reaching for Harlow

Todd Moore dedicates The Dead Zone Trilogy to "The Duende, the movies, and my wife Barbara."

in the first poem of the trilogy -- which Moore claims concludes his epic Dillinger -- Jean Harlow speaks to John Dillinger who reaches out to her:

  my
  hands get
  alllllllllllll
  tangled up
  in the
  moo
  vie
  light n dark
  get alllllll
  mixed to
  gether so
  that
  I cdn't
  tell
  which
  was
  which

this seems to me a particularly important visual. anyone who reads Moore realizes the significance cinema plays as both source material & inspiration.

so we have multiple layers at work. there's Dillinger attempting to hold the unholdable   not being able to distinguish light from dark   confusing reality with fiction. but there's also the poet feeding off the movies.

any work as vast as Dillinger has got to function on several levels. I've long felt that one of those was as a paean to the movies. I even wonder if Moore's honing of his lines from sentence to word to syllable is almost a replication of physical film going thru a projector to cast its image.

I'm not done with Dillinger yet. he keeps pointing that gun at me.