Bio

THE POET AS OUTLAW by Todd Moore

My obsession with outlaws began nearly thirty years ago when I started to write DILLINGER. Just exactly what the attraction was and is hasn't always been easy to explain. I suppose the most obvious explanation is that I grew up around a lot of small time criminals. People who routinely stole things for a living. Guys who resorted to violence more easily than to talking. Life at the Clifton Hotel meant staying right at the edge of the edge. Trapped in a dead end existence.

That's one explanation. An alternative possibility has to do with the fact that I spent many an afternoon and evening at the movies watching Humphrey Bogart. Richard Widmark. George Raft. Edward G. Robinson. and Jimmy Cagney practice bank robbery. mayhem. and murder and making it look just this side of wonderful. And. keep in mind. I was a street kid with not much of a past, a cramped two room apartment to live in where the floors were rotting and the walls had holes big enough for the rats to squeeze through, and a future that held no great expectations. So. when I saw Bogart or Cagney or Raft shoot a bank president who had just taken some poor bastard’s farm, I was ready to cheer.

But that was me and that was then and this is now and it doesn’t account for an obsession that still holds strong almost fifty years later. The other part of the equation is that I decided to write poetry. Or, maybe I should say I decided to rewrite myself through poetry. Because that's part of the process. You have to rewrite yourself so that you can fit into the poem.

So, when I came to poetry, I was still wearing part of my outlaw self. The funny thing about poetry is that it consists of a surface and an interior. The surface is what is celebrated now almost mindlessly every April. This is the cue for the Robert Pinskys and Bill Moyers of the country to stand at a couple of thousand mikes and drone on about the power of the word and Whitman and Shakespeare and ain't it grand and go lets really read this shit guys and for another couple thousand mediocre to fair to really lousy poets to get up and white knuckle it through poems forty 1ines too long and a mile wide about mom the joy of writing falling head over heels and the goddam moon. So much for the surface and making nice and cleaning poetry up so that Aunt Ethyl and Uncle Roger can sit through a reading of Billy Eugene's novel in verse entitled DREAMING OF THE TASTE OF Z and not be outraged or have the overpowering urge to scratch balls or doze.

And, the interior of poetry. That's another planet altogether. And has nothing to do with poetry theory which is really nothing more than poetry narcissism and intellectual masturbation. Show me a theory that created a poem or better yet show me a theory more important than a poem. It doesn't exist and never did. Writing poetry theory is for those people who can't write poetry.

The interior of poetry is the country where the dreams are where the demons live. Only the better poets get there. Only the superior poets even have a clue as to what I' m talking about. If you want to write poems that matter, this is the country you eventually have to get to. This is the country of the free floating nightmare. This is the country where each dream is a republic known only to itself. Ten thousand years ago a man wiping animal blood off a stone knife knew it better than the best of us know it today. And, that’s because we've tried to tame the poem. We've cleaned it up wiped its ass and blown its nose. We’ve crafted the wildness out of it. We've scrubbed the blood off shaved its whiskers its armpit hair its crotch hair we've either hidden or removed its pecker and its cunt we've extracted its fangs so that now when it bites all it can do is suck without giving much tongue.

We've even reached the point where the language of poetry is the enemy. Language is no longer passionate communication but rather something more like a barrage of mathematical sets rigged to stand for art objects a fractal barrage that isn't supposed to tell you a goddam thing. And, when you have nothing passionate to say, what better way is there to hide behind than a wall of language? Where is the best hiding place for the self than inside the word. Or in the silent white spaces between words. There, the self is best camouflaged with whiteness because it's mostly scrubbed clean of race and gender. Whiteness piled and stacked on top of more whiteness. The best retreat of the self is in and through the word.

The interior of poetry is where you find the self. And. you discover it in the drifting wreckage of nightmares the debris of images surviving the hundred thousand lost great epics of the universe. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and became a kind of outlaw. He also became a hero. Today. in order to be both an outlaw poet and a hero, you need to travel into the interior of poetry and steal the raw psychic stuff swirling around you. The stuff filled with the energy and electricity of the body and the brain and the blood and the soul. You need to steal it you need to bring it back you need to somehow find a way to turn that energy those fragmented images and that debris into a poem that you can read and reread and never get tired of. Because isn't that what poetry is? The stuff of words that never wears out no matter how many times you read it?

When I was a kid I used to go to the movies over and over ,just to see certain scenes and hear the way the actors spoke the words. Bogart at the end of THE: MALTESE FALCON telling Mary Astor why he was a private eye. Brando in ON THE WATERFRONT telling Rod Steiger what it felt like to be a loser. And, Spencer Tracey saying almost anything in BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK. I didn't realise it then but I was living from movie to movie, just for the poetry. And, of course, there isn't supposed to be any poetry in the movies or in kicking a can or throwing a curve ball or skipping a flat stone across a river or doing eighty down a back country road. There isn't supposed to be any poetry in doing anything physical until an outlaw poet comes along and makes doing those things okay and hearing about them feel so real that the hairs on the back of your neck tingle and stand straight up. If the outlaw poet is guilty of anything it is of preserving what it means to feel human. And, of robbing the First National Bank of what's left of the goddam American Dream.

(originally published in the Lummox Journal 9/02)

The Price of Fame by Todd Moore

The price of fame is high in America. Movie, rock, and sports stars all know what I’m talking about. But, for them it’s at least a kind of trade off because for all their loss of privacy, they at least have some kind of financial pay back. In the arts, and specifically poetry it doesn’t work exactly the same way. I’m not sure what kind of money a main stream poet is capable of earning but I do know that in the small press there is practically no money to speak of unless you are a Charles Bukowski and he really was the exception to the rule. And, even Bukowski was not what I would call enormously wealthy. In later life, I am certain he made five and six figure incomes from his writing and lived comfortably, but he never made the kind of money a Tom Hanks or a Madonna or Michael Jordan make.

But I’m not really talking about money here. Right now I’m more interested in a poet’s reputation. I think my best definition of fame for a small press poet is he is famous in the small press if he is fairly widely known. You don’t have to be world renown like Bukowski to be famous in the small press. But you do have to be generally well known among small press poets and editors to at least have a modest reputation, a small bite of the fame pie. Of course, this kind of fame brings with it no money whatsoever in jobs, readings, or book sales. It just simply means you are pretty well known for a body of work.

This kind of fame makes you a little more vulnerable than a movie star, a rock star, a sports figure. At least these kinds of people can use the unimaginable sums of money they make to provide a little distance between themselves and their fans. A small press poet, if he has any fans at all, is usually not bothered or harassed by them. I mostly see this kind of attention as at least flattering.

But, it is not always flattering or friendly. And, the reason for this, is the very nature and essence of poetry. Poetry has always been a peculiar source of dark energy. Lorca called it Duende and Rilke referred to it as the Angel. Mostly, they were trying to get at where poems come from. But, they really didn’t stop to consider what comes out of that ether along with those poems.

When I write poetry, especially those long sections out of Dillinger, I like to think of that kind of writing as calling down the energy. I’ve never been overly superstitious or religious. But peculiar things happen to you when you write a long poem. You may be subject to very striking and almost prophetic dreams. You may experience some moments of clairvoyance. And, you may summon up some real live demons you never counted on.

And, it’s the real live demons I want to focus on. These demons are actually real people who want to take you on, take you over, and by attempting to make a fool of you in public, become bigger and brighter and more creative and ultimately their larger version of who they think they are through you. I recall seeing a Stephen King movie years ago that addressed this very issue. I forget the title but the stars were Kathy Bates and James

Caan. He was the writer and she was holding him prisoner so that he could write the book that she envisioned. Or something to that effect. The point is that for every strong poet out there, many, many wannabes dream of taking his or her place. The strange thing is that I’m talking about poetry. An art that brings no money. Especially in the small press. But an art that is still associated with enormous psychic and other worldly power. Duende, Angel, Mojo. Call it whatever you want to.

The kinds of wannabes who feel themselves hypnotically attracted to poets are what I consider to be something like icon stalkers, cultural ghosts who’ve failed at being university professors, writers, actors, painters. Something happened to them. Most of the time they just didn’t possess the necessary creative genius to be a writer or an actor. So, the next best thing was to challenge the very system that they feel broke them in the first place.

At this point, as I stare at these words on the page, I almost find this subject to be ludicrous beyond belief What am I saying here? That there are people out there somewhere who would be silly enough to stalk a small press poet? And, I guess that that is precisely what I am saying. In a way, when you think about it, this is probably one of the reasons Bukowski bought that house out in San Pedro. Naturally, he wanted a nicer place to live in. And, naturally, he wanted his own space, his own privacy. But i would be willing to bet there were people just aching to find out where he lived, failed writers, failed actors who wanted to rub up against Bukowski’s mojo.

Of course, stalking can occur in any number of ways. First, you can be physically stalked. You can be followed to and from your home. You can be followed while you shop. You can be followed to the movies and while you are out dining. And, you can have someone hanging around your house. This is the up close and personal stuff and just a heartbeat away from some kind of violence.

Second, you can be stalked through the mail. Love letters, hate letters, letters admiring or criticizing your work. This can also happen through your e-mail. Out of the blue you may get a peculiar letter about a chapbook you’ve written or an essay you may had just recently had published. These forms of stalking are really not meant to engage you in an intelligent conversation but to draw you out, to find your weak places, to invite you to a public exchange where this kind of predator is not really after your ideas but rather the very essence of who and what you are. This kind of predator is interested in one thing only and that is to destroy you publicly and become whoever they think you are.

Needless to say, this kind of pseudo intellectual predator is really only a bottom feeder and more than likely a failure in the arts and in his or her personal life. And, this is only a guess, but this kind of person is filled with so much blind desperation that he or she is willing to risk an already apparent failure against any poet’s reputation. What I’m really talking about is a suicidal lunge toward any poet with a successful reputation no matter what.

In a situation like this, and they are relatively rare even today, the best thing to do is remain silent unless the stalker attempts to invade personal space. Most of these psychic terrorists on the internet are quite frankly physical cowards. They wouldn’t have the courage or the guts to face a poet in the flesh so they use the net where they can hide in their cowardly anonymity.

Silence almost always defeats and defuses any situation that involves a wannabe who wants to climb into the spotlight by defaming a writer or a poet. Silence has a kind of powerful metastasis all its own and before long the predator will cruise around for another target.

If silence doesn’t work and one of these wannabes does show upon your doorstep in real life, then go to plan B. Go heavily armed. I do. But, then isn’t that what you’d expect from an outlaw?

(originally published in the Lummox Journal 9/03)


				*Todd Moore's* *BIO*



	Home \| Wolf \| Links \| bio


		About Todd Moore: Todd requested that this be his "bio" -- "Crime is the preeminent metaphor for the American Dream and DILLINGER delivers that dream with unerring force." Todd Moore



		THE POET AS OUTLAW by Todd Moore My obsession with outlaws began nearly thirty years ago when I started to write DILLINGER. Just exactly what the attraction was and is hasn't always been easy to explain. I suppose the most obvious explanation is that I grew up around a lot of small time criminals. People who routinely stole things for a living. Guys who resorted to violence more easily than to talking. Life at the Clifton Hotel meant staying right at the edge of the edge. Trapped in a dead end existence. That's one explanation. An alternative possibility has to do with the fact that I spent many an afternoon and evening at the movies watching Humphrey Bogart. Richard Widmark. George Raft. Edward G. Robinson. and Jimmy Cagney practice bank robbery. mayhem. and murder and making it look just this side of wonderful. And. keep in mind. I was a street kid with not much of a past, a cramped two room apartment to live in where the floors were rotting and the walls had holes big enough for the rats to squeeze through, and a future that held no great expectations. So. when I saw Bogart or Cagney or Raft shoot a bank president who had just taken some poor bastard’s farm, I was ready to cheer. But that was me and that was then and this is now and it doesn’t account for an obsession that still holds strong almost fifty years later. The other part of the equation is that I decided to write poetry. Or, maybe I should say I decided to rewrite myself through poetry. Because that's part of the process. You have to rewrite yourself so that you can fit into the poem. So, when I came to poetry, I was still wearing part of my outlaw self. The funny thing about poetry is that it consists of a surface and an interior. The surface is what is celebrated now almost mindlessly every April. This is the cue for the Robert Pinskys and Bill Moyers of the country to stand at a couple of thousand mikes and drone on about the power of the word and Whitman and Shakespeare and ain't it grand and go lets really read this shit guys and for another couple thousand mediocre to fair to really lousy poets to get up and white knuckle it through poems forty 1ines too long and a mile wide about mom the joy of writing falling head over heels and the goddam moon. So much for the surface and making nice and cleaning poetry up so that Aunt Ethyl and Uncle Roger can sit through a reading of Billy Eugene's novel in verse entitled DREAMING OF THE TASTE OF Z and not be outraged or have the overpowering urge to scratch balls or doze. And, the interior of poetry. That's another planet altogether. And has nothing to do with poetry theory which is really nothing more than poetry narcissism and intellectual masturbation. Show me a theory that created a poem or better yet show me a theory more important than a poem. It doesn't exist and never did. Writing poetry theory is for those people who can't write poetry. The interior of poetry is the country where the dreams are where the demons live. Only the better poets get there. Only the superior poets even have a clue as to what I' m talking about. If you want to write poems that matter, this is the country you eventually have to get to. This is the country of the free floating nightmare. This is the country where each dream is a republic known only to itself. Ten thousand years ago a man wiping animal blood off a stone knife knew it better than the best of us know it today. And, that’s because we've tried to tame the poem. We've cleaned it up wiped its ass and blown its nose. We’ve crafted the wildness out of it. We've scrubbed the blood off shaved its whiskers its armpit hair its crotch hair we've either hidden or removed its pecker and its cunt we've extracted its fangs so that now when it bites all it can do is suck without giving much tongue. We've even reached the point where the language of poetry is the enemy. Language is no longer passionate communication but rather something more like a barrage of mathematical sets rigged to stand for art objects a fractal barrage that isn't supposed to tell you a goddam thing. And, when you have nothing passionate to say, what better way is there to hide behind than a wall of language? Where is the best hiding place for the self than inside the word. Or in the silent white spaces between words. There, the self is best camouflaged with whiteness because it's mostly scrubbed clean of race and gender. Whiteness piled and stacked on top of more whiteness. The best retreat of the self is in and through the word. The interior of poetry is where you find the self. And. you discover it in the drifting wreckage of nightmares the debris of images surviving the hundred thousand lost great epics of the universe. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and became a kind of outlaw. He also became a hero. Today. in order to be both an outlaw poet and a hero, you need to travel into the interior of poetry and steal the raw psychic stuff swirling around you. The stuff filled with the energy and electricity of the body and the brain and the blood and the soul. You need to steal it you need to bring it back you need to somehow find a way to turn that energy those fragmented images and that debris into a poem that you can read and reread and never get tired of. Because isn't that what poetry is? The stuff of words that never wears out no matter how many times you read it? When I was a kid I used to go to the movies over and over ,just to see certain scenes and hear the way the actors spoke the words. Bogart at the end of THE: MALTESE FALCON telling Mary Astor why he was a private eye. Brando in ON THE WATERFRONT telling Rod Steiger what it felt like to be a loser. And, Spencer Tracey saying almost anything in BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK. I didn't realise it then but I was living from movie to movie, just for the poetry. And, of course, there isn't supposed to be any poetry in the movies or in kicking a can or throwing a curve ball or skipping a flat stone across a river or doing eighty down a back country road. There isn't supposed to be any poetry in doing anything physical until an outlaw poet comes along and makes doing those things okay and hearing about them feel so real that the hairs on the back of your neck tingle and stand straight up. If the outlaw poet is guilty of anything it is of preserving what it means to feel human. And, of robbing the First National Bank of what's left of the goddam American Dream. (originally published in the Lummox Journal 9/02)						The Price of Fame by Todd Moore The price of fame is high in America. Movie, rock, and sports stars all know what I’m talking about. But, for them it’s at least a kind of trade off because for all their loss of privacy, they at least have some kind of financial pay back. In the arts, and specifically poetry it doesn’t work exactly the same way. I’m not sure what kind of money a main stream poet is capable of earning but I do know that in the small press there is practically no money to speak of unless you are a Charles Bukowski and he really was the exception to the rule. And, even Bukowski was not what I would call enormously wealthy. In later life, I am certain he made five and six figure incomes from his writing and lived comfortably, but he never made the kind of money a Tom Hanks or a Madonna or Michael Jordan make. But I’m not really talking about money here. Right now I’m more interested in a poet’s reputation. I think my best definition of fame for a small press poet is he is famous in the small press if he is fairly widely known. You don’t have to be world renown like Bukowski to be famous in the small press. But you do have to be generally well known among small press poets and editors to at least have a modest reputation, a small bite of the fame pie. Of course, this kind of fame brings with it no money whatsoever in jobs, readings, or book sales. It just simply means you are pretty well known for a body of work. This kind of fame makes you a little more vulnerable than a movie star, a rock star, a sports figure. At least these kinds of people can use the unimaginable sums of money they make to provide a little distance between themselves and their fans. A small press poet, if he has any fans at all, is usually not bothered or harassed by them. I mostly see this kind of attention as at least flattering. But, it is not always flattering or friendly. And, the reason for this, is the very nature and essence of poetry. Poetry has always been a peculiar source of dark energy. Lorca called it Duende and Rilke referred to it as the Angel. Mostly, they were trying to get at where poems come from. But, they really didn’t stop to consider what comes out of that ether along with those poems. When I write poetry, especially those long sections out of Dillinger, I like to think of that kind of writing as calling down the energy. I’ve never been overly superstitious or religious. But peculiar things happen to you when you write a long poem. You may be subject to very striking and almost prophetic dreams. You may experience some moments of clairvoyance. And, you may summon up some real live demons you never counted on. And, it’s the real live demons I want to focus on. These demons are actually real people who want to take you on, take you over, and by attempting to make a fool of you in public, become bigger and brighter and more creative and ultimately their larger version of who they think they are through you. I recall seeing a Stephen King movie years ago that addressed this very issue. I forget the title but the stars were Kathy Bates and James Caan. He was the writer and she was holding him prisoner so that he could write the book that she envisioned. Or something to that effect. The point is that for every strong poet out there, many, many wannabes dream of taking his or her place. The strange thing is that I’m talking about poetry. An art that brings no money. Especially in the small press. But an art that is still associated with enormous psychic and other worldly power. Duende, Angel, Mojo. Call it whatever you want to. The kinds of wannabes who feel themselves hypnotically attracted to poets are what I consider to be something like icon stalkers, cultural ghosts who’ve failed at being university professors, writers, actors, painters. Something happened to them. Most of the time they just didn’t possess the necessary creative genius to be a writer or an actor. So, the next best thing was to challenge the very system that they feel broke them in the first place. At this point, as I stare at these words on the page, I almost find this subject to be ludicrous beyond belief What am I saying here? That there are people out there somewhere who would be silly enough to stalk a small press poet? And, I guess that that is precisely what I am saying. In a way, when you think about it, this is probably one of the reasons Bukowski bought that house out in San Pedro. Naturally, he wanted a nicer place to live in. And, naturally, he wanted his own space, his own privacy. But i would be willing to bet there were people just aching to find out where he lived, failed writers, failed actors who wanted to rub up against Bukowski’s mojo. Of course, stalking can occur in any number of ways. First, you can be physically stalked. You can be followed to and from your home. You can be followed while you shop. You can be followed to the movies and while you are out dining. And, you can have someone hanging around your house. This is the up close and personal stuff and just a heartbeat away from some kind of violence. Second, you can be stalked through the mail. Love letters, hate letters, letters admiring or criticizing your work. This can also happen through your e-mail. Out of the blue you may get a peculiar letter about a chapbook you’ve written or an essay you may had just recently had published. These forms of stalking are really not meant to engage you in an intelligent conversation but to draw you out, to find your weak places, to invite you to a public exchange where this kind of predator is not really after your ideas but rather the very essence of who and what you are. This kind of predator is interested in one thing only and that is to destroy you publicly and become whoever they think you are. Needless to say, this kind of pseudo intellectual predator is really only a bottom feeder and more than likely a failure in the arts and in his or her personal life. And, this is only a guess, but this kind of person is filled with so much blind desperation that he or she is willing to risk an already apparent failure against any poet’s reputation. What I’m really talking about is a suicidal lunge toward any poet with a successful reputation no matter what. In a situation like this, and they are relatively rare even today, the best thing to do is remain silent unless the stalker attempts to invade personal space. Most of these psychic terrorists on the internet are quite frankly physical cowards. They wouldn’t have the courage or the guts to face a poet in the flesh so they use the net where they can hide in their cowardly anonymity. Silence almost always defeats and defuses any situation that involves a wannabe who wants to climb into the spotlight by defaming a writer or a poet. Silence has a kind of powerful metastasis all its own and before long the predator will cruise around for another target. If silence doesn’t work and one of these wannabes does show upon your doorstep in real life, then go to plan B. Go heavily armed. I do. But, then isn’t that what you’d expect from an outlaw? (originally published in the Lummox Journal 9/03)



		How to contact Todd Moore: Todd welcomes your response to his poem / these essays and can be contacted by sending a letter to 3216 San Pedro NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87110, USA.