Riddle of The Wooden Gun
144 pp
Todd Moore
Book review by David McLean
This book by poet Todd Moore is a single long poem that presents over its whole length a story of Dillinger and other outlaws and their wooden guns. Alongside the real guns we hear of the replicas, clumsily or skilfully made toys that they possessed, that were used as props in robberies, that were accorded symbolic weight, that developed from the childhood interest in toys, that carried the kids violent icon, his weapon, over into the man's toy. The weight of the image was such that Dillinger even came on the idea of using a wooden gun, or a soap gun, the FBI having concealed details of witness accounts, to break out of jail, and it worked. But as toy it had worked for Dillinger as a kid
dillinger never
told his
old man
abt the wooden
gun he
found at
the movies
instead
he sneaked
it into
the house
& hid it
under the
bed & when
he had to
turn the lights
off & go
to sleep he’d
put the wooden
gun under
his pillow
dillinger won
dered if a
wooden gun
ever gave
off any light
(p62)
The disjointed effect of the abbreviated lines here works well, though it does not always work well in poems, the effect is more difficult to achieve than it looks and is not just a question of having a finger itchy for the trigger Enter on the keyboard. Here however it is done consummately, the words often broken in the middle as in “won | dered” above to match the patterns of syntactic dislocation that are appropriate to the poem, the story. It's also an effective technique in relaying to us the strangeness of the spoken word, later we can feel in it a man talking
& i had him
make me
a little 25
auto swee
test little
wood pis
tol you
ever laid
eyes on
(p 101-2)
The gun grows to a riddle, a mystery, a magical symbol, a talisman
.. billie she
sd if i give
you a woo
den gun
will you
promise to
give me
a real one
was crad
ling the
wooden gun
in her arms
like it
was a baby
rocking it
to nighty
night what
happens when
you get the
wooden gun’s
shadow on
you makes
you feel so
goddam lost
dillinger isn’t
sure this is
the beginning
of a fairy tale
a riddle or
a question
so he just
stayed
quiet while
billie sd
pour a little
cat’s blood
on it &
she’ll peel
right off
like a
boiled po
tato skin
(p 72-3)
The shadow of the gun is maybe the shadow of the violent imagery that makes a boy a “man,” the socially conditioned iconography of violence that subjects the children who grow to be the old kind of outlaw as surely as it subjects monks to their novitiates, or maybe it's something less glibly definable, the real power of weapons over us as we touch them, the destructive potential that we are, especially when we stroke weapons and wonder if we might be gods.
The wooden gun is what frightens people, the children's toy, the artifact that represents and, as mimetic, pretends to be the real thing. The reality becomes indifferent. Like today, what is disgusting is violent sexual abuse, not films about violent sexual abuse, they're probably just a vent.
he was
holding a
thompson
in one hand
& a wooden
gun in the
other
but for
some strange
reason
nobody
was afraid
of the
thompson
it was the
wooden
gun that
had every
one edging
back toward
the wall
some kind
of black
energy was
twisting
off the
wooden
gun &
just hanging
in the
air like
strands of
very dark
smoke
(p 75)
I may be reading into this more than the writer intends, or something different, maybe less, but the gun itself, the oily metal thing that tends to get dirty and kills if you ask it to, is only a signified, the forgotten object at the end of a chain of signifiers that includes kid's toys and the elaborate toy guns with which Al Capone rewarded his favorite pistoleros. The real gun might as well not exist any more, the killers can always find something else to kill with, but the glory of the child's toy is what puts the smoking gun in the man's latter-day hand.
In the longer passage I shall take the liberty of quoting here, Moore related the known phenomenon of confabulation of our own memory of what should be closest to us to the newspapers habit of bullshitting
took out all
the bad
words in
the news
papers but
in his dreams
dillinger
recalls more
than he sd
or less
he wasn’t
sure which
but that
was ok
because
nobody wd
get any
of it right
especially
the part
abt the
wooden gun
first theory
he had a
real 45 auto
& a wooden
gun too
second theory
he had just
the 45 auto
& on his
journey up
the corridor
of cells an
inmate slipped
him a wooden
gun he’d just
got done
whittling
third theory
he grabbed a
confiscated
wooden gun
off a guard’s
desk on the
way out
& he used
that instead
of the real
45 auto just
to see how
far it wd
get him
sidebar
possibility
g. russell
girardin
in his book
dillinger
edited by
william hel
mer suggests
that herbert
youngblood’s
attorney smug
gled a wooden
gun to young
blood & he
slipped the
piece to dill
inger
or maybe it
really was
a 45 auto
(p 83-4)
We are all in the same boat as the bandido, but what the fuck, nobody else remembers exactly how their lives went down. It's a hard thought for somebody missing his childhood golden sunsets and how maybe some bird used to sound. But you're probably making most of it up, picking pieces from films, lines from songs, whatever. Our histories are edited by Mr Blatant Need-For-Reassurance and he's a crummy and corrupt hack.
As this poem progresses the wooden gun becomes an overdetermined symbol, it acquires the ability to prophesy and serve as a sign for almost everything seen through the darkening lenses of American outlaw mythology
a wooden
gun shot all
to pieces
war
a wooden
gun thrown
down a
well nightmare
water &
the black
taste of dream
huckleberry
finn
whittling
a wooden
gun out of
a fence slat
tom sawyer
painting it
the color
of a dead
man’s face
annie oakley
shooting
the barrel
off a wooden
gun that
frank butler
held
by the grip
between his
teeth
( 133-4)
Dashiel Hammett is allowed to conclude the story, talking to Hemingway of the riddle of the wooden gun at a cocktail party, the mystery is not one susceptible of explanation,
hammett re
turned hem
ingway’s grin
& sd it’s
not that kind
of mystery
then what is
it hemingway
sd growing
impatient
hammett
paused again
stared into
his bourbon
& sd the
stuff that
dreams are
made of
(p 142)
Ultimately, it was a gun symbol, a token of pseudo-manhood, the wood that boys hold in their hands before they have real hard cocks to hold, what might become a baby in a little girl's womb, it's iconography and mythology, and it doesn't matter if it's real, or what really happened, to is or to us as we remember things, it's the futility of recollecting any history; it's a good story and it symbolizes something and imparts some meaning. It imparts, like any well written poem, the meaning the reader finds in it. It would be nicer if Moore agrees with anything I said, but I think ultimately the point is that it doesn't matter. The wooden gun might have been a soap gun, people disagree. I like to think that Dillinger didn't die and actually had an extraordinarily large penis, but in some sense the Dillinger of whom we speak nowadays is as real as Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. That's very real, but he's only tenuously connected to the body of young man who almost certainly died that day, just over thirty years old, whether or not he was hung like a horse.
As Moore himself says in an essay available HERE.
“However, while Riddle will certainly hold its own as a long poem, what it does beyond all that is it works as one of the central keys to understanding DILLINGER. The poem, like that iconic photograph of Dillinger holding the wooden gun, and the actual wooden gun itself, is a kind of riddle much the same as the scarlet letter, the white whale, or Faulkner’s bear. None of these riddles will ever be solved to anyone’s particular satisfaction, but it isn’t really a solution that anyone is after. It’s the rich cluster of possibilities that these kinds of riddles offer. These are the riddle clusters that we all dream from. In fact, these kinds of riddles arise from a national core of dreaming, the place where we all get our faces from. And, I remain alive in the mystery of Dillinger and the riddle of the wooden gun.”
The book is a great poem, a good story, an entry in the epic outlaw Dillinger mythology and also a work about where dreams and myth and reality and the poetizing magic of the darkness in us all coincide. As such i really think you shall buy it, I hold a token gun of soap at your backs to make you do so here, as Dillinger launders his story again, robbers usually ask for more than fifteen dollars I believe, it's at Amazon, HERE or at Lummox Press, and other online stores.
