Photograph by Bobby Miller
MICHAEL LALLY Interview by Bobby Miller
A friend for over fifty years and finally I got the opportunity to interview him. Bobby Miller: Michael, you have had such a long and prosperous career as a poet, writer and actor. I hardly know where to start. Let’s just jump into any decade and see where this takes us. May I suggest we start in Hollywood. Michael Lally: In the mid-1980s I organized a group poetry reading as a fundraiser for a rights activist organization at Helena Kallianiotes’s night club, and she introduced me to Eve Brandstein to help me with a weekly poetry reading she wanted us to do at the club. Helena’s was on Temple Street in East LA, not in an area you would usually go to for nightlife but that’s why they could afford a big space. It had a big dance floor and a restaurant area with tables. So we’d set up in the corner near the tables and they wouldn’t play music and we did that once a week. My format for poetry readings went back to the Mass Transit days in DC late 60s and early 70s. My format was always let people read for 5 minutes or less. So if people didn’t like what they were hearing all they had to do was wait. So for Helena’s I’d get ten to fifteen people to read their poetry, and because it was a weekly event in order to generate material Eve & I would come up with a theme and people would write on that theme. And because I was living in Hollywood working in movies & TV 16 • MARCH 2022 THE ARTFUL MIND
as a writer & an actor I knew a lot of show biz folks and met others through my second wife Penny ( Milford) and through other friends like Karen (Allen). I would invite people to read and some people would ask if they could read, and if someone was an actor not known for their poetry, I would ask to see some of their stuff. And if they wrote something on a theme they’d run it by me and maybe I’d give them a little editorial help on it, maybe not depending on who it was. Some of them were just good poets. Period. So what happened was it became a thing. Helena’s was one of those clubs where you had to get through the door with the doorman and the line and the velvet rope and I always hated that. I hated any kind of elitism. So I said to Helena, if I’m going to do this then it’s got to be open to anybody on the nights we have poetry and she agreed. Eventually she lost control of the club and we had to move. She wanted it to end with her, but we said no, we were having too much fun. We were having a ball and people were really digging it, so we decided to find another venue. We switched the name to Poetry in Motion and started moving around ending up at Largo when it opened, helping bring in overflowing audiences. We did it for about eight years and one of the things that happened was these young actors would come who were friends of mine or Eve’s and had been labeled part of “The Brat Pack”. I had a stipulation about it being a poetry reading not a performance event, that caused me some trouble with some people. We had a podium that someone built for us. And I knew enough from doing this since the 60s. One of the first big events that I did was in DC, at the P Street Beach it was a rock & roll show against the Vietnam war and poetry was a part of it. I had been doing
