  42. todd moore | nightmare frenzy
  43. todd moore | falling in love with danger
  44. todd moore | stealing the fire, stealing the shadow
  45. john dorsey & s.a. griffin | the dead zone trilogy by todd moore
  46. todd moore | dillinger, the coyote, and the wolf
  47. todd moore | instructions for reading dead reckoning
  48. todd moore | the nightmare of poetry is war
  49. todd moore | the volcanic death song of baby face nelson
  50. todd moore | i’ll play dillinger
  51. todd moore | road testing the kid
  52. todd moore | everything changes when dillinger arrives
  53. todd moore | the last good reading from the outlaw dark
  54. todd moore | the coyote trickster and the wooden gun
  55. tony moffeit | a revolution of consciousness: review on dead reckoning by todd moore
  56. todd moore | the fever of writing
  57. todd moore | nightmare splender
  58. todd moore | into the open madness: the poetry of kell robertson
  59. todd moore | dying with dillinger in the corpse is dreaming
  60. todd moore | the house
  61. todd moore | the murder and the ecstasy of the everlasting dream
  62. todd moore | the shattered hemingway sentence
  63. todd moore | what I want to know
  64. todd moore | dreaming the dream, paying the price
  65. todd moore | the sentences are burning
  66. todd moore | the old man’s waiting
  67. todd moore | all the way to the fame
  68. todd moore | hustling for drinks, praying for lines
  69. todd moore | working the outlaw wind
  70. todd moore | scratching it out street level for the poem
  71. todd moore | shadow of the outlaw
  72. todd moore | I don’t
  73. todd moore | i love
  74. todd moore | dillinger, outlaws, writing, and murder
  75. todd moore | rd armstrong | reads
  76. tony moffeit | the outlaw revolution
  77. todd moore | just before
  78. todd moore | american metaphors, visions, and nightmares
  79. todd moore | and the gunfight at dodge city
  80. todd moore | fighting death for the poem
  81. todd moore | the rat’s blood had glued my hand shut
  82. todd moore | a conversation with raindog
  83. todd moore | outlaw poetry, psychic damage, the survival of wounds
  84. todd moore | i want it all and i want it now
  85. todd moore | stealing dillinger, becoming an outlaw
  86. todd moore | working on my duende
  87. todd moore | inventing the nightmare
  88. wolfgang carstens | blood, energy and darkness: a review of dead reckoning
  89. todd moore | dillinger, death, and the high mountain air
  90. todd moore | dave roskos, the editor’s editor
  91. todd moore | the mystery
  92. todd moore | scorched trinity: dillinger, billie, and machine gun love
  93. todd moore | gary goude and that crushed rotting dawg
  94. todd moore | the dillinger convergence: three ways of dreaming the outlaw
  95. todd moore | dillinger was
  96. tony moffeit | shaking the bones
  97. todd moore | the name is dillinger
  98. todd moore | how to survive the coming night: the poetry of john yamrus
  99. todd moore | love, longing, dillinger, disaster
  100. todd moore | blind whiskey and the straight razor blues
  101. todd moore | dillinger stepped
  102. todd moore | writing poetry, burning the house
  103. todd moore | the second
  104. todd moore | red
  105. todd moore | when…
  106. todd moore | outlaw poetry
  107. todd moore | the sign of the outlaw
  108. todd moore | patrick mckinnon and the drunken shamanic
  109. todd moore | the outlaw poet and those killer eyes
  110. todd moore | machine guns, movies, culture, dreams
  111. todd moore | the nightmare talking
  112. todd moore | going to meet the outlaw
  113. tony moffeit | outlaw
  114. todd moore | stories, ashes, and fire
  115. todd moore | living at the movies with dillinger and depp
  116. todd moore | the dark side of america
  117. todd moore | dillinger stood…
  118. rd armstrong | todd moore and lummox press
  119. todd moore | how come
  120. todd moore | writing with your wounds: a reading of the broken and the damned by jason hardung
  121. todd moore | 45 auto
  122. todd moore | taking on bukowski
  123. todd moore | frito stopped…
  124. todd moore | what haunted
  125. tony moffeit | scorching the darkness: the channeling of dillinger
  126. tony moffeit | a man on fire
  127. todd moore | dancing in the fire with s.a. griffin
  128. todd moore | chasing jack micheline’s shadow
  129. todd moore | this
  130. todd moore | dillinger and the riddle of the wooden gun
  131. todd moore | saturday night desperate, don winter, and the black mitten of poetry
  132. todd moore | the bank…
  133. todd moore | doing shots with ben smith in air à boire
  134. bill nevin | todd moore, cinematic poet on the outlaw’s trail
  135. todd moore | right after…
  136. todd moore | donny shot…
  137. todd moore | cindy was
  138. todd moore | coleman is
  139. todd moore | when dillinger
  140. todd moore | black rain
  141. todd moore | burning the…
  142. todd moore | the question
  143. todd moore | burning
  144. todd moore | crudely mistaken for life: the books of wounds
  145. todd moore | dynamite
  146. todd moore | peckinpah took…
  147. todd moore | the perfect
  148. todd moore | gimme a shotgun
  149. todd moore | billie licked…
  150. todd moore | devouring the shadow
  151. todd moore | las montanas de santa fe: visions of the spirit country
  152. todd moore | the kid
  153. tony moffeit | outlaw: the roots
  154. todd moore & dennis gulling | shotgun weather
  155. wolfgang carstens | todd moore | boom
  156. todd moore | shotgun blues
  157. alex gildzen | looking for the blood of elizabeth short
  158. tony moffeit | american blues outlaw poetry anarchic dream
  159. todd moore | the sea, the poem, and the house of all possible myths: the poetry of milner place
  160. tony moffeit | it is the first day of 2010
  161. todd moore & john macker
  162. todd moore | we cut
  163. todd moore | just
  164. todd moore | i was
  165. todd moore | outlaw
  166. todd moore | lucky
  167. todd moore | lisa was…
  168. todd moore | they’re coming
  169. todd moore | fucking
  170. todd moore | hemingway
  171. todd moore | tyler’s
  172. todd moore | reading
  173. todd moore | the bottle
  174. todd moore | parker shot
  175. todd moore | jack wilson
  176. todd moore | geeshie wiley
  177. todd moore | largo slapped
  178. todd moore | dillinger posed
  179. todd moore | what’s
  180. mera wolf & todd moore | read
  181. todd moore & Lawrence welsh | poetry reading
  182. kell robertson | the goofy goddess on the wall
  183. lawrence welsh | skull highway
  184. todd moore | the gold cane, van gogh’s ear, and the gun in the casket: wandering down this crooked road
  185. s.a.griffin | the way of the pen
  186. gary goude | sad lives
  187. gary goude | more poems
  188. lost? & found!
  189. john yamrus | i don’t know what it was
  190. todd moore | jerry’s old
  191. todd moore | burning
  192. todd moore | coming out of…
  193. todd moore | play it & judy christopher
  194. bone | poetry by todd moore & rd armstrong
  195. zach king-smith | before you go tell me that you love me
  196. lawrence welsh | todd moore’s riddle: obscurity, redemption and fame
  197. s.a. griffin | for todd moore’s 70th
  198. ken greenley | miriam halliday borkowski
  199. todd moore | the central avenue rundown jazz radio show
  200. dave church | the editor
  201. tony moffeit | outlaw consciousness
  202. gary goude | jake’s dream
  203. tony moffeit | renegade
  204. joe salerno | getting up for work III
  205. mark weber | for todd moore’s birthday party
  206. todd moore
  207. roger singer | 3 poems
  208. john macker | stuart z. perkoff
  209. wolfgang carstens | for todd moore
  210. lawrence welsh | notes from a punk survivor

Leave a Reply