~ In regard to the modern Medici effect on Los Angeles Poetry, Michael Lally has crossed many an Intersection. He has taken part in the innovative constructions of poetry subgenres from poetry and jazz, to poetry and theater, and even poetry & prose in the narrations of films.  ~ The Los Angeles Poetry Examiner's bi-monthly report.

MY LIFE 2

When I was 10,
I thought I was "Irish,"
even though I was
born in the USA.

When I was 20,
I thought I was "Black,"
even though my skin
is pink & freckled,
my hair is straight,
and I have no
African ancestry.

When I was 30,
I thought I was "queer,"
even though I was
married and had
two children, and
all my fantasies
& obsessions & com-
pulsions & attractions
were and had always
been about women.

When I was 40,
I thought I was a
"movie star," even
though the movies
were terrible, and
I was terrible in
them, and almost
no one knew them,
or who I might
have been in them.

When I was 50,
I thought I was
"enlightened," even
though I wasn't.

But of course I was
and am—enlightened,
as I was and still am
—an Irish-Black-
Queer-Movie-Star.

In the long dark theater a hot little british beauty with large pouty red lips came to life on the stage to say, "When I grow up I want to be a rock 'n roll drummer named Jimmy Death!"  And she flitted on across the  stage, and she kicked high in the air while whispers in the audience said that this was Perri Lister, then the girlfriend of Billy Idol and the very bride in The White Wedding music video.

Her dialogue was a poem by Michael Lally: a Los Angeles poet, organizer, talent, talent booker, actor, writer, poet. Poet extraordinaire y maestro, mentor to many and poetry enabler to hundreds, who lives in Jersey now.

With 27 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he continues to become an undeniably viable name in poetry circles here and really all of this nation, from sea to rhyming sea. Having lived a sunny portion of his life in Santa Monica he grew up in Jersey, lived in the Apple surviving on heaps of Nuyorican pie, beat soup and his own original recipes for Attitude.

Living now back in his homestate, he continues to write, his long time essential voice now with a silver touch of eloquence.  Michael can be read daily at his poetry blog, Lally's Alley where his heading reads:

"just another ex-jazz-musician/proto-rapper/Jersey-Irish-poet-actor/print-junkie/film-raptor/beat-hipster-"white Negro"-rhapsodizer/ex-hippie-punk-'60s-radical-organizer's take on all things cultural, political, spiritual & aggrandizing"

Undeniably cool, with physical and literary swagger, he is one writer who has never missed a beat, Michael Lally is an L.A. icon and will always be one. So what if he lives in Jersey. Someone has to.

(Grease Blues, a poem from ATTITUDE Uncollected Poems of the Seventies by Michael Lally

GREASE BLUES        

when i grow up i wanna be
a rocknroll drummer named jimmy death
& play all the festivals
with my hair greased back to the floor
and both feet workin like the pistons
in your heart when theres a  knock on the door
& dope on the floor & you aint expectin nobody

when i grow up i wanna be
a rocknroll drummer named jimmy death
& snow all the women
with my hair greased back below my ass
and my third leg talkin from my third eye
& my pockets overflowin with the good stuff
& my face a free pass to everybody's jam

when i grow up i wanna be
a rocknroll drummer named jimmy death
and deal with the people
who treated me like food
when my hair was combed back over my leather
& the poetry in my hog sent shivers down the spines
of the people who would sell the weather
& getting it together meant an hour ago

when i grow up i wanna be
a rocknroll drummer named jimmy death
& pay back the pigs who kept the sun out
& get it back for you & me

 
EXAMINER: Can you tell us a little about "Rythmn of Torn Stars"? It was a beautiful play that you were a part of, who else was a part of that?

A highlight of my years in L.A. was being a part of Julian Neal's play “The Rhythm of Torn Stars.” As Hubert Selby Jr. would say, and said when he first saw it (he came more than once) “It was a gasser!”

Julian Neal was originally from The Lower Eastside of Manhattan and had been influenced by the poetry he heard growing up there. He moved to L.A. and got the rights to a bunch of poems from Lower Eastside poets, or ones he associated with that time and place, and planned on putting them together as a staged reading kind of performance.

Every line in the play was a poem (or in a few cases excerpts from prose) by the likes of Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Jim Carroll, Miquel Pinero, Lucky Cienfuegos, Elinor Nauen, Maggie Dubris, Ed Sanders, Barbara Barg, Sandie Castle and me - one of the poets he wanted to use work from but hadn’t gotten the rights to yet.

When he found out I was in L.A., he came to ask my permission and when he told me his idea, I suggested how to make it more of a play and less of just a string of readers. He asked me to play myself in it (or really a character based on some of my poems and one or two others), which I did.

The first time it was presented at a small theater just up the block from Beyond Baroque on Venice Boulevard. Unfortunately I don’t have a playbill from that run and can’t remember everyone who was in it (sorry to all those who were a part of it, but I had brain surgery a little over a year ago so my memory isn’t what it used to be). I do remember that my son Miles did some of the graffiti that was part of the set.

I have the playbill for the second run, which was at a bar in Santa Monica called The Pink. The cast included Tate Donovan, Maura Tierney, Perri Lister, Michael Tulin, Mimi Lieber, Meg Foster, M.K. Harris and me.

EXAMINER:  How long did you live in L.A.?  Where you at now Lally?

I grew up in Jersey honey, and have returned. I lived in L.A. from 1982 until 1999. I moved to L.A. from lower Manhattan and the downtown poetry scene, and left L.A. for Jersey, where I was born.

As a poet I'm associated with New York, DC, and L.A. and less frequently with Jersey. I feel a strong connection with each of those places and have written poetry reflecting my experience living in all those places.

I lived various places, one of them being on the lower end of Manhattan, including the Village (i.e. Greenwich Village), the lower Eastside, what is now Soho and Tribeca.  

 
EXAMINER:  How do you feel about the strength of ties you still have with Los Angeles?

I have so many friends still in L.A., it’s like part of my heart still beats (whoa, getting a little lyrically clichéd there Michael)—what I mean is, L.A. and the great friends I made there still live in me. And it’s an honor to still be thought of as connected to so many great poets and others there who I consider friends.

EXAMINER:  Of course you were published before you came to Los Angeles... what publications of poetry were actually made here in L.A? and do they reflect your life in Los Angeles?

 My nineteenth and twentieth books—ATTITUDE and HOLLYWOOD MAGIC—came out just after I arrived. They were fairly big collections of poems, the first included “uncollected poems” from the 1970s, and the second had poems that went back to the 1960s and up to ’81 and was published in L.A.
 
In the seventeen years I lived in L.A. (almost all of it actually in Santa Monica) I had three books—CANT BE WRONG, OF and IT’S NOT NOSTALGIA—and one CD—WHAT YOU FIND THERE—come out. CANT BE WRONG is a collection of poems all written in my L.A. years. It won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for 1997. OF is a book-length poem written from January to May of 1997.

IT’S NOT NOSTALGIA is a collection of poetry and prose covering work from the 1960s to the late 1990s, and the latter sections were all written in and are about my life in L.A.. It also won The American Book Award for 2000 (it came out in 1999, just before I left L.A.).
 
The CD, WHAT YOU FIND THERE, was just me reading poems written in the ‘60s. ‘70s back East and in L. A. in the ’80s and early ‘90s (I think it came out in ’94) in a studio in The Valley.
 
A lot of the L.A. poems and prose pieces were published in magazines and literary journals as well, including local ones like LITTLE CAESAR and BARNEY. (I helped found and edited the original VENICE magazine as well, and had some poems published there)."
 

EXAMINER:  As a poet, what were the highlights of life in Los Angeles for you? as a writer? Oh, and can you touch on the film writing you did in poetic or prose form, such as the piece for  "Drugstore Cowboy"... ?

"Just after I got to L.A., local writer/editor/publisher Dennis Cooper—who had published me in his magazine LITTLE CESAER before I got there—published HOLLYWOOD MAGIC and we had a publication party at a dance club I can’t remember the name of now, but it was packed. Great music, great people.
 
Not long after that, in ’83 I was asked by the man who ran the Stages theaters in Hollywood if I’d turn HOLLYWOOD MAGIC into a stage piece, which I did and it ran there for a while, then moved to The Odyssy in West L.A. where it ran for three months or so.
 
It was entirely made from my poems in HOLLYWOOD MAGIC but with a lot of movement and imagery and interaction among the performers, which included me, my then wife, Penelope Milford, the jazz saxophonist Buddy Arnold, two thirds of the “new vaudeville” juggling/magic act The Mums (Nathan Stein and Albie Selznick) and the actor/writer Winston Jones.
 
It had everything from Nathan and Albie juggling huge dildos (that they ended by catching between their thighs in the exact correct position!) over a bed which Penny was lying in dressed only in a teddy, to tightrope walking and messed up Oscar Award ceremony speeches to Albie eating razor blades and spurting blood. Kind of a cross between a happening and a punk performance.
 
(I also acted in the L.A. premiere of Lanford Wilson’s BALM IN GILEAD which was a highlight, and where I met a slew of really fine actors and good friends who I’m still in touch with, including Dennis Christopher and Ty Granderson Jones.)
 
(Almost two decades later in my last years in L.A. I directed an actual play of mine, first performed as three plays in a bar in Santa Monica and later as a four act play called “Chicks With Dicks” at a theater in Silverlake. Unfortunately I don’t have a playbill for that but can remember some of the actors, like Emil Alexander, James Patrick Keefe, Ben Silverstein, Reed Rudy (and a series of female actors whose names I can’t remember!—please forgive me, but I’m still in touch with all the male actors, that’s why I can still remember their names).
 
Back to my first years in L.A., not long after I moved there the phone rang and when I answered a gruff voice said something like, “I was born in Brooklyn in 1943, who discovered rock’n’roll first, you or me?” I said “Who the fuck is this?” and the voice said “My name’s Ralph Bakshi. I make movies. I feel like I lost my soul to Hollywood, but I just read your book HOLLYWOOD MAGIC and think you can get it back for me.”
 
Ralph Bakshi was the creator of Fritz the Cat and had made some really revolutionary feature length “cartoons.” Now he wanted to make a live action film and wanted me to write it for him, which I did, but it never got made. But at our first meeting he also invited Hubert Selby Jr., the late, great novelist, author of the classic LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN. When Bakshi introduced us he said we were his favorite writers so wanted us to know each other.
 
One of the highlights of my life, let alone those years, was becoming friends with Selby, or “Cubby” as his friends knew him. He not only became my closest friend in L.A., he became a mentor as well, to whom I am eternally grateful.
 
 
Not long after that I met Bill Mohr who included me in his seminal L.A. Poets anthology “POETRY LOVES POETRY” (1985) and was one of the most supportive and nicest people I got to know in L.A.  And eventually I met a lot of the other poets in that collection whose work I admire too, like Harry E. Northup and James Krusoe, Wanda Coleman and David Trinidad, Jack Skelley and Amy Gerstler, Brooks Roddan and Paul Vangelisti, and more.
 
I did some readings at Beyond Baroque, but there weren’t many other venues for alternative poetry back then in L.A. and I missed having a regular place to read and hang out with other poets. So I started doing benefits for various charities and political causes at which I used a format I created back East for similar readings.
 
I’d invite ten to fifteen poets to read their work for five minutes each (usually on the theme of the benefit) to create a fast moving powerful mix of styles and approaches and keep an audience engaged, especially an audience that might otherwise not be so familiar with poetry."

EXAMINER: Poetry In Motion was a milestone in Los Angeles poetry. That was your baby with Eve Brandstein was it not?

In order to help get a large audience to raise the money I was doing these for, I’d invite some “names” I knew from my work in films and on TV as an actor, and in films as a writer. One of those benefits I did at an East L.A. club called Helena’s. The namesake proprietor asked me if I would do a reading like the benefit on a regular basis, like once a week.
 
She introduced me to Eve Brandstein, a poet as well as a writer and producer for TV and a director and a lot of other things. She’s from the Bronx so had that East Coast thing I was used to and we hit it off right away and began a series we at first called the Temple Street Poets, because that’s where the club was. But when Helena’s closed, we moved it to other venues (Largo was where it was the longest) and renamed it “Poetry In Motion.”
 
We’d come up with a theme each week for poets to write on and also invite some people better known for starring in movies or on TV or in bands than as poets. They always wrote their own poems and often were as good or better than many published poets. But the combination of writing on a theme and inviting poets to read who weren’t seen as quite legit by some in the poetry world, as well as doing it all at a Hollywood type club and only giving each poet five minutes, was too much for some local poets who not only turned down invitations to take part but badmouthed us to the press!
 
But we got so much free publicity, some of it negative, some of it really positive, from The New Yorker to the New York Times, Newsweek to Us, etc. we had standing room only crowds for years, and we did it every week!
 
A lot of the poems in CANT BE WRONG as well as IT’S NOT NOSTALGIA and the equally large collection of prose and poems published the year after I moved from L.A.—IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE—came out of those weekly readings and the themes Eve or me or one of the regulars came up with.
 
Among the regulars who almost never missed a week were Hubert Selby Jr., Michael DesBarres, yourself Yvonne, the Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts, Susan Hayden, M.K. Harris, Joel Lipman, Walter Martinez (my fellow Venice magazine founder and the head editor for that mag and really creator of it), Lynn Manning, Meri Nana-Ama Danquah and many more.
 
Others who showed up pretty often included Terry Kirkman, S. A. Griffin, Dennis Christopher, Michael O’Keefe, Annie Reiner, Lotus Weinstock, Tommy Swerdlow, Alec Baldwin, and many others.
 
As for my film writing. I was hired to write a lot of movies on the basis of a screenplay I’d written before I arrived in L.A. and everyone loved but nobody wanted to make. So they’d hire me to write their movies and when I gave them what I do, lots of street language and radical perspectives, they either got  timid or angry, as if I was someone other than I presented myself to be. So those movies never got made.
 
But I was also hired to “doctor” or help out on already written and sometimes already shot movies, or almost finished ones. Like PUMP UP THE VOLUME. I had a poem called THE HEALING POEM come out in the ‘80s that was published in Venice magazine and then republished in I think The Hollywood Reporter and elsewhere. It got a lot of attention and the director of PUMP UP THE VOLUME asked if he could use lines from it in the climactic speech Christian Slater’s character makes toward the end of the movie.
 
I also wrote some of the narration for DRUGSTORE COWBOY after it was already filmed. One of the lines I wrote that Matt Dillon said on the soundtrack was quoted in several big reviews, which made me feel good, though they attributed it either to Dillon or the director and co-writer Gus Van Sant. I got that gig after Gus heard me read my poetry at “Poetry In Motion” one night.
 
I also continued to do benefit readings, like once bringing a bunch of the “Poetry in Motion” regulars down to I think it was Laguna Beach for a benefit for Amnesty International. And we did a yearly benefit for homeless kids every holiday season at venues like the Comedy Club on Sunset strip.
 
A lot of my best times in L.A. were at those weekly readings and other events where there were a bunch of local poets getting together. I’m only sorry that some of the local poets didn’t like what we were doing or had some gripe about it. I always felt that poetry had room for all of us.

 
EXAMINER: What is  "Lost Angels"?

LOST ANGELS is a project my oldest son Miles and I did back in the mid-‘90s. We recorded a selection of poems of mine from the ‘70s, ‘80s and early ‘90s with music. Miles put together two different groups of musicians and we recorded the CD in two different sessions at a funky little studio on Lincoln Boulevard in Venice.
 
The music was mostly Miles’ creation, with the help of some of the other musicians, and he produced the sessions. It was supposed to be a follow up to WHAT YOU FIND THERE, my first CD, but SST folded by the time I started another family and moved back East. But last year an independent label, MONOMANIA, asked if I had anything for them, so we dug up the old session tapes and Miles redid them at a studio in Massachusetts, where he now lives with his family. It’s available through from the label or through CD Baby or you can download it at iTunes.

String Theory

I wasn’t good at a lot of it—
but there were things—
strings connecting me to
music—jazz & r&b mostly—
I could play—I had a feel—
soul some said—like poet
Ralph Dickey who had more
technique but lacked a
certain swinging intuitive
rhythm—and words—mine—
not maybe most original—
but originally mine in ways
that favored reverence for
a truth I never found any-
where else—and movies—
or those serial movies that
are TV—in my time I
made a contribution—whether
anyone noticed or not—
I tried to step back, like
Lao Tsu says, but found it
complicated—more complicated
than I knew how—simplicity
being my mission—my love
for the boy I couldn’t protect
in me back then but vowed
to stay connected to—do you
hear those two-letter words?—
they’re the ones that trip me
up since they removed that
foreign object from my brain
that explains my poetry now—
though it always did—