Scan barcode
xterminal's review
3.0
Todd Moore, The Dillinger Poems, Book One (Uzzano, 1977)
Todd Moore has become something of a legend in the poetry underground for much the same reason Lyn Lifshin did a decade earlier: he published, published, published, and while his stuff showed up in circulation-of-five magazines more often than not and collecting all of his publications was a pipe dream, there was so much of it out there that you could always at least find something of Todd Moore's to read. A lot of it ended up becoming the long, long poem-cycle Dillinger. Thirty years, ago, Uzzano Magazine published the first collection of Dillinger poems as a special edition (the way that Wormwood Review would later publish chapbooks by Lifshin as special editions). Little did any of us (save, I'm sure, Moore himself) realize then what a monster it would grow into.
The Lifshin comparison doesn't stop at the surface, either. Moore's early Dillinger poems read like an amphetamine-and-testosterone-laced book of Lifshin's Madonna poems:
start w/ walk into
bank yr guns
under coats &
smile at bank
tellers
& anyone else
in view
("Dillinger's Notes")
(I should note for our more prim readers that I used that quote because it's one of the only pieces of more than a strophe where I could quote without running into something that would have caused Amazon's obscenity filter to sit up, scream, roll over on its back, and beg for mercy.) The poems are as fragmented and disjointed as the language in that excerpt would seem to imply, but the whole, collected, has an unmistakable sense of pace (and that pace is fast, fast, fast). An interesting beginning. ***
Todd Moore has become something of a legend in the poetry underground for much the same reason Lyn Lifshin did a decade earlier: he published, published, published, and while his stuff showed up in circulation-of-five magazines more often than not and collecting all of his publications was a pipe dream, there was so much of it out there that you could always at least find something of Todd Moore's to read. A lot of it ended up becoming the long, long poem-cycle Dillinger. Thirty years, ago, Uzzano Magazine published the first collection of Dillinger poems as a special edition (the way that Wormwood Review would later publish chapbooks by Lifshin as special editions). Little did any of us (save, I'm sure, Moore himself) realize then what a monster it would grow into.
The Lifshin comparison doesn't stop at the surface, either. Moore's early Dillinger poems read like an amphetamine-and-testosterone-laced book of Lifshin's Madonna poems:
start w/ walk into
bank yr guns
under coats &
smile at bank
tellers
& anyone else
in view
("Dillinger's Notes")
(I should note for our more prim readers that I used that quote because it's one of the only pieces of more than a strophe where I could quote without running into something that would have caused Amazon's obscenity filter to sit up, scream, roll over on its back, and beg for mercy.) The poems are as fragmented and disjointed as the language in that excerpt would seem to imply, but the whole, collected, has an unmistakable sense of pace (and that pace is fast, fast, fast). An interesting beginning. ***
More...