todd moore | american blues outlaw poetry anarchic dream

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.

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.

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.

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.

Related posts:

1. todd moore | outlaw poetry
2. todd moore | outlaw
3. todd moore | billy the kid in the theater of blood
4. todd moore | love & death & teeth in the blood
5. the outlaw poetry pages
6. todd moore | road testing the kid
7. todd moore | writing dillinger in the eye of the hurricane
8. todd moore | the rat’s blood had glued my hand shut
9. todd moore & gary goude | blood on blood
10. todd moore | poem for vinny golia
11. mark weber | I love the blues
12. carl sandburg | poetry and people
13. blues for bird
14. mark weber | poetry band
15. tood moore | the name is dillinger
16. mark weber | for todd moore’s birthday party
17. cal haines | mark weber | poetry and drums
18. andrew neumann | saturnalia | neptune | mile wide | sigmoid flexure | btm/kof | btm/orgy of noise | binary system | thusrton moore | boston underbelly
19. mark weber | plain old boogie long division