CAUGHT READING (PART FOUR)

me reading the NY Times with our then dog Bridey and my youngest son Flynn, Father's Day in New Jersey 2005 [photo by Jamie Rose] 

my grandson Donovan and my youngest child Flynn in Great Barrington MA c. 2006

me reading a poem at a Hollywood themed reading at Bob Holman's Bowery Poetry Club (that's Claire Danes to my right) NYC c. 2008?

my oldest son Miles reading a poem? at my 70th birthday celebration in Great Barrington MA 2012

my oldest child Caitlin reading a poem? to me on my 70th in Great Barrington MA 2012

my friend Bill Lannigan reading a poem he wrote for my 70th in Great Barrington MA

poet and friend Susan Hayden caught reading in LA c.?

me reading a poem at The Cutting Room, I think, in NYC c. 2014

my friend John Restivo sent me this photo of him reading my then latest book on a train in 2015

ANOTHER LIST

As I've written of before, I ws a compulsive list maker all my life until a brain operation in 2009. I made lists in my head from the minute I woke up to the minute I fell asleep, usually using lists to fall asleep or fall back asleep.

I made lists of favorite movies and books and poems and people and so on, sometimes creating rules for them that made them extra challenging, like listing movies with five-syllable titles, or one, with each title beginning with a different letter of the alphabet, from A to Z.

Or I'd make little trinities, or triplets, that had some connection or submitted to some basic criterion... or I'd make list poems, or poems of lists.... And then after the brain operation I had no desire to make lists, and when I tried to force myself to, I'd get two things down and then lose interest.

But last night when I was falling asleep, I started to make a list of couplets made up of the poets and their poetry books that influenced me as a young poet and got to ten items relatively easily and thought, maybe it's coming back. So in the morning I wrote them down and added a few more for good measure.

Not earth shattering, but pretty sweet to have this comforting habit perhaps returning.

Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

Emily Dickinson’s The Complete Poems

William Carlos Williams’s Paterson

Jean Toomer’s Cane

Charles Reznikoff’s By The Waters Of Manhattan

Louis Zukofsky’s A

Blaise Cendrars’ Selected Writings (New Directions 1962)

Muriel Rukeyser’s Selected Poems (the first New Directions version)

Diane diPrima’s Dinners & Nightmares

Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems

Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues

Gary Snyder’s Rip Rap

John Ashbery’s Three Poems

James Schuyler’s The Crystal Lithium

Etheridge Knight’s Poems From Prison

Joanne Kyger’s Places To Go

QUOTE WORTH SHARING

REMEMBERING FRED HAMPTON'S 1969 ASSASINATION

This is a sonnet I wrote that's part of an unpublished manuscript and I thought I'd post on this, the anniversary of Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton's assassination on December 4th 1969. 

In early December Fred Hampton, a young

Chicago Black Panther leader I knew and

dug, was brutally slaughtered along with

Panther Mark Clark, when police raided

Hampton’s crib, after firing hundreds of

bullets into it, and into him, asleep in his

bed. It was the last straw. I’d objected to

Panthers calling police pigs, thinking of

cops in my clan who were decent, but this

time it seemed insulting to the actual pigs.

I wrote a poem called DON’T LOOK NOW

with the end couplet: like this short ugly

knife you are mine/Black Panther Fred

Hampton murdered in bed by pigs 1969.  


—(C) Michael Lally 2017

SOONER OR SOONER

TANGERINE

Finally saw TANGERINE, the first movie made by the team that made one of the best films of this year: THE FLORIDA PROJECT. Sean Baker directed and co-wrote, with Chris Bergach, both films. And the extraordinary, and by now well known, fact about TANGERINE is that it was shot on iPhone 5s. And with what looked like at least some first-time actors.

But the writing, directing, editing and camera work (some of the shots are framed and lit better than multi-million dollar movies) make up for any initial doubts about the acting from the two transgender leads—Kitana Kiki Rodriquez and Mya Taylor. A superb little film. I can see why everyone was touting it when it came out in 2015.

If you haven't seen it, do.

AIDS DAY

Here's a poem I wrote to my friend and sometime lover in 1972, Greg Millard, who was one of the early casualties of AIDS...thinking today of him and Tim Dlugos and Joe Brainard and Cookie Mueller and so many more I loved who were casualties in that epidemic:

WATCHING YOU WALK AWAY

For Greg Millard

Today

your back, cocked hat, thick clothes for cold

the way you turned around to look again for

what? It wasn’t there last night

We were there, ‘it’ wasnt, why,     why not

The world is all around us, even at night, in bed

in each others arms

distilled & injected into the odor we leave on each others

backs & thighs, between the knots & shields of all we lay

down in the dark to pick up in the morning

I like your brown eyes when you talk

you know who you are, I like your knowing this

maybe that’s not enough

Let’s talk, go to plays, see each other sometimes just to

see each other

If we lie down in each others bodies again

let it be for the music we hold

not the music we might make


(C) Michael Lally 1972