Category Archives: reviews by todd moore

October 28, 2008 · 1:45 am

robert swearingen | street milk

HIDING THE GUNS FROM OUR MOUTHS: THE STREET MILK OF DARKNESS

by Todd Moore

Writing

poetry is dangerous work. Dangerous because nobody pays you to do it. So, why try, right? Dangerous because it can tear off the top of your head and expose the deepest most secret part of your self to the universe. And, dangerous because it invites all your private demons to dance on your eyelids. I read STREET MILK when it first came out several years ago, thought about writing a review, but had no real place to publish it. Since then the book has haunted me in strange and peculiar ways. I’d known Robert Swearingen only because we had occasionally appeared at the same readings. But I didn’t know Swearingen’s work that well. I recall his reading Interview In Milwaukee which was a savagely comic take on a poet who is interviewed for a job by feminist but I didn’t know much else about the man. I didn’t know that he was from Hammond, Indiana, which is not that far from Chicago. I didn’t know that he had a degree in English. I didn’t know that his uncle had worked most of his life for the Illinois Central Railroad. My grandfather, my father, and my uncle had all worked for the Illinois Central back in the 1920s.

STREET MILK is one of those flawed, imperfect books that occasionally flame to life like a damaged roman candles. It is a book of brilliant sparks rather than huge explosions and maybe this is partly why I am attracted to it. The Hal Sirowitz blurb on the back cover of the book is really misleading. Sirowitz invokes the name of Charles Bukowski to make his point that this is a book about work and survival and while both of these themes are interwoven in many poems, STREET MILK is really a kind of journey through hell. Rimbaud is a name that could more easily be invoked. Or, Dante, though it would have to be a secular Dante, an addicted Dante, a Dante inflicted with nightmare visions and the horrors of the streets.

Robert Swearingen’s poetry is nothing like the poetry of Charles Bukowski. Swearingen’s poetry has a kind of shattered lyricism to it. Bukowski’s poetry comes at you like a thrown chair in a beer bar where the juke is going and a worn out hooker is trying to dodge the bottles in the air while she is putting her lipstick on. And, while Swearingen’s poetry is also about addiction, it really deals with the visions that addiction bring. Not the polish highball hangovers, the gut wrenching vomiting, and the howling hysterical landladies who are hounding Bukowski for the rent. Both Bukowski and Swearingen may have inhabited some of the same worlds including the bars but they are looking at the world with very different pairs of eyes.

And, this isn’t bad. What it means is that Swearingen isn’t trying to be at all like Bukowski. What it means is that Swearingen is attempting in this book to find, maybe to rescue something from his own broken world. Since I don’t know Robert Swearingen very well, I have no idea how long he has been writing poetry, how long he has been working on the manuscript that eventually became STREET MILK. The book was published in 2002. According to the brief bio on the back cover of the book, Swearingen was born in 1946, which means he was fifty six when STREET MILK appeared. By anyone’s standards, fifty six is late to be bringing out a first book of poetry. Late, but brave. It is often foolhardy to be publishing poetry at all, since so few people read it. But it is always brave because it is a wager made against the void. An intimate bet with the blood that what you wrote is worthy of being read and remembered. Even for a nano second.

I die of thirst beside the fountain
Next to the fire
I’m shaking tooth on tooth

This epigram which kicks the book off so aptly was written by Francois Villon. I can’t think of a more fitting way to begin STREET MILK. Villon, who was both outlaw and teacher, could just as easily have been Swearingen’s brother. In fact, he is the spiritual brother to anyone who writes from the street, the bar, the skidrow hotel, and even the jail. Villon continues to provide the archetype for the poet who writes from under the floorboards of any culture.

When Villon writes, I’m shaking tooth on tooth, he’s speaking for all of us. Especially, Robert Swearingen. Villon is talking about a kind of primal shaking when you encounter life at its rawest. And, Swearingen’s best poems capture the visceral feel of that shaking.

STREET MILK could easily have been an autobiographical novel. The first section focuses on Swearingen’s childhood, his railroad man uncle, his grandmother who locked him away in the basement, and Swearingen working at Bethlehem Steel. The best poems in this section are Hero Worship, Uncle Archie’s Basement, Gary Indiana, Bethlehem Steel, 265 Days Without An Accident. The best thing about these poems is that they were rooted in a gritty midwest reality that I knew. I wanted to know more about Swearingen’s father, the grandmother and why she locked him away, Uncle Archie who liked his whiskey, and Jimmy the friend who went missing. Maybe Swearingen will write more about these people in a future book of poetry. I hope he does because I care about them. I care about their shortcomings, their brokenness, their passions, and their deadendedness. They are really what good poetry is all about. They are the kinds of stories that make us all dream.

The second section of STREET MILK is a quantum leap from the reality of the railroad yards, grandma’s house, and the steel mill to the floating surreality of alcoholic visions. Three Day Drunks Usually End Ugly, the poem that opens this section, is the kind of hallucination that you don’t easily forget. And, while this poem could have been a little more tightly edited, it still works powerfully on the imagination. When Swearingen writes, Someone is looking out through the bones of my face, you know he is taking you to a whole new level of the visionary experience. This certainly isn’t where Bukowski wrote from. In fact, it comes closer to A SEASON IN HELL or maybe NAKED LUNCH. Swearingen follows this line with the following lines.

I’m riding the bus with these corpses the driver is
bleeding from his feet and all I have to read is LES
MISERABLES…

Not all of the poems of the second section are as good as Three Day Drunk, but several come very close. I really liked The Funeral, Street Milk, Insomnia Redux, Gunshots From Lovers, Shopping On Acid, and Insomnia. In fact, I think Gunshots might be that one perfect poem that Swearingen has written so far. It teeters right on the edge of oblivion. The last couple of lines are just plain gorgeous in their suicidal simplicity.

while we collected our sonnets of glass
and hid the guns
from our mouths.

Have you ever come across maybe two or three lines of poetry you wish you had written? These are the three lines in this book that I have fallen in love with. STREET MILK is what I would call a beautifully damaged work of art. Damaged and powerful. The laughter in Interview In Milwaukee and Shopping On Acid approaches a kind of down and out slapstick. These poems are, by turns, hilarious and horrible and at the same time you know that what you are laughing at is a glimpse of the void.

STREET MILK

is destined for cult book status. Todd Moore | October 27, 2008

Please click the image to see the back cover.

Street Milk Author: Robert Swearingen – ISBN: 0971534403 : 9780971534407 – Format: Paperback Size: 140x215mm – Pages: 75 – Weight: .15 Kg. – Published: AtlasBooks (Central Avenue Press) – December 2007 – List Price: 10 EURO – Availability: In Print – Subjects: Poetry & poets

In this collection of 44 poems, Robert Swearingen takes the reader on a journey through a life that is by turns raw, humorous, and at times, poignant. With a brutal honesty that asks for neither pity nor condemnation, he speaks in the context of personal experience, of a life of material success, selfishness, loss, folly, loneliness, and the hope for a redemption that will transcend the mistakes of the past.

Robert Swearingen’s book Street Milk is available directly here on this page and soon via our THE SHOP page where you will find also Todd Moore books by clicking here…

Leave a Comment

Filed under reviews by todd moore

Tagged as , ,

July 4, 2008 · 11:22 pm

chasing jack micheline’s shadow

The stories about Jack Micheline are legion and they range all the way from fact to tall tale and anecdote. Jack Micheline was arrested on this corner, Jack Micheline was staggering drunk down that side of the street, Jack Micheline wrote a poem and gave it to Bob Kaufman right in front of that coffee house over there. Jack Micheline was everyman and Jack Micheline was no one. Jack Micheline was always on the hustle for a poem but Jack Micheline was incapable or simply refused to hustle himself to the mainstream publishers the way that Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, or William S. Burroughs did. That’s very possibly one of the reasons that Micheline’s work appeared in the small press for most of his life. That’s probably why his work remains uncollected in book form to this day, long after his death. Which is unfortunate simply because Jack Micheline was a major poet writing for limited print runs. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

If Kell Robertson is the poet of the american west, the high deserts and the mountains, then Jack Micheline is a street poet, the poet of the diners, the bus depots, the cash registers, the billboards, the urban set of railroad tracks, the names of the avenues. When you read Micheline you get the close to the pavement feel of the city, the despair of big city living, the skyscraper celebration, along with the stink of the cheap hotels and rooming houses. In this respect, he and Bukowski knew what it was like to just barely survive in the city.

The major difference between Micheline and Bukowski is that a Micheline poem is mostly a lyrical celebration of the city while the best Bukowski poems concentrate on the down and out particulars, hookers, a pile of dogshit on the sidewalk, a grueling hangover. Bukowski dealt mainly with the stink of the human condition. Micheline often transcended that and celebrated the fundamental connectedness of people.

What is interesting about Micheline and Bukowski is the trajectory that their lives took. John Martin, the creator of Black Sparrow Press, discovered Bukowski and the rest became history. Micheline was discovered by many small press publishers, but none with the luck and the savvy of a John Martin. And, luck may just be the key word. I suppose the question that needs to be asked is why did Bukowski become so hugely famous and successful while Micheline, at his death in 1968, had never attained the same kind of renown? Both poets were legendary for their drinking and brawling. Both were known as social outlaws, both could be difficult and unpredictable and even dangerous people to know. Still, it is ironic that the behavior that made Bukowski famous to the point of becoming a celebrity literally marginalized Micheline and relegated him to neglect by the time that he died. This doesn’t mean that he didn’t have a loyal following of readers. However, it does mean that most of his work appeared in short run zeroxed editions while Bukowski’s work was being published in languages all over the world. Where poets are concerned, the question of fame is a devouring demon. Devouring and totally random in the way that it deals with poets. And, while Micheline may have worked hard to avoid fame or success, he had to be painfully aware that poets he knew and knew well had become famous all around him.

The whole question of fame with regard to Micheline really doesn’t matter now except to a future biographer and I have no doubt in my mind that someone will eventually write the story of his life. It’s just simply one of those books which needs to be written. What is important, right now, at this moment, is to acknowledge in print that Micheline was every bit as good a poet as Ginsberg or Kerouac or Corso. They were his immediate contemporaries. Bukowski was an entirely different matter because he was never associated with the Beat poets in any important way and because he was a kind of poetic movement unto himself. No one could do what he did.

Jack Micheline suffered from neglect for largely two reasons. One, he was not widely published. And, two, he was not widely reviewed, if he was reviewed much at all. Publication and reputation through reviews and critical articles are what form the longevity of any poet. And, it is my opinion that this is where Micheline suffered the greatest neglect. And, yes, Kerouac wrote an introduction to his first book RIVER OF RED WINE but that was in 1958 and it was a long haul from that year to 1998, the year that Micheline died. Also, those times that Micheline’s work was reviewed, the notices appeared where but in small press magazines with very small print runs. Right here, it’s necessary to remember that Bukowski’s work was rarely if ever reviewed in mainstream journals; however, his books were selling so well through word of mouth that it really didn’t matter. Both Bukowski and Martin were laughing all

While Micheline never wrote a poem as important and emblematic as HOWL, never wrote a novel as iconic as ON THE ROAD or as experimental and outrageous as NAKED LUNCH, he did leave a body of work as lyrical as one poet’s of that time. A full discussion of Jack Micheline’s poetry is worthy of not one but many critical studies. However, here, all I really need to do is call attention to one remarkable poem that Micheline wrote on a bus en route from San Francisco to Santa Rosa on March 15, 1982. Chasing Jack Kerouac’s Shadow is in my opinion one of a handful of great lyric poems written in the closing years of the twentieth century. The long lines situate it directly in the Whitmanic tradition, yet the voice of the poem, the sound of the poem are strictly Micheline’s very private sound. In this poem, you can feel Micheline’s motion on that bus, the experience of being jostled, of actual movement. “…streets, poems, nuthouses, jails, paintings, con men and time….” You are there sitting right to Micheline and he is telling you the lines the second that he writes them down. “I am fifty two, live alone, considered some mad freak genius/In reality I am a fucked up poet who will never come to terms with the world….” Right here, Micheline has gotten at the heart of his failures and at the same time you can read between the lines that these failures also make him Jack Micheline and will provide him with a kind of fucked up genius to write the only kind of poetry that he is truly capable of.

Chasing Jack Kerouac’s Shadow isn’t really about Jack Kerouac at all or about his shadow. This is Micheline’s search for his own shadow, his deepest and most vulnerable self. And, while Micheline has written a substantial body of fine work, I believe this poem is one of the keys to his entire work. This poem may be many things, but it is certainly the most intimate look at Jack Micheline who was always the penultimate performer. In certain ways, it reminds me of some of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s best work. Poems like A Cloud In Pants and The Backbone Flute.

All of this leads me to one observation. Jack Micheline’s work really needs to be collected. Maybe we may never have all of his poetry under one cover, but we need as much of it as we can cram beneath covers. Which means that some publisher out there should give his poetry the serious consideration that it deserves. If Micheline were Russian, his work would already have been collected and he certainly would have become as famous as Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Please click on the covers to enlarge the images.

Jack Micheline’s book Outlaw Of The Lowest Planet is available in our THE SHOP page here… plus the entire ZEITGEIST catalogue.

Leave a Comment

Filed under reviews by todd moore

Tagged as , , ,

June 29, 2008 · 12:32 pm

kell robertson | the goofy goddess on the wall

KELL ROBERTSON AND THE RAGGED TERRAIN OF THE WAY WE ALL DREAM by Todd Moore

Have you ever walked down the sidewalk and suddenly discovered a big red stain on the cement where someone had been badly injured or maybe murdered and the sight of that bloodstain is so unnerving that it leaves you shaking for the rest of the afternoon? And, you don’t exactly know why because you’ve seen blood splattered walls on tv or in the movies and they never made you feel that way. But, this is somehow real and you can see where someone has tried to wash the stain away but it refuses to disappear. Instead, the blood has gone into the pebbled texture of the cement and it is going to take many thousands of indifferent feet to make it go away.

Discovering a Kell Robertson poem can have this effect. Robertson brings a certain rawness, a certain primal feel of life, an authentic viscerality to nearly everything he writes. The best of his poems almost seem like something that approaches the final apocalyptic reports from the last american psychic frontier. Beginning with Frederick Jackson Turner, we have been repeatedly told that there really are no more frontiers, but if you live in any part of the american west you know that there are little pockets of wildness that still survive. They persist in the geography of places like the Gila in New Mexico, they persist in the ragged terrain of the way we all dream. Here, in america.

Kell Robertson’s latest chapbook THE GOOFY GODDESS ON THE WALL is the latest installment of his ongoing picaresque adventures lived right at the edge of american culture. This is where Robertson has lived for most of his life. The title poem takes place in an abandoned filling station where the poet discovers an old calendar advertising Jimmie’s Foxlake Feeds flapping in the wind on the wall. And, the pinup on the flaking calendar portrays a beauty queen from thirty years ago. Some trickster has used a pen to ink out here teeth. Yet, somehow enough of her beauty is left intact to allow the poet to dream what she might have been like thirty years ago. In some ways, she becomes part of Kell Robertson’s dream of a pastoral america. A dream that is fading or has already disappeared like Jimmi’e Foxlake Feeds and the filling station itself. This part of america is not coming back and Robertson knows this only too well. And, he laments it in poem after poem.

In some ways, Kell Robertson could have been a character in a Cormac McCarthy novel. He is part of John Grady Cole’s world or Billy Parham’s world. While Robertson is not a Cowboy Poet, he is a poet from a nearly vanished time. Born in 1930 in rural Kansas, he was on the road by the mid forties and certainly had seen a good deal of the west by 1950, the same time period that the major characters of THE CROSSING TRILOGY lived through. The fact that Robertson was living in the west and southwest in the forties and fifties goes a long way in giving his voice and vision the kind of authenticity that is lacking in most so called Cowboy Poets. Robertson’s best poems have a sound in them that you find in the very best moments of a Max Evans’ novel, a Cormac McCarthy novel, and especially in William Faulkner’s short novel THE BEAR. Robertson heard the best of all talking and somehow he was able to get that voice, the sound of that voice, the bourbon gravelly shorthand drawl of that voice into poems that I can only call masterpieces. Not every Kell Robertson poem is a masterpiece. But poems such as Bear Crossing, Almost Suicide, For My Stepfather, A Horse Called Desperation, Pretty Boy Floyd, and The Gunfighter are almost certainly the best of all talking.

The best poem in THE GOOFY GODDESS ON THE WALL comes near the end of the book. I Forgot The Name Of The Movie But It Went Like This: is the kind of poem a poet writes near the end of his life. Here, Robertson really isn’t talking about a movie. Instead, he’s playing with memory and desire. He’s right on the edge of inventing the movie of his life except that he has already done that through poetry, through promoting his legend of having been a Hollywood stuntman, through sounding a little like Robert Duvall in LONESOME DOVE, Edmond O’Brien in THE WILD BUNCH, and Tommy Lee Jones in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. And, also, maybe Walter Brennan in MY DARLING CLEMENTINE. I Forgot The Name Of The Movie is one of those summing up poems. The poet is asking himself what he has done, what kind of legacy is he leaving behind.

Kell Robertson’s poetry is both easy and difficult to define. Easy because for most of his life Robertson has been a kind of cultural outlaw. He has gone against the grain at almost every turn. In the classic Beat period, Robertson lived at the margins of the Beat world but he was never part of the movers and shakers in that world. In fact Robertson’s first book TOWARD COMMUNICATION appeared in 1967, right on the cusp of the Hippie Revolution, but Robertson was anything but a Hippie. A free spirit like John Grady Cole, yes, but not a Hippie.

And, Robertson’s poetry is difficult to define because it is not Surreal, it is not necessarily Confessional, it is not part of the Language School of poetry, it is not Beat, it was never Modernist. And, it is not Cowboy though it has horses and cowboys in it. It resolutely defies easy definition as all strong poetry should.

The fascinating thing about Kell Robertson’s poetry is that it could just as easily have been written beginning in 1920 as it was beginning in the 1960s. Robertson’s poetry never really depended on T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or Robert Frost. In some ways it depends more on the stories of Ernest Hemingway and the song lyrics of Hank Williams. The core of the best of Kell Robertson’s work depends partly on the leanest of american sentences. It’s very possible Bukowski figures in there somewhere except that Bukowski’s poetry is heavily urban and situated right at the street level while Robertson’s poetry is heavily western and rural, situated somewhere between a cantina, a mesa, and a bus station. Bukowski’s poetry is a celebration of the visceral. Robertson’s poetry has always been a viscerally raw western lament, a kind of death song in the best tradition of Sam Peckinpah. Every death song should have some blood in it.

Maybe at this stage of Kell Robertson’s career as a poet, the question inside the question is does a small press poet actually have a career, someone needs to ask just what is Robertson’s legacy as a poet? What has Kell Robertson accomplished as a poet? If he has written a long poem, that is a poem at least as long and significant as THE WASTE LAND, he has never published it. If he has written a novel, it remains unpublished at this date. If he has written a memoir, I have never heard about it.

I suppose what I am talking about is style. Passing out after a long day of drinking at the Shuler Theater in Raton, New Mexico. Now, that’s style. Having a car run over your foot while you are trying to push it out of a ditch. Now, that’s style. Slapping your holsterless thigh while arguing with a bartender over the drink tab. Now, that’s style. Or, writing a poem as spare and wonderful as Pretty Boy Floyd. That, amigo, is style. You can see that kind of style in the photograph of Kell Robertson smoking a roll your own on the last page of THE GOOFY GODDESS ON THE WALL. You can see it in the way that he has crouched himself against the impudences of the ignorant world. He’s all trickster in that snapshot. He looks like he’s getting ready to conjure a story or a poem.

Robertson’s real legacy lies in the way that he writes, the way that he says things. There is virtually no one who writes the way that he does or sees things the way that he sees and dreams them. Robertson may be one of those poets who resist being labeled. However, if Kell Robertson is anything, he is an Outlaw Poet. His heroes are John Wesley Hardin, Charles Arthur Floyd, Lash Larue, Woody Guthrie, Billy the Kid and Ken Maynard. His poetry calls to the Outlaw Poets. His legacy lies strongly in that tradition. And, it has been overlooked too long as a legitimate tradition in american poetry.

The one thing that we can all be sure of is that Kell Robertson has published maybe two dozen or more chapbooks and one book of a hundred plus pages of poetry. Maybe he has produced a body of poetry at least as large as the work of Weldon Kees or the Greek poet Cavafy. Not terribly long, but a poetry that has a groundedness to it. A poetry with a unique voice and a raw power that is as original and as hypnotic as any poet I know of. Kell Robertson is unique. There is no one writing like him today and I don’t think we shall see his kind again.

Note: THE GOOFY GODDESS ON THE WALL appears as an Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books imprint, $5.00, POB 54, Manasquan, NJ 08736.

John Dorsey, Kell Robertson and S.A. Griffin | Photo: Jimi Bernath at Kell’s place during “Venus In The Badlands” outlaw poetry festival in April of 2006. [please click on the image to enlarge]

Leave a Comment

Filed under reviews by todd moore

Tagged as , , , ,

June 14, 2008 · 1:06 am

dancing in the fire with s.a. griffin

S.A. Griffin | Photo: Mark Savage | Car: ’59 Cadillac Sedan deVille

DANCING IN THE FIRE WITH S. A. GRIFFIN by Todd Moore

I remember sitting up half the night talking to S.A. Griffin in my book littered office about everything from poetry to crime to movies to getting drunk. I remember listening to S. A. read The Apes Of Wrath at the Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe. I remember the crazy outlaw talk talk talk in John Macker’s converted roadhouse home out in Bernal and the walk out into the wilderness beyond his house where he had made a slab rock altar for Sam Peckinpah’s typewriter. I remember the hour long interview S. A. Griffin did with me on his blogtalk radio show. Mostly, what I remember about the times that S. A. I get together is the excitement of the conversation. Which is really more like plugging into a shared energy source.

The first time I ever talked to S.A. Griffin was on the phone. It was a Sunday afternoon and he was asking me if I would be interested in sending him some poems for an anthology called THE OUTLAW BIBLE OF AMERICAN POETRY. Just like that, as naturally as though he were asking if we might go out and have a beer together. Little did I realize that this was a watershed moment in my life. Because THE OUTLAW BIBLE became one of the biggest best selling poetry anthologies ever and I mean ever. And, I know there are people out there who are pissed off that Bukowski wasn’t included. That exclusion along with several other really major small press poets was NOT because of a decision that S. A. Griffin had made. But, once you get past that glitch, what hits you is that this anthology gave some exposure to many writers and poets who had, for decades, been working right at the margins of american poetry. And many still are. This anthology did not invent or really define Outlaw Poetry, but it certainly was influential in discovering many of those poets are really are the Outlaws. And, it provided some real momentum for rediscovering what was necessary Outlaw and blood required for revitalizing what survives as american poetry.

What surprises me is that I had seen S. A. Griffin many times before I really knew who he was. Griffin has spent much of his life as a film and tv actor. One of my favorite movies is PALE RIDER and in that film Griffin plays one of John Russell’s badass deputies. I’ve always been disappointed that so far Griffin has not been given a larger role in a movie. He’d make a great John Glanton, the leader of the bounty hunters in Cormac McCarthy’s novel BLOOD MERIDIAN, if that movie is ever going to be made.

Smoke words, drink words, drink asphalt. That’s from Carma Bums Rules Of The Road. This is the absolute essential energy that is S. A. Griffin. This is S. A. Griffin, this is Los Angeles, this is the psychic energy of poetry, this comes close to an american duende if there is such a thing. There really can’t be simply because this isn’t Spain and nobody in america is Lorca but if america could be Spain for say an insane drunken fucked up pistol pointed at the forehead second, then smoke words, drink words, drink asphalt might just come close to an american crazoid duende.

The thing that has not surprised me is that huge mountain man of a book called NUMBSKULL SUTRA. It’s Griffin’s own personal automatic weapon assault on american poetry. Bang, bang, you’re dead, it has that kind of an effect. Published by Rank Stranger Press in 2007, it announces itself largely. It elbows its way to the front of the pack. NUMBSKULL SUTRA is essentially the big movie that S. A. Griffin has always wanted to star in. This is his role of a life time. This is the part to die for. No doubt that S. A. Griffin will write other books, but this really is the big one. This is the Los Angeles urban/barbaric yawp. This town stinks all to hell of Chanel Number 5 and sunbaked Ripple. This is where the Mexican orange merchant pukes on the street of dreams, have you found your name on the street of stars yet, if not I will machine gun the letters in and pour blood in the cracks, this is where somebody asks does the poem really matter while someone else climbs into a big car in need of bad repair to set out on a long pot smoking drive and Hollywood is burning in the background like an already forgotten silent movie back lot sans the kiss. And, forgive me S. A. if I have not broken the lines where they should have been broken or have left out a few words or put in one or two that didn’t belong there or not given the proper titles because these are YOUR WORDS and there is a little outlaw dancing in every one but first understand this.

The poems from NUMBSKULL SUTRA have a way of shooting out through the psychic veins, have a way of blowing all the usual poetry niceties right out the smashed to hell window because what I see in these poems, what I get in these poems is Los Angeles as apocalypseville. It’s Post Bukowski, it’s post Micheline, it’s post d.a. levy and pure pure Outlaw with razor bladeTude. And, S. A. we both know some parts of Los Angeles will always be burning, shall we dance in the fire?

Leave a Comment

Filed under reviews by todd moore

Tagged as , , ,

June 8, 2008 · 11:51 am

how to survive the coming night: the poetry of john yamrus

The kind of poetry John Yamrus writes is what most people would tell each other over drinks at three o’clock in the morning if they were conscious enough or literate enough to talk like that. This is not a poetry of metaphor and simile. This is not a poetry of rich literary allusion. Or, lets put it this way, this is a poetry of bare bones literary allusion, the stuff needed to get you through the day or night. Heroes like Steinbeck and Bukowski and though I don’t recall a mention of Gerald Locklin, I think Locklin must mean a lot to John Yamrus. The one thing Yamrus’ poetry is definitely not is academic. This is not MFA / writing school poetry. Instead, it’s the stuff that’s ground out of the blood and the bone of everyday existence.

Though the spirit of Charles Bukowski inhabits these poems, John Yamrus’ poetry has a voice and style that is entirely his own. It struggles with Bukowski. It struggles to define itself in the very real light of the myth of Charles Bukowski. But it wins the right to exist because it acknowledges a debt to the man, a large debt owed by a whole generation of poets.

For as long as I can remember I have been reading poems by John Yamrus. Back in the typewriter font and mimeograph day I used to see Yamrus’ poetry all over the map. And, i was never disappointed. And, still am not. What Yamrus learned early and well is how to write a poem that needs to end somewhere and sometime soon. He never over writes, he never under writes. He has always known just where the poem comes to a dead stop, like the end of a breath or a head on collision. Isaac Babel once said that a sentence should end with a period that is more like a black wound in the heart. This is what Yamrus has learned.

Bukowski’s property
this poem
isn’t mine these
thoughts aren’t
mine these
sentences aren’t
mine these
cadences
aren’t
mine these
lines aren’t
mine.
nothing
i do
or think
or write
is mine.
it’s all filtered down
through you
Mr. Bukowski…
and i wish
you’d
come here
and
take it back.

from One Step At A Time, p. 71.

While there are several poems in both collections which mention old Hank, “Bukowski’s property” works for me as a kind of key to what Yamrus is doing, at least in these two books. Most obviously, Yamrus admits in this poem that Bukowski has been a major influence on him. Essentially, what he says is that Bukowski has made such an important impact on poetry that he basically owns the language and that Yamrus, in this poem and very likely in most of his work, is pretty much borrowing Bukowski’s language just to write the poetry that Yamrus is driven to write. He is doing what so many contemporary poets neglect doing. Yamrus is fessing up to the influence and fessing up big time. In a sense, this is very much like stealing the language from the gods or at least one still very powerful god, even though he is dead. Looked at this way, it is an act of bravery.

However, because “Bukowski’s property” is a key John Yamrus poem, lets take this analysis just a little further. The lines in this poem are not the classic lines that you would find in a Charles Bukowski poem. Most of the best of Bukowski’s work is usually more long lined, though later in life he did write some short liners. Yamrus’ lines in this poem are never more than four words long. Which means this isn’t typical Bukowski. In fact, it comes closer to the kind of poem that Lyn Lifshin might write. The lines are short and more often than not broken in places that you wouldn’t expect. And, there is the kind of poem that I write. The major difference is that I never use stationary titles. My titles mostly leap into the poem and race down from there the way the rest of this poem scans down the page quickly and reads like a close to the bone conversation with a very severe poetic self.

One influence that John Yamrus has not mentioned is Gerald Locklin. As I stated before, I have read through both books carefully and can’t find a mention of his name anywhere except in a blurb on the back cover of One Step At A Time. The fact is, I find as much Gerald Locklin in these poems as I do Charles Bukowski. Equal parts to be exact. But, I do not mean these remarks as a diminishment of John Yamrus’ poetry. In fact, what I am suggesting is that Yamrus, maybe from early on, had somehow found a way to synthesize the styles of Charles Bukowski and Gerald Locklin. This is no mean feat when you stop to think about it. Bukowski met life headon and with no reservations. He was the rowdy, the tough guy, the down and outer slouched over a drink at a bar. Locklin, on the other hand, continues to write a kind of dialed down poem, full of failed attempts and attempted failures, a man who loves jazz and books, a poet who prefers meditation to action, a poet who lives the nondramatic life and who writes from a stance of self effacement.

And, it is this mix of meeting life headon along with a certain amount of self effacement that you will find in “Bukowski’s property” and also in many of the poems in these two books. What I am getting at here is that by synthesizing the styles of Charles Bukowski and Gerald Locklin, John Yamrus has somehow gone beyond both poets and has arrived at a voice and a style that is uniquely and ingeniously his. The irony is that by writing this way John Yamrus has somehow gained title to “Bukowski’s property” and to something I would like to call the John Yamrus poem. Not many contemporary poets can lay claim to that distinction.

John Yamrus

has been a fixture in American poetry for four decades. Since 1970 he has published 2 novels, 15 volumes of poetry and more than 900 poems in magazines around the world. Selections of his poetry have been translated into several languages including Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Japanese and (most recently) Romanian. His newest book, SHOOT THE MOON, is available online from amazon.com and more on John Yamrus can be read here…

Todd Moore’s

work has appeared in over a thousand magazines and literary journals. His style has been called pared down and noir. He’s one of the founders of Outlaw Poetry and his work is featured in THE OUTLAW BIBLE OF AMERICAN POETRY. His long poem DILLINGER has been critically hailed as”hypnotic when read, cinematic in scope.” He has just finished a novel called DREAMING OF BILLY THE KID and his new collection of poetry is entitled LOVE & DEATH & TEETH IN THE BLOOD.

Note: A selection of Todd Moore books are available for purchase in our shop here…

Leave a Comment

Filed under reviews by todd moore

Tagged as ,

May 13, 2008 · 9:45 am

alex gildzen and the dream factory myth


Alex Gildzen | Photo: Stathis Orphanos

I can’t write about Alex Gildzen without mentioning Paul Metcalf. I think it was Paul who first suggested that Alex write me and that was well over twenty years ago. For the record, Paul Metcalf was Herman Melville’s great grandson and a first rate, though badly neglected novelist and poet. His novel GENOA and long poem APALACHE are as good as anything Charles Olson, David Jones, or Thomas McGrath wrote in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Some critic with vision and guts really needs to explore and write about the work of Paul Metcalf.

As for Alex Gildzen, he’s an Outlaw Poet. I make that statement unequivocally, knowing Alex and his poetry since the eighties. Making that statement might get me into a little trouble but it’s like Raymond Chandler wrote. Trouble is my business. And, before I go further I need to say that Outlaw Poetry is not just about poet icons who push the cultural and aesthetic envelope right to the edge. Outlaw Poetry encompasses a whole generation of poets who have said and are saying no to a corrupt university/publishing establishment which honors only the writing degree darlings who use university teaching positions as bases of power.

Gildzen, like Edward Field before him, mines the Hollywood Dream Factory. In some ways, this is still a largely ignored area for a poet to work in. And, I think, this is largely due to the fact that for most poets mythology means going back to the Greek myths, the Roman creation stories. Just mention the word myth and see how many people will recall Homer, Sophocles, Catullus, Virgil. That is, the well read people. That’s why I love movies like THE MALTESE FALCON and THE BIG SLEEP. I need to hear the american lingo in my ear again, I need dialogue that washes it all clean, that makes me want to see movies that really are movies and read poems that don’t bore the living shit right out of me.

Or, bring up american mythology, how about Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, John Henry, Pecos Bill? And, of course, there is that solid american bible of mythology, Richard Slotkin’s REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE. For some peculiar reason, pop culture in america has been deleted from much so called serious poetry. That is, at least until Edward Field wrote STAND UP, FRIEND, WITH ME. You can ransack most poetry written before 1950 and you will find very little with regard to the movies.

And, yet, regardless of what our serious (and most boring critics) have written, it is the movies which have provided our novelists and our poets with the raw material for something like the archetypal american dream. Before Field, the only really great novelists to tap into archetypal Hollywood were Nathanael West who wrote THE DAY OF THE LOCUST and F. Scott Fitzgerald who was still writing THE LAST TYCOON when he died. Somehow West and Fitzgerald realized before almost anyone else that the Dream Factory on the coast was onto something. Something so subversively american it was like receiving communion and a blowjob, both at the same time.

By the time Gildzen started to write poetry, there were a few books he could consider as predecessors, as influences. Of course, Gildzen was no stranger to the vast storehouse of Hollywood myths, histories, stories, tall tales, and juicy bits of gossip attached to the Hollywood environs. He had grown up to Hollywood, had seen all the important films of his childhood, had read all the necessary books about Hollywood, had even met some movie stars. Somehow Gildzen was able himself into the central core of Hollywood’s collective unconscious.

Collective unconscious, of course, is a Jungian term. However, I don’t think even Carl Jung could have predicted the impact that the dream factory would have on the contemporary fantasy and dream world of, not just americans, but people all over the world. More often than not, america is credited with the invention of jazz. It has long been called the only art form that is truly american. I’d like to amend that list to the movies as well. Not just the movies, but the images created by the movies. I will never be able to think of the film STAGECOACH without seeing John Wayne twirl that Winchester around when he stops that coach which is heading toward Lordsburg. And, whenever I think of BONNIE AND CLYDE I’ll always see that bullet riddled car and those bodies rolling in the gunfire. And, Warren Oates behind that machine gun in THE WILD BUNCH sums up the enormous and pervasive violence possible in contemporary america.

So, when I mention the Dream Factory of america, what I am really talking about is the place where all of us go to kick through the trash heap of images that we all desperately need to recycle through our poems. And, Alex Gildzen knows that this is the central fact of american poetry, the central fact of dreaming in america. Gildzen’s poetry is as dependent upon these images as Cavafy’s poetry was dependent upon the ancient history and myth of the Alexandrian world. And, because Gildzen knows that the Dream Factory is the central fact and myth for american poetry, this knowledge places him at the periphery of what is acceptable in the polite world of writing schools and mainstream publishing. And, it is also this knowledge that has made Gildzen an Outlaw Poet.

The Outlaw Poet works best at the periphery of a society, not at the center. Baudelaire stood right at the margins, at the very edge of French society in the nineteenth century. Rimbaud was way outside the margins. In fact, he moved the margins farther than anyone else at that time. If, as a poet, you stand at the center of your culture you will never be an Outlaw Poet. Eliot could never have been an Outlaw Poet. Walt Whitman will never be anything but an Outlaw Poet.

One thing to keep in mind is that no Outlaw Poet is like any other. Every Outlaw Poet is different from every other one both in life style and the way that he stands against the culture. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Micheline were both Outlaws but they were both as unalike as any two people could have been, both in their work and in their life styles. The same goes for Tony Moffeit and Kell Robertson. If anything Tony is a kind of blues/shaman poet while Kell is the original half horse half alligator american wild man poet. The same goes for S. A. Griffin and Alex Gildzen. Both poets are the pure products of the Dream Factory Myth. But, they mine that myth so differently. And, they both know that inside the flicker of that movie light there is a powerful darkness that most of us have only just begun to tap into.

Alex Gildzen

born April 25, 1943 in Monterey, California, is a poet, mail artist, and blogger who is best known for his autobiography Alex in Movieland, an experiment in list poems. Gildzen grew up in Elyria, Ohio, graduating from Elyria High School in 1961. He then enrolled at Kent State University, earning a BA in journalism and an MA in English in 1966. Gildzen then took a position with the University News Service department, covering the university’s cultural scene. He was on the Commons on May 4, 1970 when four students were killed by the National Guard during an anti-war demonstration.

After that event, Gildzen decided to make a career change and was hired by then-Curator Dean Keller to assist him in the univeristy library’s Special Collections Department in 1971. During his tenure in Special Collections, Gildzen acquired the archives of the Open Theater, as well as the papers of its director Joseph Chaikin and major playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie. He also acquired the papers of Group Theater member Robert Lewis, film historians Gerald Mast and James Robert Parish, and silent screen star Lois Wilson. He retired as Curator in 1993 after thirty years of service at Kent State.

Gildzen’s first book, Into the Sea, was published by Abraxas Press in 1969. His selected poems The Avalanche of Time was published by North Atlantic Books in 1986. He became involved in mail art in the 1970s and produced a number of works, notably Postcard Memoirs. He visited Santa Fe for the first time at the end of 1990; he moved there four years later. During the1990s, Gildzen produced a pop music concert and AIDS benefit and had two of his plays produced. Since his retirement, he has continued a robust career as a poet and mail artist, particularly utilizing the Internet as a medium. His blog is “Arroyo Chamisa” and he appears on You Tube in videos reading his work.

Bibliography:

  • Gildzen at 50: A Celebration (1993) edited by Dimitris Karageorgiou

Selected Works by

  • Into the Sea (1969)
  • “Twenty Sonnets Bound in Gold” 1972)
  • Funny Ducks (1973)
  • The Year Book (1974)
  • Swimming (1976)
  • New Notes (1978)
  • Postcard Poems (1978)
  • Skins (1981)
  • The Avalanche of Time (1986)
  • A Gathering of Poets (1992) an anthology co-edited with Maggie Anderson
  • Joseph Chaikin : A Bio-Bibliography (1992)
  • On the Blue Swing (1998)
  • Mail & More (2003)
  • February 03 (2003) with Todd Colby, Thurston Moore and Matthew Wascovich
  • It’s All a Movie (2007)

Please visit Alex Gildzen’s web pages here… and here… Some of his books are available for purchase in our THE SHOP page here…

Leave a Comment

Filed under reviews by todd moore

Tagged as ,

March 9, 2008 · 2:45 pm

american blues outlaw poetry anarchic dream

moffeitportrait.jpgTONY MOFFEIT | AMERICAN BLUES OUTLAW POETRY ANARCHIC DREAM
by Todd Moore

Tony Moffeit and I founded the Outlaw Poetry Movement in America in 2004, partly as a reaction to the kind of tame poetry generated by writing programs, academia, and the prize system which is good old boy, incestuous, and corrupt. However, Tony and I have been good friends since 1983 when I published one of his early chapbooks entitled OUTLAW BLUES. But Outlaw in his work predates the early eighties because of his abiding interest in rockabilly, Delta Blues, Sun Records Country, and Hank Williams. Tony brought pop music culture to the poetry table when most everyone else was too cultured, too sophisticated to care.

moffeitoutlawbluescoverweb.jpg

When I say Outlaw Poet, I don’t mean to suggest that Tony Moffeit robs banks or is involved in a criminal organization. What I do mean to say is that Moffeit’s poetry bucks the trend of safe writing in America. It doesn’t come out of the John Ashbery East. It isn’t affiliated with the New York School, Black Mountain, or Language Poetry. And, in the West, it has nothing in common with the Boulder Beats or Post Wannabe Bukowski. Moffeit, at times, has been called Beat but he really has nothing in common with the Beats. He shows no interest in Eastern Religion, doesn’t write like or in the tradition of Allen Ginsberg, and is not even connected to the Baby Beats.

Moffeit’s predecessors are really Jack Micheline, Ray Bremser , and d. a. levy. These poets were all marginal Beat poets who had more interest in street poetry, drugs, crime, and going it alone than in the more public scene of Kerouac and Ginsberg. These three poets are really closer to what the Outlaw Poets are all about.

As an Outlaw Poet, Tony Moffeit is more interested in Billy the Kid rather than the Dalai Lama. What he is searching for in many of his books and chapbooks is the dark American underbelly, the shadowy place where all creative energy originates. His sense of Lorca’s Duende is visible in his poetry and blues performances. When he performs Luminous Animal, the room begins to shake.

For Moffeit, the metaphor of Billy the Kid is really central to his most important work. The Kid, who was a real life Western gunman, is important to both Moffeit’s continuing long poem about the Kid and to Moffeit’s poetic stance which stresses a kind of existential attitude about being a poet in America post nine eleven. Because if you are a poet, if you are one of the last of the authentic American voices, if you are a storyteller in the wreckage of the human, then you are making an existential choice about the breath and the way.

This passage from Outlaw Blues probably best exemplifies what Tony Moffeit is all about.

…tonight i sing a blues song for the outlaws the renegades the desperados who drift under endless skies america your clouds are my songs your rain is my voice your hail is my blues.

Tony Moffeit has always lived at the edge of his nervous system. He howls his poems in performance and he writes poetry doing 80 on Route 25. His is a high speed america and his dreams are energized with Duende and blood.

moffeitcovergrosswebneu.jpgmoffeitcoverbackwebweb.jpg

Leave a Comment

Filed under reviews by todd moore

Tagged as , , , ,

· 2:39 pm

billy the kid in the theater of blood

tm1466.jpg

I am staring at the cover of a pure Outlaw classic, just published by the Outlaw Press in Pueblo, Colorado. It’s perfect bound, with signature black depths and striking yellows and reds all across it. The surreal figure wearing the big cowboy hat and poncho is Tony Moffeit and the title of this book is BLUES FOR BILLY THE KID. There is no price on the cover simply because this book is, according to Moffeit, one of a kind, not for sale.

While all books written by Outlaw Poets are one of a kind, this one really is just the one. Moffeit, who has long been known for his fascination with Billy the Kid has published this book on his own press and is giving it away to close friends, tells me that BLUES FOR BILLY THE KID is still a work in progress.

I suppose the question that Moffeit may be asked is if this book is unavailable to the reading public, then why bother to review it? After all, aren’t book reviews written to sell books? My answer is that it is becoming less and less the case. It probably works for mainstream publishers but book reviewing for small press books really has little to do with money. The purpose it accomplishes for a poet like Tony Moffeit is really to announce the fact that an important book has been released to reviewers and critics regardless of the print run. I say important book because BLUES FOR BILLY THE KID is an important book. Important because it joins other important books such as A HORSE CALLED DESPERATION, PLAIN OLD BOOGIE LONG DIVISION, ADVENTURES IN THE GUNTRADE, and DILLINGER as landmark narratives in the Outlaw Generation.

Since the mid to late seventies, Tony Moffeit has made a name for himself mainly as a poet and a pop culture critic. His bluesy poetry performances have electrified audiences around the country for years. However with the publication, and use the word publication with the broadest possible application, of BLUES FOR BILLY THE KID, Moffeit is now stepping up in the role of long narrative writer, more so than ever before. BLUES might easily be called a long poem. The format of his long lined page is very similar to an earlier Moffeit poem like Luminous Animal. The difference, however, is that each section of this work is divided into discrete chapters which make me believe that Moffeit’s BLUES is really meant to be a novel. I don’t think I would be far off the mark to call it a novel-in-progress.

And, I am already anticipating those critics and readers who might say, but what about the length and where are the well drawn characters? As for the length, I estimate it to be somewhere around eight to ten thousand words long. As for the characters, all characters are emanations of the writer’s demon obsessed self and night bound other. The clearest drawn character is Moffeit himself or the Moffeit narrator. The elusive other is actually the Kid.

One thing to keep in mind about the novel as a form. It has never been clearly defined as a form. It varies from writer to writer. Breton’s NADJA is as unique as Hedayat’s THE BLIND OWL. The characters are not all that well defined in either book. Or, take Michael Ondaatje’s THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY THE KID which is part prose, part poetry and is often classified as a work of poetry. A classification I totally disagree with. It’s definitely a novel and not a very long one at that. My estimate that it’s barely twenty thousand words long. And, while length is really only a quibble with regard to the novel, lets recall that some of the great novels have barely exceeded thirty thousand words. Those would include THE STRANGER, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, and THE HEART OF DARKNESS.

While BLUES FOR BILLY THE KID is a novel, it is at this point still a work in progress, so who knows what its final length will be. What I do know is that it is a novel of rare and hypnotic power as it stands. I like to think that poets’ novels have a quality I tend to equate with heavy water used in the production of nuclear weapons. A poet’s novel is dense with suggestion, metaphor, dream, and nightmare. I think this idea might as easily be applied to THE BELL JAR, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, DELIVERANCE, or THE CARDBOARD HOUSE. At any rate, those certainly are the qualities to be found in BLUES FOR BILLY THE KID. Kid novels in america are anomalies, wormholes of fiction, images of extreme and mysterious notation, snapshots from the void. The most accessible ones are those that appear as pulp westerns, too numerous to mention. Serious writers such as Larry McMurtry, M. Scott Momaday, and Michael Ondaatje have each taken a turn at writing about the Kid. And, even in BLOOD MERIDIAN there is a character called the Kid and while he is not meant to be the historical Billy, the suggestion is still there that he is a cubist fragment, a fly away shadow of old Billy Bonney.

While many have written thousands and thousands of words about the Kid, nobody really knows who he was or what he was like. I personally came to this conclusion while writing my novel DREAMING OF BILLY THE KID. And, during the course of my research into the adventures of the Kid of all kids, especially talking to other novelists who have written extensively about the Kid, I reached the conclusion that the Kid never really knew the Kid. How can anyone, especially a famous outlaw ever know the legend, the myth, and the origins of his own personal darkness?

The Kid was the Kid and each and every poet and novelist who approaches this mystery eventually comes away with the knowledge that the Kid is that impenetrable darkness which can only be guessed at but really never breached. After all the bare bone facts are known and the speculations made, the only thing a novelist or a poet can do is dream. But the dream must be made as a wager and the wager is always done with the blood.

Which is what I think Moffeit has done. BLUES FOR BILLY THE KID is on its way to becoming one of the essential books of the Outlaw Revolution. If anything this novel is as much an attempt to conjure the Kid right out of the dust as DILLINGER is an attempt to rescue John Dillinger from the blood splattered alley near the Biograph Theater. Think of Moffeit’s act of writing it as the equivalent of Maria Sabina performing one of her Veladas to cure someone. Maybe himself. Or, Black Elk’s attempt to call back the buffalo. And, no, Tony Moffeit is definitely not a shaman. Not in the old primal sense of the word. But Moffeit is an Outlaw Poet painting his fragmented novel the way that Picasso painted Guernica. Moffeit is a primal poet somehow trying to conjure an outlaw america, to shore it up against future Enrons and Abu Ghraibs, trying to piece it all together as some kind of answer to what passes for the bankrupt poetry of the mainstream presses, as some kind of reply to the shit that passes for great art today. A book like BLUES FOR BILLY THE KID is an american death song. I salute him from the theater of blood.
tm2466.jpg

Leave a Comment

Filed under reviews by todd moore

Tagged as , , , ,