What I meant was that To Ask For Love moved me more than any book of love poems I've ever read.
When I heard that Mary Beth Hurt had passed, my first instinct was to call poet Ray DiPalma, forgetting he passed years ago. I first knew of her through him, when we were all students at the U of Iowa in the 1960s and her last name was still Supinger (I wrote about this in "The Iowa City Sonnets" section of my last book SAY IT AGAIN).
She was in the theater department and I was a married veteran working on a BA and MFA in poetry (simultaneously) on the GI Bill, after four years in the military. Ray was in the Poetry Workshop too, but also acted in almost every play the theater department put on, which is where I first saw him and was totally impressed.
Mary Beth was an incredibly nice person to me always. Born and raised in Iowa, no matter how many awards her acting garnered her, she never lost that midwestern down-to-earth unpretentiousness. One of my favorite memories is of a day we spent roller skating in Central Park probably in the the early 1980s.
I had done some roller disco skating but never outdoors and it had been a while, but when I arrived at her place she had already made this plan for us, and though I was afraid I might fall on may ass or make a fool of myself in some other way, I didn't. Partly because she didn't make it competitive or in any way about showing off.
As for the photo, here's what I wrote in a post from 2014:
"I have no idea who took the shot, my copy is a slide from which I had this photo made and then scanned it. It's the great film actress Mary Beth Hurt caught reading my book HOLLYWOOD MAGIC. Not sure when, but the book came out in 1982, just after I moved to L.A. and Mary Beth still lived in New York, as I remember it.
I visited her apartment there once when she was dating Kevin Kline, I think, or just afterwards, before she married the director and screenwriter Paul Shrader, and while I was sitting in perhaps that chair, I noticed a big flower pot with a plant in it had words painted on the side and they seemed familiar, so I asked where they were from. She thought I was messing with her but finally realized I wasn't and said they were from a poem of mine [in the book JUST LET ME DO IT].
I no longer remember what they were or which poem, but I remember how happy it made me. I was just at the beginning of the change that would later come from which I would grow into the understanding that it isn't how many people read your work or see your work, or experience your work in whatever way they do, but simply that someone who does, actually gets it. Which Mary Beth did, and for which I am eternally grateful."
The last time I saw her was at a WGA Awards event at The Beverly Hills Hotel where a friend was nominated and invited me along. She wass there with her husband Paul, but we found a spot away from the hubbub to sit and catch up, and though I felt like I'd gone through a thousand changes since we first met so many years ago, and I'd guess she may have felt the same, for me she was just Mary Beth from Marshalltown Iowa, my longtime down-to-earth friend.
Condolences to her family, friends, and fans, of which the latter two I count myself among.
Too many deaths (as always) to comprehend, but wanted to mark the recent passing of poet Tina Darragh. I met her when I started teaching (Modern Lit, Creative Writing etc.) at Trinity College (now University) in the Fall of 1969 in DC, where she was an undergraduate and one of my students. At the time, she was the head of the Young Republicans on campus, but soon moved away from that choice.
Tina reminded me of some of my first generation Irish-American aunts, so I treated her like family. One of my favorite poets at that moment was Francis Ponge and Tina and I got deep into his unique approach to prose poetry (admittedly in English translations from the French). She also helped me and my then wife Lee Lally, and Terence Winch and a few other poets, start a weekly open poetry series, Mass Transit, and Some Of Us Press to publish slim volumes of poetry (chapbooks) by local poets we all agreed on.
She lived for a while in the commune my household turned into, (while she worked as a waitress in a nearby Toddle House) and was a great supporter when I came out as gay (identifying as bi-sexual seeming like a cop-out) and Trinity "let me go." She organized a school-wide strike, but I talked her and others out of it, deciding it was time to move on anyway. She also helped me organize a protest calling for statues of politicians and military men all over DC to be replaced by statues of poets and writers and artists etc. like Gertrude Stein and Billie Holiday.
She had a small press for a while called Dry Imager, and published a side-stapled xeroxed collage art and poetry double book by her (called My First Play, if I remember correctly) and me (called Malenkov Takes Over). She is recognized (but not enough) as one of the pioneers of the "Language Poetry" movement, but her work transcended any categories. She and her creative output were unique.
She remained in the DC area while I moved around the country, but whenever I saw her over the years, I felt the connection we had from the beginning of our friendship and hope she did too.
Condolences to her husband and son and all her family, friends, and fans.
On a perfectly clear Fall day, heading back to
Fort Monmouth, I watched as other cars on
The Garden State Parkway veered onto the
shoulder and stopped, the drivers not getting
out, just sitting there. At the toll booth the man
said The president's been shot. As I drove on,
more cars pulled off the road. I could see their
drivers weeping. Back in the barracks we stayed
in the rec room watching the black and white
TV, tension in the room like static. When they
named Lee Harvey Oswald, I watched the
black guys hold their breath, hoping that meant
redneck, not spade, and every muscle in their
faces relax when he turned out to be white.
[(C) 2018 Michael Lally from Another Way To Play]
couldn't ask for a more insightful understanding of what i intended with this work and the effort that went into creating it:
https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2025/06/jerome-sala-getting-it-right-michael.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawK1S3VleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETE1SWc0dkZlTHhNbTBFVW81AR6Ml7TM_e2b-u3iKSTQXPFCcpTTkoc9kLRLnUmriq0fSlr0ZLM9xDlS6YZ_WQ_aem_C7Z_F_Y_ppTrCXDIEDdjBw
Two new poems of mine in Innisfree Poetry Journal 40. Thanks to editor Greg McBride, and to Terence Winch (who's got great poems in this issue) for connecting us. Check it out:
Not to beat a dead horse, as they used to say when I was a kid about futile actions, but given my present physical and mental limitations, listing all the great things that happened last year, including the publication of many fine books by friends I love, is too challenging, so I'll toot my own horn one last time about the new book of mine published by Beltway Editions in 2024, and express my gratitude to those who noted it by giving it rave reviews on amazon, an entity I oppose but nonetheless the only place I know of where SAY IT AGAIN:An Autobiography In Sonnets was noticed.
On the day after the election I got this in the mail, LOVE, JOE: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard, who, for those who don't know, was a uniquely original artist/writer/poet/collaborator and also one of the loves, and lovers, of my life. It helped my mood immensely.
Ever since I was a child in the 1940s, during and after WWII, I have found my solace in the arts, where the creative endeavors of others, as well as my own, have found ways to open my heart to the infinite possibilities of life. Everything Joe Brainard created, did that for me. And still does.
I remember (the title of Joe's autobiographical masterpiece) the thrill of seeing an envelope in the mail with Joe's distinct all caps lettering (see the cover of the book). His sometimes rambling thoughts and observations and enclosed drawings or magazine photos (and in the case of me and a few others, his sexual fantasies (I know, you're shocked)) always seemed like rare treats to me.
Daniel Kane has done a fantastic job of editing, choosing to group letters by addressee chronologically, so that you get the scope of each relationship amid echoes of events and gossip, which is like a full immersion into Joe's life and work and world (and wisdom), and his triumphs and struggles with it all.
Not everyone's "cup of tea" (as Joe might put it, i.e. in quotes), but if you already love Joe's work (if unfamiliar, read I REMEMBER) I think you'll love LOVE, JOE. And for me, love is always the answer.
[I'll only be there on video, and my reading includes graphic sex so be forewarned]
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I just learned that it was recently Coming Out day (who designates these days and months dedicated to categories of humans?) ao belatedly here's a cover photo of me at 29 in DC in early 1972 when I 'came out' as gay because calling myself bi-sexual would have spared me a lot of the oppression suffered by gay men in The Gay Liberation Front I became active in at the time, when homosexuality was still considered a mental illness and a crime for which you could be locked up, let alone fired, ostracized, belittled, and attacked.
Plus I felt the term bi-sexual implies there's only two kinds of sexual activity and identity when my experience is that every sexually intimate connection is unique, so the possibilities are incalculable. Later on I used the term 'pansexual' and eventually let all labels go (though I love the term 'fluid' for what I feel). I'm grateful I had the chance to be a part of a movement that made much progress as a result of our activism, though tere's still so much to be done. [SAY IT AGAIN tells the story of how I got to that 'coming out' day]
Two of my favorite poets and people came up from Jersey and Long Island to hang out with me recently: Stella Kamakaris (to my right) and Maria Serrano. Note my right middle finger, permanently stuck at FU (which for me means bless you) for several years now. The universe feckin' with me no doubt.
IT IS AS IF DESIRE (from Hanging Loose Press), the latest book by (full disclosure) my best friend Terence Winch, is a collection of almost sonnets, ten-line poems written for occasions, like birthdays and anniversaries, with Winch's usual playful ease at manipulating formal guardrails and customary wit and wisdom within them, perhaps more subdued (less flashy) than earlier poetry collections (like last year's THAT SHIP HAS SAILED from U of Pittsburgh Press), but as with all Winch endeavors, that is deceptively challenged by the defiance at the heart of his lists of seemingly mundane daily realities, the defiance of a sensibility refusing to give in to the threats and calamities of twenty-first century life and the inevitable passage of the years of that life. As he writes in the poem "Cabbage & Jam" (note how allowing for the pause at the line breaks adds not only resonance to the seeming obvious meaning but multiple meanings):
Between word and meaning, the land
rolls down beyond the hidden arbor
where the clothesline waits in secret
where the cousins line up for the quiz
show and Lotto, where I sit by the phone
and computer expecting any minute
to hear from you, somewhere off
the grid, maybe sick, maybe blue,
how should I know? I just need for you
to call me, baby. Is that so hard to do?
Here's my personal anecdote about poet/writer Hettie Jones. Around 2000 I had recently moved back to the East Coast and ran into Hettie at The Saint Mark's Poetry Project. As too many people know, I can often say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time. I had just read and loved poet/writer Diane di Prima's memoir Recollections Of My Life As A Woman and was raving about it to everyone I saw, like a small group of poets that included Hettie.
In 1960, when I was 18, Diane's "Thirteen Nightmares" had a big impact on me, as did she, and I was grateful to eventually consider her a friend. She was an inspiration to me, and I admired the courage of many of her life choices, one of which was to have a child with LeRoi Jones, as he was then known, who also had a huge impact on me back then. At the time LeRoi (later to become Amiri Baraka) already had two children with his then wife, Hettie.
Hettie's best known book was her own memoir How I Became Hettie Jones, which tells the story of their marriage. I wasn't thinking of any of that as I praised Diane's memoir, though everyone else was so they weren't surprised when Hettie walked away in a huff. In the following years whenever I ran into Hettie, at readings we both were part of, or events for Hanging Loose Press, who published books by us, she was always her dynamic and impressive self while I worried if she was as happy to see me as I was her.
She was admired and beloved by many, including me, and will be sorely missed. Rest In Poetry, Hettie.
[PS: Anyone interested in The Beat era should read both these excellent memoirs.]
To see why Geoff Young is one of my favorite poets (and people), check out these Youngian sonnets:
SAY IT AGAIN An Autobiography In Sonnets, my latest book, came out this year, 2024, and now the year is half over and as far ss I know there haven't been any reviews or even mentions in publications that pay any attention to poetry. But there have been (as pointed out by friends) some amazing reviews on Amazon, for which I am totally grateful.
This book is the result of decades of work and according to some readers is as easy to read as watching a movie. In this case a documentary about how the impact of music, poetry, art, culture, politics, and life experience changed a working-class ethnic wannabe tough guy into an anti-war, civil rights, feminist gay liberation activist.
If you haven't read it yet, give it a shot. If you have and you enjoyed it, spread the word however you can. Not just for me, but for Beltway Editions, the small press that published it (and may then publish the sequels in the future). And for all the creative souls that pour their hearts and hard work into something hopefully meaningful.
Years ago, poet and dear friend Don Yorty filmed me in my then Jersey apartment home reading my poem tribute to my long gone father, called SPORTS HEROES COPS AND LACE. I wanted to repost it here, but my infirmities makes figuring out how to do that and then doing it extremely challenging (I've had to correct my mostly one-finger typing while writing this again and again etc.). It's on Vimeo, if anybody would like to hear it.
Before Frank published his classic memoir ANGELA'S ASHES, I saw them both perform in the original version of that story, each playing multiple roles of the people in their Irish childhood, including women in kerchiefs and shawls, in a church basement to a small audience. Malachy later published his own memoir, A MONK SWIMMING, which came out around the same time as my poetry collection CANT BE WRONG, in the late '90s. We did a reading for the books in a San Francisco bar and restaurant. That's a photo of us with our friend the writer/scholar, and long gone Dan Cassidy (me with Dan on my left and Malachy my right).
Then two poet/scholars I knew passed, Jerome Rothenberg and David Shapiro. Jerome had a great impact on my generation of poets with his anthologies of world poetry focusing on the work of indigenous peoples. His own poetry impactful as well. When my SOUTH ORANGE SONNETS first came out in 1972, he sent me a postcard praising them (in my archives at NYU). He was a kind and gracious person.
David Shapiro had an impact on our generation as well. We were both Jersey boys, but from such different backgrounds I was sometimes a bit chip--on-my-shoulder confrontational with him. He had the kind of articulate wit I didn't, and early success as a teen in the poetry world where he was admired as a "poet's poet" and in the academic world. But in the end we had much more in common than our home state and poetry (and music, him classical me jazz), including Parkinson's which he suffered from for many years with a kind of acceptance and even nobility which I can only aspire to.
And most recently Tom Bower, an actor I knew and greatly admired, and could fairly be called an "actor's actor" if he hasn't been already. You may not know his name but you've most likely seen him in a movie or on TV. In my encounters with him, he was always so easy to get along with, both humble and grounded, never arrogant or self-centered as I could often be back in the day. I liked him and hoped he liked me.
May all of the above Rest In Prose, Poetry, Performance, and Peace.
