outlaw poetry and free jazz network

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I love to play movies in my head.

Just little scenes that come out of nowhere and go back to the chaos of nightmare and dream. Maybe I’ll have Billy the Kid talking to Pat Garrett. The Kid is in jail waiting to be hanged and Garrett is sitting at his desk playing two handed poker and the Kid says, who are you dealing cards to? The chair on the other side of your desk is empty. And, Garrett takes the roll your own out of his mouth, balances it on the edge of the desk where there are burn marks from other cigarets that had been previously parked there and says, I’m playing against death. And, the Kid says, that’s a game you can never win. And, Garrett replies, I know but that doesn’t stop me from trying. And, the Kid is thinking, I’m playing, too, and I’m gonna win. I love scenes like that where the odds are impossible. Harrison Ford jumping off the falls in THE FUGITIVE. Paul Newman and Robert Redford jumping off the cliff into the river in BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. I love it when somebody fucks with death. I live in those moments. The electricity is eating me alive.

I love to play scenes from the classics in my head. Like where Alfonso Bedoya is telling Bogart, we don’t need no stinking badges. And every time I play that part I always change it just a little. Maybe I’ll have Bedoya saying badges so hard that spit will shoot out of his mouth in all directions. Or, maybe I’ll have one of his eyes start to turn toward the dark place where his eye socket and nose bridge meet like it’s trying to turn toward the darkest region inside his skull.

In THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, I really wanted to know more about Liberty Valance and not nearly so much about Jimmy Stewart because Stewart was so noble that he was boring. Maybe that’s why John Ford made the movie in black and white because there was so much black and white in the characters and hardly any in between. Hardly any neutral darkness that could lead to real evil. I really wanted to know how low down killer badass John Wayne could be because it took a John Wayne to kill Lee Marvin’s Liberty Valance. But, it was Lee Marvin I was really interested in. Marvin had something that was hair trigger and unpredictably archetypal that I loved. I knew kids like him back in the old hotel days. Kids who played with guns and kids who liked to burn people’s houses down.

The interesting thing to suppose is that John Wayne wasn’t lurking in the shadows when Stewart met Marvin on that dark deserted old west street. Wayne was off somewhere getting nastily drunk and Stewart had decided to let Marvin shoot him but to somehow keep walking, somehow hold onto that little pistol and Marvin being Marvin kept putting slug after slug into Stewart. The right arm, the left arm. The hip. But Stewart steadfastly holds onto that pistol and Marvin makes the mistake of letting Stewart get close because he figures he can finish Stewart any time he wants to. And, when Stewart does get close he somehow brings that wounded arm up. Camera closeup of Marvin’s face is laughter mixed with colossal surprise. Then Stewart fires and the bullet hole shows up very black in Marvin’s forehead. And, Marvin opens his mouth to say something and we get to see all that darkness inside.

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. The chickie run. James Dean and Buzz are getting all ready to climb into their cars for the race to the edge to see who will jump first before the car goes over. And there is a short silence between them. Then Buzz takes the switchblade out of his pocket and slides it into James Dean’s hand and says, you won’t mind holding onto this for me, will you? Dean gives him that quirky Dean look, winks and says, see you at the edge. Because Dean is more in love with the edge than Buzz could ever be. Dean has been racing toward the edge all of his life.

CHINATOWN. Right near the end when Faye Dunaway has been shot dead behind the wheel of her car and she has gone head down on the steering wheel triggering the horn and Jack Nicholson is standing there while Joe Mantell who plays Lawrence Walsh, one of the associates in his detective agency tries to calm him down. What he says is, forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown. I love that scene and have reshot it from who knows how many angles in my head. And, when I’ve exhausted them I have to go back and watch the movie all over again. Because movies like that have become national myths, places where we can go to live, places of immense psychic residence. I know I often go to those shadow houses again in my dreams.

Can you think of any poems written during the last fifty years that have the same kind of impact as LIBERTY VALANCE, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, CHINATOWN? Or, lets go more recent. How about Clint Eastwood’s UNFORGIVEN where Eastwood says, we all have it coming. How about the way that Sean Penn gets completely unhinged and takes on that haunted look in MYSTIC RIVER? Or consider the end of MYSTIC RIVER where Kevin Bacon points his gunfinger at Penn and Penn just shrugs? Or, how about that crazy flashpoint second when Javier Bardem says, call it friendo, in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN? And, I’m just using scenes from movies I picked at random. How many lines from poems written in the last fifty years have had the same effect on you? Have driven you out of and back into your blood. How many lines from poems have you tried on like fantastic old clothes, they jump you, they bushwhack the living shit right out of you. How many. Come on, how many?

Lets just cut to the chase and ask the question, if I am so goddam all knowing, why haven’t I been making movies instead of writing poems for the last forty years? Because those little movies I run in my head are the origins of poems. Among them, DILLINGER, WORKING ON MY DUENDE. Because I am compelled to write poetry the way that Dillinger was compelled to rob banks. Because I cannot deny the line or the breath or the blood of the poem. It is the angel that fights me And, I think the question is still valid. Are there any poems that haunt you the way that movies do? Personally, I am haunted by Plath’s ARIEL and I am haunted by Ted Hughes’ CROW. I am haunted by William Carlos Williams’ To Elsie and I am haunted by Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL and I am haunted by Charles Bukowski’s BURNING IN WATER, DROWNING IN FLAME and I am haunted by Lorca and I am haunted by Neruda and I am haunted by the very intense best of Vladimir Mayakovsky. And, this is the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

The big difference between great movies and great poems is that movies are instantaneous. Wham. All we have to do is shove a DVD into the machine, hit play, and settle back. Or else, just go to the movies, kick back in stadium seating with that big drink in the rich rich dark where everything is waiting and let the movie dream you. With a poem you have to work for it. And even though you make yourself comfortable, you still have to read it, you have to give yourself up to the very first line, you have to immerse yourself in the words, drown in them, go so far down in them that for a second you might think you are not coming back up, you have to push yourself into the dance, the murder, and the play. Someone once said, writing poetry busts guts. Well, reading poetry requires almost as much effort. The way I read poetry is I pretend it’s a movie. It’s dark inside and I’m in there all alone and I have the best seat in the house and anything can happen and I want it to I want it to so much that it hurts.

What happens with me is that somehow I have learned to bring the movies into the way that I read. Think of it this way. The only way to read is to read dangerously. To read so that you veins are exposed to the words. I can be reading THE WASTE LAND one more time and also thinking about that ear getting cut off in RESERVOIR DOGS. I can be reading LETTERS TO AN IMAGINARY FRIEND and thinking about Warren Beatty getting all shot up at the end of BONNIE AND CLYDE. I can be reading Jim Thompson’s THE KILLER INSIDE ME and also getting lines for a new section of DILLINGER where Dillinger says every bullet in his Thompson is dreaming. The thing that I’ve discovered is that scenes of certain movies invade me at the oddest of moments, especially when I’m writing, and sometimes a line from a poem will go through my head while I am watching a movie. And, then the line and the movie get all mixed together. I can’t help it, this is the way I have been wired, it’s the way that I am. Going to a movie is the psychic equivalent to getting a blood transfusion. The blood of the movie, where the rolling credits turn into a poem.

I need movies in the eyes, I need poems in the dreams. Reading is watching, watching is reading. I read movies the way I watch poems. I float in a movie river of darkness and dreams.

Todd Moore books are available here…

as if you would search out a poem among hundreds of poems. the one you would kill for. the one you would die for. the one that would make you forget your darkest memory. or take that dark memory and use its dark energy. the one that would make you see in your blindness. make you reach out for the blackness as if it were a new light. to be buried alive in that blackness. to feel yourself in your breaking. and in the breaking the blackness becomes a new light.

something giving birth whether it is a bullet or a word. something invented out of nothing when you have stayed hungry and lost in the motion, starved and lost in the action, revealing to yourself your multiple identities. the berserk storm that unveils your many faces, your many voices. when the lights are out and the dreams take over, and you are back into the breaking.

nothing is real. there are only ghosts, only phantoms. nothing words from no mouth. no voice no answer. everything reborn into nothingness. i want to find the secret of shifting identities. nothing is real. everything for the taking. renegade theater. zero in the blood.
zero in the bones. zero in the eyes. it’s just a demon fever that carves out the night. it’s just a hunger looking for something it can’t define.

the light is dim almost non-existent. i dream of the day when i’ll really awaken. all i have is my feeling, my reaching out in the blackness for shapes in the shadows. i listen all day in the silence. the words overhead. the words overheard. the words underneath. at the end of a corridor is a mirror. the mirror has gone crazy. i watch myself in my breaking.

i have dissected my agony and come out on the other side. time has lost its way in space and my phantom motion cries out to canyons. the trigonometry of darkness. all equations reduced to blackness. renegade equations of madness. i no longer want to be sane, like an assassin sought out by assassins.

i want to be buried alive in the blackness. i remember how to disappear. i remember places and faces. in the here and now crow has come out to give you his mouth. i’ll tell you my secrets with a knifeblade, carve them on the walls. in my fever, a seeing a craving. to pass out and awake hallucinatory.

assassins in the shadows. i reach out for the lightning, haunted by the breaking, the breaking of the blackness, the breaking of the darkness. i feel myself in my breaking. everything for the taking. what is love’s gamble? are you invisible when faces ride the train? or when rain turns to snow and snow turns back into rain? or is that when the hell cards come into play?

the waiting game. the crying game. the killing game. strategies of assassins. where will i find my other face? i remember a previous identity. it’s like discovering your other half. a breakthrough in my amnesia. eaten alive by the nighttime. the darkness invades me. two train whistles intertwined, like a trickster burnt out and laughing.

Tony Moffeit books and his CD Outlaw Blues Revolution are available here…

Have you ever wanted to talk to Ernest Hemingway? Just wanted to sit down at a table in some Paris bistro and ask him when he knew that Jake Barnes belonged to him, was his totally and absolutely. When THE SUN ALSO RISES was his book to write and that nobody else was meant to do it? Have you ever wanted to look into Hemingway’s eyes, just look into his eyes while he was talking about Barnes the way he might talk about his nightmares or his best fantasies?

Have you ever wanted to talk to John Steinbeck? Have you ever wanted to ask him about when he realized that Tom Joad wasn’t just any Okie? Have you ever wanted to ask Steinbeck when he knew that Tom Joad was becoming enormous inside the words, that Tom Joad was starting to have veins and arteries and was actually dreaming on his own? And, maybe you were sitting with Steinbeck in an old shot and beer saloon and Steinbeck was just starting on his third round and he was talking about how Joad would sit down with him and start telling him parts of the book as though they were stories Joad had heard in prison or from other drifters, america’s famously and infamously dispossessed, and the more that Steinbeck talked the more that Tom Joad talked and was really coming into the miracle of his voice. And, when Steinbeck finally put THE GRAPES OF WRATH out on the table, there was a bloody fingerprint just above the word WRATH on the book jacket.

Have you ever wanted to sit down with Faulkner in Musso and Frank’s in Los Angeles and have a ham on rye and a tall cold beer while Faulkner talked about THE BEAR. He wasn’t eating, just talking and occasionally doing a shot. And, he wasn’t talking about the people in the story. Instead, he was just concentrating on Old Ben, the bear. He was telling about the day he thought of Old Ben and just the idea of that animal gave him fever chills and goose bumps and he couldn’t wait to sit down and start writing. And, while Faulkner told about Old Ben, his voice went hauntingly low and his eyes got that southern, victoriously defeated look about them, and pretty soon his talking made my sandwich and my beer taste so much better.

Have you ever wanted to meet Cormac McCarthy accidentally in an Albuquerque restaurant way up in the heights. McCarthy thinks nobody knows who he is. But, he is wrong, I know him, or at least what he looks like. He is talking to maybe an agent or a Hollywood producer. Who knows, the man looks like some kind of big shot. But, that doesn’t matter. What does matter is the way that McCarthy is talking. He’s gesturing and is very animated and excited about something. Maybe he’s telling about how Chigurh, the killer of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, came to him. Maybe it was a nightmare. Maybe it was a newspaper story. Or, he might be talking about Judge Holden, BLOOD MERIDIAN, the novel that he will never be able to shake from his memory and dreams. I am sitting half a room away, can’t hear the conversation, but in a peculiar way am almost a part of it. I’ve wanted to ask him about Judge Holden. I would love to spend five minutes with McCarthy about Holden or even Chigurh. But it is a part of McCarthy’s personal code, he despises strangers who approach him for autographs or questions. So, I respect that code. But, I know there is something I can do. When his friend gets up for a coffee refill, I decided to leave by the exit door which is located just behind McCarthy. To do that I need to approach his table and walk around it to reach the exit. What I am interested in is not so much conversation. I just want to look into his eyes. I just want to see what his eyes are like. And, I want to play a kind of psychic chickie run just to see who will blink first. I want to see what his reaction will be like when I look like I am heading straight for him.

So, now I am on my feet. McCarthy is looking down at the table at nothing in particular, dirty plates, soiled napkins. This takes up a second or so. When he glances up, I am walking in a straight line toward him. He is aware of it now. He still has a calm expression on his face but that changes in the next second or two. Suddenly, he begins to shift around in his chair, but just slightly. Maybe he’s looking for a place to escape to. Maybe he doesn’t want to make eye contact. Now I am just a few feet from his table. He has stopped shifting around and he is staring straight at me, but it isn’t a friendly look. I can sense some anger in it, maybe some rage. And, it is now occurring to me that maybe I would be looking this way if the situation were reversed. Maybe I’d be pissed off, too. But now I am in this thing right to the end. And, I need to really look into his eyes. I need to see them up close and personal, as though this is some kind of psychic combat. I notice that McCarthy has tensed himself. It looks as though he might stand up. I am sliding around his table and his face has flushed and he looks as though he might stand up. Now, I am on the other side of the table walking past him and I can just barely see him watching me out of the corner of his eye and then it is over and I am going out the door.

I never did see Judge Holden in that stare. Or Chigurh. Or anyone else from his novels. And, maybe I didn’t want to or need to. A signed book is useless, an artifact, an object that may or may not be worth money. But it does nothing to conjure that writer’s characters or dreams. The fact is that I didn’t discover a thing from that encounter. Nothing, nada. Except the primal fear of a famous man who seriously wants to be left alone.

And, in that moment I also realized that it would do no good to talk to Hemingway, to Steinbeck, to Faulkner either. That Jake Barnes and Tom Joad and Judge Holden and Chigurh don’t really live in that blood anymore. Even though I was hoping against hope that they could.

Later, in a coffeehouse halfway across town, I sat thinking about what had just happened. Dillinger was sitting across from me. Or, lets just say that I imagined Dillinger sitting across from me maybe the way that McCarthy might privately conjure Holden or that Melville in the depths of his depression would conjure Ahab. Dillinger didn’t say anything, he just sat there and let me have my silence. And, that’s when I realized that a character like Judge Holden or Huck Finn or Jay Gatsby or Dillinger become more than just someone found in a book. You can’t own Ahab. Melville cobbled him out of flensing blades and harpoons him but he couldn’t own him. You can’t own Joseph K. Kafka put him together with blood angst and longing but he couldn’t own him. You can’t own Moosbrugger. Robert Musil hammered him out of knife blades and hatchets but you can’t own him. And you can’t own Chinaski. Bukowski found him among the beer rags and racing forms but you can’t own him. Somehow the memorable, the great characters all slip their moorings and become free. The critics would like to think that they own them, but that won’t happen even on their best days. Bloom could never own Hamlet, no matter how many theories that he devises. Hamlet will always have a dream tie to Shakespeare who can’t really own him either. The great characters are very much like great outlaws. They step outside the bounds. They belong to no one except maybe an archetypal wind. They are the sum totals of their books and then they become the world as well.

Nights Dillinger comes and goes. I hear him enter, then leave the house. He carries the dream machine gun I gave him. I know he drives out into the desert looking for something. Maybe it is the next section of the poem that he’s in. Or, maybe it’s the blood rich darkness of an america longing for the black pour, the expectation of love and disaster.

Kenny G. wasn’t looking for a blackjack in the face. He was the kind of guy who wanted to talk shit to you before he kicked your ass. He wanted to scare you by telling you what he was going to do to you. High and low. Maybe if you just took it, he’d give you a fat lip and let you go with a warning. Or, maybe he’d just beat the living hell out of you for the fun of it just to watch you yell. Then he’d go from there to giving you a shove or punching you hard in the chest or guts. It was his idea of fight foreplay.

So, the blackjack surprised him. Surprised and hurt him both at the same time. I’d found it down in the Illinois Central railyards between two freight cars. It was stamped Illinois Central Railroad on one side and had some initials on the other. I figure some railroad cop had accidentally dropped it and suddenly it was my lucky day. If you can call a tool made specifically for crunching bones luck.

The best advice I ever got from my old man was when you hit a guy, give it to him straight in the face and make it hard. As hard as you ever hit anything because when you land a punch in the face just right the pain radiates everywhere. And, it really fucks up the eyes. So, that’s where I hit Kenny G. with that jack. He was still talking when I swung and the sound it made was like a hammer sinking into meat. Kenny G. finished his sentence spitting by out a tooth and a whole lot of blood. And, while he was bent in half, I hit him again. A drunk coming out of The Rainbow Tap I was standing in front of said, you didn’t give him a chance. And, I said, he didn’t deserve one. I had let him become one of my demons until I caught his blood in my hands.

We dream our assassins. We open that psychic door and we invite them right in. Hemingway kept inviting them in until he became them. Isaac Babel played gangster games with them until they morphed into the secret police and got him. And, Benya Krik was absolutely no help at all. Mayakovsky performed with the demon assassins until one of them handed him a pistol and said, you know what to do. Lorca thought that if he conjured the duende assassins they would love him so much they’d leave him alone. Instead, they loved him so much they shot him dead.

The thing is you can’t write a decent line of poetry until you invite the demons in. The demons who are also the assassins. Lorca knew that and included the threat of death in the theory of the duende. It doesn’t matter if you call that phantom death, demons, or assassins. They all amount to the same thing. And, if the poems you write aren’t seasoned with the blood that the demon assassins provide, they won’t be worth the paper they’re written on. And, by the way, the blood is usually yours.

Lorca had already invented his assassins long before they came to arrest him. I’m absolutely sure of that. I can see him having a midnight snack with one on a candle lit veranda while he’s writing the lines, If I die, please/ Leave the window open (Farewell). I think Lorca knew his assassins intimately. Which ones loved red roses because they resembled wounds, which ones loved the black holes their pistols made when they shot them into the blinding light of high noon.

In certain ways we all know our demons intimately. Their dreams are our nightmares. And, in a secret way we know those demons will become our assassins. Especially if we are poets. Undoubtedly, if we are poets. Maybe we are even hoping for it. A poet who believes he is also an outlaw might keep a loaded pistol in his desk drawer and tell himself it’s for the demons. It won’t do any good against the demons but it’s comforting to know that a loaded pistol is just waiting to be held. William S. Burroughs knew that. He had lots of pistols and the demons loved him dearly. And, he loved them beyond human love itself.

You can’t be an outlaw poet and not love weapons. It’s part of your weakness, it’s part of your nature, it’s just part of what you do. You may not rob banks, you may not shoot people, but there is some secret part of your being that is attracted to weapons and head over heels in love with danger. You may not own any guns, but that doesn’t stop you from loving them. Lorca may not necessarily have been in love with weapons but he was attracted to violence, he was attracted to danger and that was the door he let the demons pour through.

A powerful poem is as visceral as a gunshot wound. When it’s new it just smolders in the air all around the poet who wrote it. Smolders and burns. Later that poem wound congeals and becomes a kind of molten thing. It still burns internally but not like that first few minutes after it was written. A powerful poem is visceral and burns like a gunshot wound and death can smell the wound’s rot and also himself. And, while some poems are meant to heal, others are meant to annihilate, destroy.

A SEASON IN HELL can destroy you. THE NAKED LUNCH can destroy you. OEDIPUS REX and THE BOOK OF JOB can destroy you. THE BLIND OWL, which is not a poem but reads like a poem, can destroy you. Judge Holden’s sheer strength can crush every bone in your body, destroy you. The rage of Ahab and Dillinger can destroy you. The madness of HOWL can destroy you. Some poems are weapons all by themselves. Some poems are like wolves, they devour us. They eat us alive heart and soul, even down to the bones. Chigurh will destroy you, he knows where you live.

So, why is it we are drawn to the worst ones? Or, if we is not appropriate here, then why am I drawn to the worst ones? The outlaws who live apocalyptically, darkly, created through some kind of special dispensation with nightmare, fever, poison, and frenzy. Even Dillinger dreamed his own assassins. Everything was available to him. Dillinger dreamed his assassins so he could drain off some of their dark energy for the robbing of banks. And, yes, that might be a stretch because Dillinger was definitely not an intellectual. And, he really wasn’t interested in the black arts. But, I believe that he dreamed powerfully, that he dreamed lethally. And, I believe that in his unconscious he was betting against the odds that the demons would get him. He was betting against the odds because somewhere subliminally he believed he was above the odds. He knew against all knowing that he was better than any demon out there. Nietszche believed the same thing and he was betting Zarathustra that he was right. And, Dostoevsky was betting Raskolnikov, Melville was betting Ahab, Shakespeare was betting Hamlet, Goethe was betting Faust, and I am betting Dillinger. The bet is always outlaw and fatal. Archetypal characters are stronger than anyone’s demon assassins. Archetypal characters are the real outlaws of poetry and somehow they will always win.

Todd Moore books are available via THE SHOP page here…