WRITTEN AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY BOBBY MILLER

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 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

it in Iowa City in the mid 60s and when I was young in NYC and because I was a jazz pianist as a kid, I knew how to get a crowd to quiet down cause that was always the trouble in the new venues we used, because people were jabbering, so I would control the lights. I think Eve videotaped a lot of them which you can see some of them online. We had the podium and a mic and when it was time to begin, and this was in restaurants and clubs with food so people would be eating and clinking dishes and talking, so when it was time for the show I would turn the lights almost all the way out in the room with just a spot on the podium. I’d have a list of the poets and there would be no introductions, no bullshit blowing smoke up your ass stuff. Eve would get up or I would get up and one of us would start the show and the other would end and when the poets would finish their poems they’d just say the name of the next poet to read. We’d read something on the theme and then say a famous actor or a known poet or an unknown one would read and because of the Hollywood people it would be standing room only. Some people would come just to read, others to show off and perform thinking there might be some movie or TV producer in the audience. So I would say look , I don’t give a shit if the page is blank, you go up there with a piece of paper and look like you’re reading off it because this is about poetry not about your performance. You ain’t auditioning, you’re reading poetry. One time there was an actor, I can’t remember his name, little darkhaired guy, and he said he wanted to perform and I told him that’s not the way we do it here and he got up and did a performance piece and when he was done I went up to him and said “Listen to me, you ain’t ever gonna be in here again. I asked you not to do that.” It happened a few times.

The main thing was that our weekly poetry readings, Poetry In Motion, got written about all over the world but unfortunately it was often cynically written about . The reporters that were sent from People, Newsweek, Us magazine, The New York Times, The London Times and reporters from Australia, Japan and all the big papers from around the world were into it, but their publishers weren’t. When the stories would come out the reporters would come and apologize to me and Eve and say “ I’m sorry but this is what the editors did.” For instance I think it was Newsweek that titled their article “Whitman Wannabes. The brat pack showed up in Hollywood to read their poetry.” It was that kind of shit. Like one young movie actress read a poem about an abortion she’d had and it had everybody weeping including the reporter. So the stringers would turn in something very poignant and then their editors would distort it. The only ones who didn’t do that interestingly enough was The New York Times. The only thing they got wrong was they had a picture of Hubert Selby Jr and said it was me. He read every week and he loved it. The New York Times actually wrote about how moving it was and how good it was. It was the New Yorker in Talk of the Town, that said “ Poetry hustler Micheal Lally woke up one morning and realized he had a lot of famous friends in Hollywood.” Like I was exploiting them and my answer to this was “ Okay wait a minute. I’m trying to be democratic about poetry and open poetry up to audiences beyond the literary elitist cliques. Trying to bring it out to a broader audience and I’m being attacked because some of the people that read also happen to act in things. That seems to me to be kind of reverse elitism. What I’m doing by inviting them is showing that they are just like everyone else. They were just people who happen to be famous. And they want to write and express themselves. Why not? And some of the poets did the same judgmental thing. Once a famous writer came and read and afterwards stormed off and said “ Don’t ever ask me to come here again, it’s an insult to poetry.” But I thought that some of the famous movie actors who read actually wrote some good poems. Some of the poets in LA were also mad because poetry had disappeared in LA. Coffee house poetry, bar poetry had stopped when I got there in ’82. The LA Times Book Review made an announcement that they weren’t reviewing poetry books any longer. Poets came out and were picketing them. No one was paying attention to poetry any more. Why? And now suddenly poetry was getting publicity worldwide every week.

BM: Do you remember what year you came back to NY to do your events at Tommy Tangs in Soho?

LAL: Late 80s I think. We did that once a month there.

BM: I remember you invited me and I went to the first one. I had at that time Continued on next page...

Book jacket, Photograph by Gus Van Zant

Book jacket, The South Orange Sonnets

I’ve been

heterosexual homosexual bisexual tri-sexual pansexual transsexual multisexual omnisexual prosexual antisexual hypersexual unisexual unsexual sosexual ausexual protosexual neurosexual socialsexual spiritualsexual emosexual psychosexual selfsexual fantasysexual photosexual butchsexual femmesexual genderbendingsexual joysexual sadsexual lolsexual sobsexual morningsexual nightsexual daytimesexual memorysexual nostalgicsexual notnostalgicsexual sensualsexual poetsexual actorsexual moviesexual modelsexual privatesexual publicsexual computersexual phonesexual polymorphousperversesexual pagesexual screensexual oldsexual youngsexual hardsexual softsexual toughsexual gentlesexual permasexual avantsexual radsexual theshitsexual sunsexual moonsexual starsexual superstarsexual ultrasexual egosexual selflesssexual godsexual peoplesexual mesexual shesexual hesexual theysexual themsexual queersexual realsexual

it’s complicated only written a few poems that I liked. Most of my early stuff was bad and I didn’t like it until I went back a few years later and read it again and thought that they were actually pretty good. I remember going to your readings at Tommy Tangs that first time and thinking that there were a lot of young Hollywood there. And some of it was good and some of it was not so good and you came up to me after and asked what I thought and I said “ Looks like a bunch of Hollywood people trying to be poets and by my standards they weren’t my idea of great poets. I also knew that it didn’t mean that just because they were Hollywood actors didn’t mean that they couldn’t write good poetry. I think I said something like “ I write better poetry than that.” And you said “ Good. Well you come next week and read some of your poetry.” So I went home and wrote three poems in pencil and came back the following week and read them. And it was packed because the week before there had been so many famous people there and the word got out and the publicity brought a lot of poets and also some people that just wanted to see stars. But there were really great poets too. And Marc Smith from the Chicago Poetry Slam was there along with Bob Holman and I was invited to read at all the venues that had happened around the Poetry Slam movement. Because of you I didn’t stop doing readings after that for about the next ten years and curated 5 or 6 different venues in Manhattan. I got invited to curate and host a poetry series at a huge nightclub The Tunnel in NY in the basement bar and I told the owner he had to give me a budget to pay poets money because they were charging admission and my perspective was that they were making money so they had to pay the poets. Until that time no one had paid poets except Verbal Abuse at Jackie 60 because Chi Chi Valenti the owner there insisted that poets be paid. No one paid poets to read before that.

LAL: Actually St Marks Poetry Project paid poets then.

BM: Oh did they? I never read there. They never asked me. I complained about not having read there once to Penny Arcade and she said “ Don’t worry about it. You are one of those people who won’t be recognized until after you’re dead.” I said : Oh well that will be something to look forward to.”

LAL: I got that all the time back in the 70s and early 80s. I would do a reading at St Mark’s and other venues and get huge crowds where they would sometimes have to put speakers in the street for the people who couldn’t get in. I wrote a letter to the New York Times saying “ You do reviews of Chamber Music with audiences of 20 people and poets including me are doing readings with crowds of hundreds and you say nothing is happening in poetry.” And they wouldn’t cover it and they wouldn’t respond to my letters. And it bugged the hell out of me. And it got me in trouble with a lot of people because I would get so angry about it. That kind of shit turned me arrogant and angry for a period of my life. In the middle period. In my 40s and 50s I thought I was supposed to be famous by thirty. I didn’t care about money or celebrity I just wanted the respect and recognition for the work, but I’m thinking: What the fuck happened? Some people had said you’re the greatest and time passes and you’re just a middle-aged guy. I think this is true for lots of people, it took getting into my 60s to turn around and say “Oh wait I wanted to be a creative person who made a living by my wits and my talent, and my main art is my poetry that belonged to me personally and maybe improvising on the piano. Actors say other people’s words and I was saying my own words. I got to do it. And someone came over to me after a reading and said ”A poem of yours saved my life when I was going to commit suicide” or “You opened my eyes to poetry and that saved my life”. I got to do that my whole life, and 30 times as of now someone came up to me and said “I’d like to publish a book of your poetry; can you give me a manuscript?” And I got published and I thought what more can you ask for Michael? I had a 9 to 5 job once for less than two years working for the Franklin Library in NY because my son Miles was little and it was just him and me and I needed money. I’d mostly made money with freelance writing of all kinds.

BM: Was this when you were living on Sullivan Street?

LAL: Yes and a few other places we lived downtown and then back on Sullivan Street, having lived with different women and a couple of men So it was about that 9 to 5 job. I didn’t mind doing it because it involved writing and most of it I could do myself. I once edited a newsletter for them that I wrote all the different articles for. But then they wanted me to fire a nice guy who had kids and I asked why, so they could squeeze a couple more bucks out of replacing him. I said no. So I quit.

BM: So when you first came to NY when you were young, who was on the scene reading poetry?

Photograph of Michael Lally by Bobby Miller, 1990s

later a train ride though it was a little more complicated from Jersey then. I would get a bus from the bottom of my street which would take me to Newark where I would transfer to the bus that took me to Manhattan. I was the youngest of seven, the sixth one died so there was a five-year gap between me and my siblings. When the older kids were all in school my mother would take me sometimes to NY during the early part of the day to go to the Paramount to see a matinee or some funkier movie theater that had some type of vaudeville act in between features. She liked that kind of thing. She inspired my desire for performance. She was a cool cool lady. So I knew Manhattan and at about 13 or 14 I started going on my own. I would lie and get away with it because I worked after school every day and on Saturdays. As I got older on Sundays as well. I worked in my father’s home repair business mostly but he didn’t pay me. It was for room and board. So I had to get jobs to make some money. Like busboy and dishwasher. So they would let me go out at night. People were looser in the 40s and 50s. So I would get on the bus to Port Authority, hang out in the village and then get the bus back to go home. I’d come in late and take my shoes off so they wouldn’t know. I lived in the attic with my sisters when I was little and alone when I was a teenager. And to get to the attic you’d have to go through my parents room. And they were tiny rooms, it was a tiny house with tons of people living there. So I would be brushing by my parents bed and of course just as soon as I got in bed I’d hear my father get up. I’d get in trouble. So I was going to Manhattan often.

BM: Can you tell us about your introduction to some of the Beat poets in the village at that time?

I ran into a lot of poets. I’d have mostly indirect contact with them. Diane di Prima who was a great influence on my writing and my life. I adored her and we became friends. I was on the periphery. Corso was a total pain in the ass, so was LeRoi Jones (later changed his name to Amiri Baraka) who were very unkind and unfriendly in my experience. Joel Oppenheimer who was one of the lesser known people at that time a great poet and who started the St. Mark’s Poetry Project was so kind to me. I’d go to readings at The Gaslight Café and the Café Wha sometimes. I was hanging out with jazz guys, black jazz musicians because I would sit down at any piano at any jazz club and start playing and then we’d start talking so I knew a lot of those guys. I met these three older black guys who weren’t jazz musicians but were part of that scene and like pioneers in integrating Greenwich Village in the 50s. Clifford Heard, Dewitt Jennings and Mel Johnson. And I had three brothers their age so I was used to having these three older guys around. They kind of became my new brothers. I met them at a bar called Obies which had posters of plays that had won Obies throughout the bar. I just thought that the guy that owned the bar was named Obie. I was just a seventeen-year-old kid from Jersey. I had this street person with me named Princess who was from one of the islands. One of my black street friends told me that Princess was a dyke but she and I had sex all the time, we hung out. We were sitting in Obies and the three guys showed up and they sat down at the table and started saying shit like “I was at the mosque yesterday and Malcom was saying “Did you kick a white devil today?” “Yeah all these white kids polluting the race.” They kept throwing these jabs at me and finally I stood up and said “Ok Which one of you mothers wants to step outside with me?” And they just burst out laughing. They were all huge guys and I was this skinny kid from Jersey. They said “Sit down kid. We’re just fooling with you.” And then they invited me and Princess to a party and I thought this could be a trick to get me somewhere and beat me up. But I went and of course it was hip as hell with older folks in their 20s, white and black people into mixing which was rare in those days. Generally it was white women with black men in black neighborhoods. But this was in the Village, though even though there were certain types that would beat you up so you had to be careful. But my new three best friends were a part of the scene and knew everybody. As for the black musicians I knew, their take on the Beats reading poetry with music was they didn’t like it be Continued on next page...

Photograph of Michael Lally by Bobby Miller, 1992

cause to them it was like they were stealing thunder from the music which was poetry itself of a different sort. So they didn’t like it when poets would show up and start blabbing on the mic. So I got this prejudice that I wish I hadn’t. That I had all my life. I’d meet really great musicians who would say “ You’re a poet and you play piano?” They’d suggest that we record some music to go with my poetry but I didn’t mix the two. I was a fool. When I first got to LA guys would want to go into the studio with me but I don’t know what I was thinking. I read once with John Densmore from The Doors playing drums behind me. I did a reading once with Ray Manzarek too, at The Vine Street Bar & Grill. He was backing up poetry with piano. We had a rehearsal at his studio in the valley and they went outside to smoke a cigarette and I sat down at the piano and started playing. Ray walked back in and said “Why am I playing keys? You should be playing.” I said “ No no no.” Ray said “ Yes you should be doing some poems accompanying yourself”. So I did a few with him backing me and two accompanying myself. Unfortunately it wasn’t recorded but the crowd went crazy for it. I don’t know why I had such a weird thing about it. I finally did do a CD (Lost Angels) with music in the 90s with my son Miles and some friends of his playing music behind my poems. As for the Beats, Ginsberg to me was just sort of a hustler back in the 1950s when I first was around him, much later we became friends. Seemed a lot of people admired Bill Borroughs who I thought was too cynical and misogynistic and nasty. And Kerouac who I identified with more, him being a Catholic Mystic, which I thought of myself as and son of an immigrant entrepreneur. I identified a lot more with his sentimentality and romanticism which was made fun of. But he was more misogynistic in his relationships. He wouldn’t claim his daughter Jan, who became a friend of mine, until later because he didn’t want his wife sucking child support out of him because it interfered with his writing his great works which was the mentality at the time. We can retrospectively say that was shitty and it was. So I didn’t identify with that part. I did identify with the Jazz influenced prose that was very poetic to me. Ray Bremser wrote a poem about the Jersey Turnpike “vroom vroom ” and that got to me cause it spoke to my teenage jersey working class roots. Even though I was a print junkie and read voraciously I tried to speak and write in a language that could be understood by teenage me and my neighborhood and my clan. I had been bad at languages I studied. But after a cancer operation in 2001, coming out of the anesthesia, my family told me I was using French phrases and German Phrases and Latin phrases and fancy words that I didn’t normally use in conversation. And after my brain operation in 2009 I found that my vocabulary had changed. If I couldn’t think of a word, a simple word I would normally use, my brain would come up with a more highbrow multisyllabic word cause that was all I could think of. I noticed that my vocabulary had broadened in my conversation and my writing because of the changes in my brain. [Although that’s not the case in this interview!]

BM: And when you go back and read your earlier work before that change happened, do you like one better than the other?

LAL: No I like all my work. I’m always amazed. I didn’t like it at a certain point. Like you said about you not liking your early work until you went back and it read it much later. I had a book come out in 1974 called “Rocky dies yellow” which when I first got my copy I wasn’t sure if people would get what I was doing. Then it got a lot of attention. Specially from the New York poetry scene. Like Edwin Denby and John Ashbery and all that crowd who were totally taken with that book. I met Edwin Denby at a party at Kenward Elmslie’s, and he came up to me, and Edwin was like one of these legendary older figures who had mentored Frank O’Hara who had a big impact on me, and said “ You’re Michael Lally. I’ve been wanting to meet the poet behind the mind.” I was just so thrilled, it was like finally somebody is getting it.

BM: It’s so great to be back with you Micheal. Can you catch us up where we left off last month when we first began talking about your wonderful life as a poet, writer & actor. Tell us about how you went from a teenage poet to the beginning of your career.

LAL: In the fall of 1966 I went to the University of Iowa on the GI Bill after I got out of four years in the military and had been married to Lee for two years. I had met a college guy in Spokane while I was there in the service and he got into The Writers Workshop at the U of Iowa and he said “ You should come.” I was living back in Jersey, in South Orange. My mother died and someone needed to stay with my father and all my siblings had their own homes so I was elected but Lee and me didn’t like it. We weren’t happy to be there. I got a job working at a mental institution as a recreational therapist because I played football in high school. I hated it and knew I was going to end up inside. I was identifying with the patients.

So I had these letters from this guy that I had known in Spokane telling me to come out to the Iowa Writers Workshop. He told me I was better than the kids out there. I had already published poetry in magazines. This was ’66. So two weeks before school was to open we got a U Haul van, filled with nothing but art and books and records since that was all we had. So we drive out to Iowa City straight from Jersey, didn’t stop, cause that’s the kind of intense guy I was. So I go to the admissions office and say “I want to get in the writer’s poetry workshop.” And they said “ Well did you apply?” I said “ No, that’s what I’m here for.” “ Well the application period is over. Where did you get your BA from?” I said “ I didn’t.” She said “ Well you can’t get into a graduate workshop without having graduated from somewhere.” So I was like “Look. I’m married. My wife and me are here now. I came all the way out here. I just spent four years in the military. I don’t know about these things, I just heard how great The Poetry Workshop is. I’m just a guy from Jersey trying to get in” She said “well let’s see what we can do.” And she got me into the undergrad-

uate workshop. Once I got into that I applied to work on a BA and MFA at the same time and nobody had done that before. “There’s no rule against that is there?” “No” they said. ”Well see if I can get in.” George Starbuck ran the place. Everybody there was saying my poetry was too raw and unpolished . Which was a complaint I heard a lot throughout my life. Which was a deliberate thing I was going for. But George Starbuck, who was in the Korean war, in the graves outfit identifying bodies, he said “I think a working-class veteran would be good to shake these kids up.” And he was the head of it so he said it was ok, so I got in. And so if I had an A average I could work on both degrees at once. And I had to have part time jobs because Lee was pregnant, she was a telephone operator but, in those days, they would only let you work to a certain point if you were pregnant. So I worked at professor’s homes cleaning windows and doing repairs and I worked in a bookstore which I would take books from at night. Take them home and read them and bring them back the next day. I wouldn’t crack them or get them dirty. In the 50’s there was a cigar shop across the street from my father’s shop that had racks of paperbacks and I knew the man that ran the cigar shop and he would let me take books across the street as long as I didn’t soil them or crack the spine, and then return them. I have books from the 50s that still look brand new because I would always wash my hands before I’d read them and never break the binding. I’d do that in Iowa. People would mention the names of certain writers and I’d say “ I know them”. Then I’d go find their book and read it so I’d know what they were talking about.

After a few months in Iowa, I got radicalized. I wrote a political column for The Daily Iowan and for a bunch of underground papers. In 1968 I ran for Sheriff of Johnson County on the Peace & Freedom ticket. I was kind of politically well known around the Midwest. One week I had five speaking engagements

BM: Did you win?

LAL: No, no. there was no way I could win. I came in second but I converted a lot of people. I did debates with the sitting sheriff in what they called Wallace country, today it would be Trump country in the rural areas. I remember one where I walked out with hair below my shoulders and had patched jeans on and I walked out to an audience of mostly rural farmers and the sheriff had just spoken and he brought pictures that he passed around of demonstrators and cops pushing each other, talking about the protestors being communists. So I walked out and I just stood there for a minute. They’re all staring at me and I’m not saying nothing. So I said “I bet some of you are wondering why I have such long hair and haven’t gotten a haircut. I’ll tell you why. I just spent four years in the military as an enlisted man and on my last day an hour before I was going to be discharged an officer stopped me and told me to get a haircut by the numbers” which meant according to regulations. “And I said “I’m on my way out in an hour” and he said “Well you better come see me after you get your haircut, or you won’t get your discharge.” So I went and got a haircut, came back and he okayed it and I got out. I said to my wife “I’m not going to get my haircut again until I feel like it.” And I haven’t felt like it.” And I felt the whole audience drop their guard! So I started talking and telling them that I come from a family of cops. My Irish immigrant grandfather, my brother, his father-in-law, my brother-in-law, my cousin, another cousin, the boarder that lived in our house. “Before I came here to Iowa I would have thought that everything the sheriff just said before me was true. “These kids are little commies…” and so on. But I’m going to school with these kids. They’re just kids. They’re just regular American kids who are being fed lies about what’s going on in Viet Nam and why we’re there. I’m a 26-year-old veteran and these were 18-year-old kids hipping me to what’s really going on and they were being sent to die in this place halfway around the world for what?” I’d talk like that. And they came up to me afterwards and invite me to their homes saying “You got me thinking.“ One guy, and this was unfortunately the typical attitude, came up to me and said “In world war two we captured some Germans. They spoke some Continued on next page...

I MEANT TO

I meant to put those sixty-three names and email addresses in the BCC blind copy space, not the CC copy space. I meant to

send it to him, not her. I meant to swallow not drool, on the computer, my lap, your sleeve, my arm, the floor, that first edition, in the drawer.

I meant to walk and move with that feline grace someone once said I had, not wobble and stagger like an old wino. I meant to

hit the “y” not the “t” the “h” not the “g” the “b” not the “v”, return not send, amends not amen. I meant to stand up

straight not bend, to sit upright not slouch, to not fall down and get stuck between the couch and a hot pipe that burned my back

like the prolonged sting of a fierce slap. I meant to stay twentynine or forty-nine, not be seventy-nine turning eighty in May this

way, drooling and stumbling and unable to make a fist with my right hand or grasp a utensil in the proper way but

instead need foam additions to the handles for my one or two fingers that can still curl without help. I meant to be

the exception to obviously aging or a long gone legend by now not a bent over drooling old man who still often

feels like a woman inside but I’ll accept what I’m left with for as long as I can and still be grateful for all that I’ve been and am.

(C) 2021 Michael Lally

gibberish but other than that they were like you and me. But the Vietnamese are more like monkeys, don’t you think?” So there were some people you just couldn’t get to. I did better than people expected. Part of my program was to disarm the sheriff’s department and that wasn’t going over well. But I spoke at Quaker conventions and chambers of commerce. I knew how to talk to people.

BM: After the University of Iowa where did you go next?

LAL: I was invited to go lots of places when I graduated in 1969. I wanted to go to Chicago to be with this group called “Rising Up Angry” They had a newspaper I wrote for and were organizing a group of young white greasers against the war and for civil rights. We were aligned with the Panthers and other freedom activists. The head of it, Mike James, wanted me to come up there. Some anti-war activists in Oakland and San Francisco wanted me to come out there and work. Some artist friends in Spain wanted me to move there. Poets in New York like Ted Berrigan said I should come back to New York. But by then Lee was pregnant with our second kid and she knew I sucked at the money thing. She was like “I’m not going anywhere until you have a job wherever we’re going”. And none of those places had offered me a job. Instead I got offered a job as a creative writing teacher at a Catholic girls college called Trinity Collage across the street from Catholic University in DC. So I took the gig to make Lee happy and we moved to DC. We looked for an apartment which was difficult because in those days nobody wanted to rent to a family with a baby or pregnant woman. No babies. So we ended up in a working-class garden apartment in Hyattsville Maryland. There were no gardens, but a very diverse mix of people and we lived there for a few years. Miles was born at Children’s hospital in DC. I had a brother who lived in Hyattsville and was a musician playing gigs at night and also a principal at a local Junior high school. I asked him for some money until I got my first check from the collage where I was teaching and he said “No, but I need a substitute teacher. You can work for your money and I’ll give you an advance.” So I taught Junior High School for a couple of weeks.

BM: So what happened with Lee and you after I first met you in DC in 1970?

LAL: We both went through the transformation from being anti-war activists and civil rights activists to women’s rights activists and gay rights activists. The house we rented in Northwest DC had already turned into a radical anti-Viet war commune, and eventually a feminist and gay rights activists commune. Until the only other man in it left and it became a lesbian feminist commune. Lee was actually reluctant and she didn’t want to be a public figure but other women were always encouraging her to be. She was tough but she was a tiny woman and she was so strong in her spirit. [doesn’t sound like me} And she was so incredibly talented in so many ways, not just poetry but the arts in general. But she became an influence in the feminist movement as I was in the anti-war moment and then we “came out” as gay—even though we were still lovers. I never liked the word bisexual. That implies that there are only two kinds of sex. I say there are as many different kinds of sex as there are opportunities to have sex. Once we were out we got into an open marriage adding lovers of the same gender, and we continued to be lovers. We were trying to create a new world where—as one radical writer put it—“love is more possible.” Lee had basically one other lover, a woman who called herself Atticus. There is an irony in Lee having a female lover named Atticus from “To Kill A Mockingbird“ because when she went back to being with a man he called himself Boo from the same book. So I kind of lived my life by following omens that came in threes in close succession. And there were two omens in a row of Lee lying to me. And the third omen involved a young poet. You introduced me to her on Wisconsin Ave in front of Blimpies. I was with a guy named Randy who was friends with a lover of mine, a Cuban guy named Ramon from the P Street Gallery I think. Randy was visiting from New York and we came out of Blimpies and you were walking with the young poet and you introduced us and said she was staying with a friend in Georgetown further up Wisconsin Avenue who had a town house with a pool and it was a hot night and we all walked up to it and you and Randy immediately stripped and jumped in the pool. And the poet and I were talking and she gave me her number. I posted it in a journal which I have, where I wrote “She’s too young and beautiful,” She was like 20 or 21 and I was like 29 or 30 and I’ve got a wife and kids and it’s too much. And then she walked into The Community Bookstore one day and I was behind the counter so we started talking and she was feeling sad about some guy and I had a lunch break so we went back to her place and I held her in my arms and let her feel bad about the guy and we became friends. And Lee said to me “either you stop being friends with that girl or get out.” And to me that was the third omen. Guess I’m getting out because I liked this person. We were really instant soul mates and we were hitting it off in a deep way. We weren’t lovers at the time, we were just dear friends, and still are. Besides I was still married, even though Lee had a woman in her bed. It was the fall of ’73 and I didn’t want to leave before the holidays were over and upset the kids even more. So I waited and moved out in January or February of ’74. And then I lived on P Street. There was this apartment in a house off Dupont Circle and a little old southern lady opens the door and I say. “I’m looking for an apartment.” And she says “ What’s your sign?” “Gemini ” and she says “Come right in.” She immediately gives me the apartment and told me that she had been an assistant and mistress to an important southern senator for decades and that he had bought her this house so she’d have some income because she had retired from working for him. She rented out the first and second floors and she lived on the third floor. I rented the first floor and had a mattress on the floor and a desk. She came down as I was moving in and said she wanted to paint the first floor. And when she was finished she said “Why don’t you come up to my place”. And then she asked me if I’d like to make love. So I said sure. That was where I was at that time. Into anything and anybody. It all seemed like love to me. So she put a blanket down on the floor and we made love. Afterwards she made me dinner. She was as sweet as she could be. She told me that I didn’t have to do this again if I didn’t want to but if I ever did just to let her know. I said “Thank you!” And by then I was with the poet and we’re in bed one night and there’s a knock on the door. And it's Salt & Pepper, this Costa Rican woman named Ana and the blonde woman that lived on the second floor with her husband. I asked if I could help them and she said “Do you have a cork screw?” I said no , I don’t drink wine. So before they leave they say ”Why don’t you and your friend come up after you’re done and join us and have a drink.” So I got back in bed and asked the poet what she thought and

Bookjacket, The Hollywood Review

she said “Sure, let’s go.“ So we got dressed and went upstairs. When we got up there it was only the two of them and their husbands. So we’re all drinking except me because I had given up alcohol but I got high on some cocaine and pot. So everyone was fading and the husbands and the blonde conked out and then the poet is out and it’s just me and Ana. But nothing happened. Around that time the poet went off to work on a yacht for a year and it broke my heart for a while. Then late one night Ana called me from the apartment of a lesbian couple we were friends with saying they were arguing and her husband would be mad if she went home and woke him up and needed a place to stay. So I said sure come over, but I don’t have sex with married people. So she came over and of course we had sex. I was terrified that her husband was going to come through the door and blow my head off. So she comes to visit me a couple of days later on her lunch break. I told her that I couldn’t be involved with a married woman. So we stayed in touch and I would run into her and her husband at events and the vibe was still there. So she ends up knocking on my door one night and says “Guess what?” “ What?” ” I left my husband and got an apartment right next door.” So we became lovers. Then we talked about moving in together. I had gotten a lot of publicity in DC, the big fish in a small pond thing. But other things were happening. John Ashbery told me he was in love with me. New York was calling. You were there, and Tim Dlugos. So we decided if we were going to move in together let’s just go ahead and move to New York. We moved in May of ’75 so that my kids could come stay for the summer and know where I was living. I had them all summer. When Miles showed up he was saying things like “Boys aren’t any good.” He had all these negative comments about being a male. And then I saw a photo in the feminist DC paper Off Our Backs of the people in the commune and my daughter was there but my son wasn’t. And I was like “What the hell was that about Lee?” I told her that he was getting screwed up and that he needed to live with me. She said “Ok.”. Ana at this point said “if I’m going to raise your kids, I want my own kid.” Well I still wasn’t divorced from Lee yet and I didn’t want another kid yet. So she got a job around the corner and meets a young guy and I saw that and said “Uh oh.” And then she cops to it. She wanted to move back to Costa Rica and have a kid. So she left me for him. It broke my heart. I threw a giant party in a friend’s loft to help me get over it.

BM: That was where I met my wife Aileen ( Ferriday), in the closet at that party. I was going to roll a joint in the closet and there was Aileen hiding from that abusive guy that she had been living with who cut all her beautiful red hair off and stole her grant money from the British Arts Council. I helped her escape from him and then she was deported back to Manchester. I went over there a few years later and married her so she could come back to New York

LAL: Aileen was great, god rest her soul. Which reminds me, I didn’t have anyone steal my grant money from The National Endowment for the Arts, but I did have conservatives in Congress who were trying for the first time to defund the agency, they denounced my second grant saying the NEA supported “pornography” citing my 1974 poem “My Life” as evidence. But it didn’t work because newspapers and TV and radio news shows couldn’t quote the words the congressmen were calling porn, so no-one paid that much attention. The next year they focused on the visual arts and got a much much bigger reaction.

BM: As we come to the end of this interview, is there any one poem that you wrote in this life that you have a great fondness for? Kind of like having a favorite child that you are most proud of? LAL: Some of my favorite poems of my own are long ones, like “My Life” and “Where Do We Belong”—two of which were book-length (“Of” and “March 18, 2003”)—and serial poems like “The South Orange Sonnets” or “The Village Sonnets”, most of which can be found in Another Way To Play: Poems 1960-2017. But usually the poem I “have a great fondness for” and am “most proud of" is a more recent one, so today it’s “I Meant To” written about a month ago. As for advice to young poets, all that comes to mind is: read everything you can get your hands on, go to poetry readings as often as you can, write every day if possible, and don’t expect any reward other than the joy of creating something you feel proud of.

Photograph of Michael Lally by Bobby Miller, 1980s

Thank you Bobby and Michael for this interview!

H

Ode To Spring

Ramps and nettle underfoot trout lily near the rushing brook coltsfoot by the beaten path dandelions push through new grass

Moss and lichen glow and brighten dead fall in the wood all is good

Snowdrop crocus daffodil budding lilac waiting still then when finally in bloom all will stop breath in and swoon

Robin chickadee and sparrow in a dither here and there mallard family back again from who knows where

spring beckons us to breath and see and hear as we are gifted with this miracle but once a year

ELIXIR

Greeting Friends Of Elixir! How welcome spring is after a cold hard winter! Heading out to forage is one of the first things I do when the snow & ice have gone. I also like to do a deep cleaning of my home and take stock of what is still useful and in good working order and what needs to move on. This applies to my body as well. Spring cleaning is the best way to move through the seasonal transition. Spring can bring, congestion, allergies, sluggishness, and a number of other conditions that interfere with our engagement with this beautiful time of year. If you are interested in learning about and would like assistances with your body’s spring cleaning this year contact Elixir at organictearoom@gmail.com or 413-644-8999 for a health & wellness consultation, healing foods cooking instruction, herbal instruction, or to design a cleanse specific to your needs.

It is my passion & my honor to help and guide people to a higher level of wellbeing. www.elixirgb.com

UNFINISHED PROOF 2021, COLLAGE AND ACRYLIC MARK MELLINGER

ABSURDIST ARTIST STATEMENT

My work explores the interconnectedness of Bauhausian sensibilities and Trobriand Island chants. With influences as diverse as Noble Sissle and Shemp Howard, new insights are created from both mundane and transcendant dialogues. Ever since I was a child I have been disturbed by the essential ephemerality of space/time. What starts out as circumlocutory vision soon becomes corrupted into a hegemony of greed, leaving only a sense of ennui and little chance of a new paradigm. As spatial miasmas become transformed through emergent Unabhängigkeitserklärungen, the viewer is left with a catafalque for the prognostication of our future. markmellinger680@gmail.com

the art of mary ann yarmosky

visit and enjoy: maryannyarmoskyeclecticart.com

Deirdre Flynn Sullivan

The Winged Lion and His Golden Dragon

My love is a winged lion Soaring down from clouds Of wind splattered March And I am his masked dragon Calling from a lonely bell tower.

The blue and rose skies Of a painted Venice Awakened our dark passions In the spring moon coupling Of suddenly fierce desires.

Separated by the span of winter We rushed into a curving embrace Above cold peasants on a grey ground We lit the fire of their stories With our acrobatic swoops and dives.

~ Deirdre Flynn Sullivan 2/26/20

VENETIAN MASK: VARIATION: MYTHOS I ~ Deirdre Flynn Sullivan 2019