todd moore | writing dillinger in the eye of the hurricane
Sunday, September 23rd, 2007
WRITING DILLINGER IN THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE | Todd Moore
The writing of The Name Is Dillinger is just about the clearest recollection I’ll ever have of writing a poem. Especially a long poem. It came on as a dammed up fit of rage, desire, power, and expectation. It was April,1976, a Saturday night, and I was becoming more and more restless. I couldn’t sit down and be comfortable and I couldn’t stand up. I was no good for conversation and pieces of me were beginning to burn up inside. I wanted to go somewhere and I really didn’t want to go anywhere at all. The one thing that I began to realize was that I was just starting to hear this voice that started way back in my throat. It was talking counter to all the ways that I was talking. But instead of the talk coming out, that talk was going in.
My father never drove a car. Well, that’s not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet. “In those days,” he told me when he was in his 90s, “to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it.” At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in: “Oh, bull–!” she said. “He hit a horse.” “Well,” my father said, “there was that, too.” 
CONNECTIONS A LÁ CYBER
