relentless

Author: Todd Moore

chapbook review by David McLean

crane's bill books 2008

This book constitutes that part of the Dillinger poems by Todd Moore that concerns Babyface Nelson and his strange relation with Dillinger. These poems taken together, are the only epic poem worth the name to be written for a long time. They really do achieve a gigantic stature, an effect that the reader is straddled by the strangely laconic figure of Dillinger as he sums up the alienation and isolation of the life choice of professional brutality and murder. These various books and poems have developed a unique style, a brutal staccato of short lines chopped up to match the irregularity of thought and speech, and the violence of the criminal ideal, the criminal mythos and its icons the gangsters and hoodlums whom Moore lovingly yet dispassionately dissects. They are “American” in inspiration, but this icon has become global. There is a whole culture predicated on depicting and mythologizing this form of the outlaw existence.

The characters are icons of course, invented for Moore's poetic convenience, but so are we, of course, characterized and invented for somebody's convenience, even if for a certain extent our own convenience is one of the parties involved in the scripting.

Nelson is an interesting character, portrayed here as a repressed gay who was deeply attracted to Dillinger and simultaneously, as a psychopath, sort of more than half inclined to kill him. Not exactly gay, maybe, more of a pathological homosexual type fixated on meat, domination, mother and blood.

cause he

knew the

fire cdn't

hurt him

he even put

his hand

in it some

times &

when he

pulled it

out there

were no

burn marks

on him

just some

body else'

blood

mama

fuckit

yeah

he didn't

like getting

blood on

him …

Nelson is portrayed trapped in an insane dance with the “demon flies” that haunt him, that mar the mask, the persona; maybe Moore means that in the same way the violent mythology of macho manliness is what disfigures the American male brought up on this myth of hoods and bank-robbers and the cosa nostra, that the violence inside us, perfectly natural actually, is perceived socially as something to wash away, as Nelson cleanses blood from his unburnt hands.

Nelson identifies totally with the role of the killer, the hard remorseless machine, he feels

.. it seemed

as tho the

bullets were

coming out

of him

instead of

the gun

even though this man has to wipe his lips when smoking to remove the invisible flies. And Moore's crowning achievement is that the reader understands and likes this maniac, after all, I'm always prepared to blame mothers and, let's be realistic, if we all had guns, and there were no efforts made to police us, there probably wouldn't be very many left of anybody.

Nelson admires Dillinger, loves him in a way that he will not accept is sexual, and simultaneously resents Dillinger's superior popularity. Moore speculates that the main reason for not killing him may have been that this would have enhanced the Dillinger mythology, and made his just a tributary river of blood. Nelson lives life as a dream, he can control his dreams. Men like this need even more control over their environment than those of us who are less ambitiously crazy, those of us who don't see the demonic flies that swarm over even the living, the flies of madness and mortality threatening to consume them.

Violence and its artifacts are totemic, Nelson almost believes he may have swallowed a machine gun and absorbed its power and efficiency, he is a man with nothing inside him, certainly not a functioning psychology, the gun is a powerful talisman, and he makes it his, resorts to crime to live and killing for kicks, society gave him no help and religion and culture have little consolation to come with – what did people expect he would do? What, for that matter, do they expect poor disadvantaged gang members to do nowadays?

Moore has been called a pornographer of violence, that's simply not true. However he analyses the psycho-sociology of violence and the pornography of violence like no other. If you feel a hankering for the real pornography of violence, may I suggest the Old Testament?

This chapbook is a lovely artifact itself, a beautifully restrained cover, and a perfect complement to The Riddle of the Wooden Gun recently released from Lummox Press, also a beautifully produced book in the sense of physical object.. Get yourself a copy.