DAVE MORICE R.I.P.

 

Poet and wordplay genius Dave Morice was a one of a kind, and one kind, person. He arrived in Iowa City (where he became an iconic presence) in 1969, as I was leaving, so except for a few visits over the years, we mostly knew each other through correspondence and poetry.

 Look him  up to see how unique he and his work were, which I am grateful to have been a small part of (e.g. his poetry comics, where he illustrated lines of classic and contemporary poetry).

I just want to say as a person who always thought I was the smartest in whatever room I was in when I was younger (from childhood to my fifties!) and sought out people who thought they were, I could be challenging, but I never felt judged or unappreciated by him. I suspect everyone who knew him would say the same.

Rest In Poetry, Dave.

LOVE, JOE

[I'll only be there on video, and my reading includes graphic sex  so be forewarned] 

Love, Joe – an evening celebrating the publication of Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard Wednesday | 10/30 | 7:30pm reception, 8pm event | The Parish Hall @ St Mark's Church

Please join us for an evening celebrating the publication of Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard, edited by Daniel Kane. Joe Brainard was one of the most distinctive figures on New York City’s vibrant cultural scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Widely known for his influential experimental memoir, I Remember, Brainard worked in a variety of forms, from New-York-School-aligned poetry to Pop-Art-adjacent artworks, including wild riffs on the comic strip character Nancy. Love, Joe presents a selection of Brainard’s letters that stretch from 1959 to 1993 addressed to artists and friends such as John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Fairfield Porter, Bernadette Mayer, James Schuyler, Alex Katz, and Andy Warhol. The letters, edited and annotated by Daniel Kane, allow readers to witness an extraordinarily fertile moment in New York’s history, when literary and visual arts intersected with happenings, proto-punk and psychedelic rock concerts, and experimental music and dance performances. The evening will include readings by Tyhe Cooper, Kyle Dacuyan, Heather Denton, Mike Funk, Brad Gooch, Vincent Katz, Michael Lally, Ann Lauterbach, Keith McDermott, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, and Nicole Wallace. We hope you can join us at 7:30pm for a reception before the event. This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel.

TICKETS

Daniel Kane's publications include All Poets Welcome: the Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (2003), We Saw the Light: Conversations between the New American Cinema and Poetry (2009), and Do You Have a Band? Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City (2017). He lives in Copenhagen and teaches American literature at Uppsala University in Sweden.

PAUL AUSTER R.I.P.

 

We met in 1970s NYC, and discovered we grew up in the same town in Jersey but on different sides of it, and at slightly different times (he's five years younger). Despite my sometimes arrogant persona, he seemed always friendly and tolerant and a little amused by my relentless attempts to share the truth I thought only I could decipher.

I liked him, his writing, and like everyone else, his sexy smokey eyes. My favorite book is his INVENTION OF SOLITUDE, maybe because he writes about the town that made us homeboys of sorts, but with two distinctly different perspectives. Grateful to have known him. Condolences to his family, friends, and many fans.

BREATH CONTROL 12/80

So grateful that John Newt sent me this recording of me in my prime (1980, at 38) reading some of my poems and a story, demonstrating the breath control I learned from studying Frank Sinatra's and John Coltrane's techniques. 

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[archiveorg mma222-01 width=640 height=60 frameborder=0 webkitallowfullscreen=true mozallowfullscreen=true]

'NOTHER LIST

For some reason woke up with a list forming in my mind of my ten top favorite authors sixty years ago when I was 21 in 1963! Here they are in no particular order:

Diane di Prima

Bob Kaufman

James Baldwin

LeRoi Jones (later became Amira Baraka)

Walt Whitman

James Joyce

Fydor Dostoevsky

William Goldman

Jack Kerouac

Lilllian Smith

PERSONAL SAINTS

Woke up this morning to a text from a fiend with a photo of Father Mike Judge, the Franciscan chaplain to a NYC fire brigade who died at Ground Zero on 9/11 and who we knew. I replied with the single word SAINT. Which then led my mind to generate an alphabetical list of dead folk who are personal saints in any world, or heaven, I have a say over (i.e. in my heart):

SAINT ANNE FRANK

SAINT ANTHONY (DINOVI)

SAINT AUNT MARY (LALLY)

SAINT BASQUIAT (JEAN-MICHEL)

SAINT BERRY (BERENSON)

SAINT BILLIE (HOLIDAY)

SAINT BIRD (CHARLIE PARKER)

SAINT CAL (JOHNSON)

SAINT CANDY (DARLING)

SAINT CAMPION "TOMMY" LALLY

SAINT  CLIFFORD ("CLYDE" HEARD)

SAINT COOKIE (MUELLER)

SAINT DIANE (DI PRIMA)

SAINT DOLPHY (ERIC)

SAINT DOROTHY (DAY)

SAINT DOUG (LANG)

SAINT DOUGIE (STEINDORFF)

SAINT ED (COX)

SAINT ELIO (SCHNEEMAN)

SAINT EMILY (DICKINSON)

SAINT EVA (HESSE)

SAINT FANNIE (LOU HAMER)

SAINT FRANK (O'HARA)

SAINT FRED (HAMPTON)

SAINT GRACIE (ALLEN)

SAINT HARPO (MARX)

SAINT IRENE (DEMPSEY LALLY)

SAINT JACK (KEROUAC)

SAINT JIMMI (HENDRIX)

SAINT JIMMY (SCHUYLER)

SAINT JOAN B. (BARIBEAULT) 

SAINT JOAN G. (LALLY GLOSHINSKI)

SAINT JOAN R. ("BAMBI" ROBINSON)

SAINT JOE (BRAINARD)

SAINT KENNY (GRAHAM)

SAINT LEE (FISHER LALLY)

SAINT LEWIS (WARSH)

SAIINT LOUIS (ARMSTRONG)

SAINT MALCOLM (X)

SAINT MARILYN (MONROE)

SAINT MARSHA (P. JOHNSON)

SAINT MARTIN (LUTHER KING)

SAINT MCCARTHY (JOHN)

SAINT MEL (JOHNSON)

SAINT MIKE (JUDGE)

SAINT NATALIE (WOOD)

SAINT NORMAN (LEAR)

SAINT OTIS (REDDING)

SAINT "PRES" (LESTER YOUNG)

SAINT ROSE (MCBRIDE LALLY)

SAINT SELBY (HUBERT JR.)

SAINT SIMONE (SIGNORET)

SAINT SISSY (JOHNSON)

SAINT TED (BERRIGAN)

SAINT TIM (DLUGOS)

SAINT 'TRANE (JOHN COLTRANE)

SAINT UNCLE JOHN (LALLY)

SAINT VERONICA (LAKE)

SAINT WALT (WHITMAN)

SAINT WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

SAINT WILLY (FARRELL)

SAINT YVONNE (DE LA VEGA)

There are more in my head but I can't get them out. How 'bout yours?

WOMEN'S HERSTORY

Women's History Month ended yesterday so here's a list of some women heroes of mine:

Helen Keller

Eleanor Roosevelt

Dorothy Day

Martha Gelhorn

Frida Kahlo

Katherine Hepburn

Theresa Harris

Barbara Stanwyck

Billie Holiday

Ella Fitzgerald

Ingrid Bergman

Ida Lupino

Marilyn Monroe

Dorothy Dandridge

Simon Signoret

Anita O'Day

Kate Chopin

Zora Neale Hurston

Gertrude Stein

Anais Nin

Muriel Rukeyser

Diane di Prima

Mary Wells

Abbey Lincoln

Barbra Streisand

Jean Seberg

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Nevelson

Nikki Giovanni

Audre Lourde

Lee Lally

Sylvia Schuster

Angela Davis

Robin Morgan

Gloria Steinem

Shirley Chisholm

Bernadette Devlin

Bernadette Dohrn

Bernadette Mayer

Barbara Guest

Jane Freilicher

Donna Dennis

Eva Hesse

Patti Smith

Sara Rudner

Maureen Owen

Elaine Equi

Nan Goldin

Cookie Mueller

Jan Kerouac

Joanne Kyger

Bobbie Louise Hawkins

Cecilia Vicuna

Joanelle Romero

Karen Allen

Sharon Stone

Edie Baskin

Lynne Goldsmith

Susan Campbell

Annabel Lee

Eileen Myles

Elinor Nauen

Maggie Dubris

Sally Silvers

Susan Bee

Rhonda Haines

Marlee Matlin

Eve Brandstein

Anne Beatts

Wanda Coleman

Susan Dey

Laverne Cox

Janet Mock

Yvonne de la Vega

Nana-Ama Danquah

Mello-Re Houston

Susan Hayden

Patricia Spear Jones

Angela Lockhart

Nadia Owusu

Maria Serrano

Stella Keating

Mindy Thompson Fullilove

Caitlin Clark 

Caitlin Lally Hotaling

[what came to me off the top of my head going back through my life, so many more I'm forgetting in this moment]

RUSSELL BANKS & CHARLES SIMIC R.I.P.

 

I knew Russell Banks and Charles Simic in the 1960s and early '70s. We were all little magazine and small press poets and writers and Russell had yet to have a book out when we met. I was on literary and small press writers panels with each of them back then and ran into them at conferences and readings. I liked them both and appreciated their writing but found them more guarded in their reactions to my no-filter revelations and rants. They were good friends to each other and it seems appropriate that they died within days of each other. Rest In Poetry and Prose and condolences to your families, friends, and fans.  

ANOTHER LIST!

In the  mid-1970s, I was a single parent living with my first son (later his sister joined us) on the third floor of a three story federal building on Sullivan Street in what was beginning to become Soho when my second floor neighbor and friend, Denise Bratton, moved out and left me this already antique Art Deco kitchen table (and four matching chairs that long ago fell apart) and it's been with me ever since.

Almost a century old and half a century with me I felt inspired to list just some of the people who have gathered around it in my many homes then and since:

Caitlin Lally (now Hotaling)

Miles Lally

Ana Ross-Gongora

Lee Lally

Irene Lally Koch

Jimmy Lally

Cal Johnson

Sissie Johnson

Etheridge Knight

Tim Dlugos

Ray DiPalma

Elizabeth DiPalma

Jane DeLynn

Sylvia Schuster

Marty Brandel 

Bruce Andrews

Joe Brainard 

Johnn Ashbery

Kenward Elmslie

Edmund White

Terence Winch

Karen Allen

Ted Greenwald

John Godfrey

Jim Brodey

Harris Schiff

Annabel Lee

Rain Worthington

Bill Hellerman

Kiki Smith

Elaine Gill

Steve Levine

Steve Hamilton

Alfred Milanese

Kathy Acker

Jimmy Fouratt

Eileen Myles

Edie Baskin

John McCarthy

J. J. Mitchell

Beate Nielson

John Yau

Charles Bernstein

Paul Violi

Irma Towle

Susan Rothenberg

Udo Breger

Bill Sullivan

Richard Andersen

Simon Pettet

Nathan Whiting

Charles Walsh

Emil Schneeman

Elio Schneeman

Leslie Greene

Cookie Mueller

Max Blagg

Mac Wellman

Robert Slater

Fr. Campion (Tommy) Lally

Susan Wechsler

Elinor Nauen

Maggie Dubris 

Susan Seidelman

Penelope Milford

Aileen

Bobby Miller

Beverly D'Angelo

Diane Lawrence

Mary Waranov

Dennis Christopher

Don Johnson

Ralph Bakshi

Rutger Hauer

Rob Cohen

Dale Herd

Lewis MacAdams

Ed Begley Jr.

Brad Davis

Helen Shaver

Melanie Mayron

Michael O'Keefe

Mike Binder

Jamie Rose

Tom Wilson

Joan Baribeault

Blaine Lourde

Jim Keefe

Jimmy "Buddy" Lally 

Catherine Audia Lally

Nathan Stein

Albie Selznick

Winston Jones

Bill Mohr

Rhonda Talbot 

Kale Brown

Eric Trules

Zalman King

Alec Baldwin

Lycia Naff

Neith Hunter

Kim Williams

Terre Bridgham

Jerome Sala

Elaine Equi

Aram Saroyan

Eve Branstein

Susan Hayden

Bonnie Raitt

Sharon Stone

Jeff Kobar

Walter Koch

Russel Kesterton

Carl Koch

Ty Granderson Jones

Michael DesBarres

Pamela DesBarres

Patti D'Arbanville

Stephen "Rocky" Bauer 

Peter Case

Flo Lawrence

Yvonne de la Vega

Ramona Wilson

Nick Brown

Hubert Selby Jr.

Katy Sagal

Lyndall Hobbs

John Bailey

Carol Littleton

David Milch

Rita Stern Milch

Sarah Jessica Parker

Beth Grant

Paul Harryn

Michael Chieffo

Jenifer Baxandale

Crystal 

Jaina Flynn

Flynn Lally

Michael Harris

Meg Foster

Bill Lannigan

Katy Lannigan

Marshall Norstein

Elaine Durbach

Billy Lally

Robert Lally

Sis Fennesy Lally

Naomi Greene

Donovan Lally

Ed Hotaling

Deak Hotaling

Hannah Bracken

Janet Kirker

Jeff Coleman

Sue Brennan

Stephanie Hoeler

Jim Coleman

Stefan Wrembel

Jeanne Donohue

Will Robinson

Abi Teixteira

Gwyn Kruger 

Nela Hadzic

Odell

Mim Kohn

Nance Boylan

Steve Adams

Spenser Parker

Mick O'Malley

Suzanna Caperos

Lisa Dugan

Amber Daniel

Maria Serrano

Stella Keating

Josee Funes

Marilyn Mohr

Karen Hubbard

Pina Pipina

Susan Napack

Phillipa Scott

Maryann Seibert

Angela Lockhart Aranoff

Mindy Thompson Fullilove

Beth Boily

Laura Booker

Boo Trumble

Rachel Diken

Geoff Young

Perry Ostrin

Brendan O'Connell

[This is who came to mind as I went back over the places i lived in NYC, Santa Monica, Maplewood NJ, and now Hillsdale NY...I know I'm forgetting folks so please forgive my 80-year-old Parkinson's brain...I could have checked my mailing address thing or FB friend list, but I did my best without prompts...feel free to add to it if this table rings a bell for you...]

+ John Restivo, Vivian Bresnitz, Anselm Hollo, Bob Holman, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Jeff Wine, John Voight, Chris Coreshi, Raven Chaney, Mike Graham, Mello-Re Houston, Michael Andre, Kenneth Koch, Willie Farrell, Mark Ebner, Patrice Lally Pniewski, Michele Lally Doyle, Jennifer Lally Fondots, Kim Collins, Kevin McCollister, Magdalen Powers, Paul Abruzzo, Dick Lourie, Ron Schriber, Simon Schuchat, Don Yorty, Norman  Scriviner,  Matt Hauser, Grace Cavalieri, David Hilton, Joanne Hilton Dahlgren, Sandy Bull, Buddy Arnold, John Getz, Ingrid Bolting, Chloe Chandler, Luloo Flynn Mann, Evan Mann, Isabella DesPosito, Doug Milford, Theresa Burns, Jim Bracken, Kathy Bracken, Ate de Jong, Julian Neal, Sophie Charlip. 

DOUG LANG R.I.P.

 

I've posted these photos before of poets Terence Winch, Doug Lang, and me in DC in the late 1970s and 2018 (Doug's the only one with facial hair in the early shot). He was born and raised in Wales. I first knew of him from his 1973 end-of-the-'60s paperback novel, FREAKS, that he always seemed embarrassed by but I dug and still have. The rest of his output was poetry as original and impressive as anyone's of our rapidly diminishing generation (type in his name on my blog LALLY'S ALLEY, to find posts I've written about his work).

He had an encyclopedic knowledge of literature, music, movies, and art, and was always fun to discuss any of that with, even after losing his short term memory in recent years. He often seemed slightly amused, or bemused, by my excited enthusiasm about my own taste in the arts, but in any encounter I always felt the love we had for each other underneath it all. My condolences to all who knew and loved him, especially Terence, Sandra, Phyllis, Bernie, and Susan et al.

GERALD NICOSIA'S MEMORY BABE: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF JACK KEROUAC (THE KEROUAC CENTENNIAL EDITION: NEW & REVISED)

 
Maybe you have to be as intensely compulsive as I am to read a 770-page biography (not counting endnotes etc.) that's an updated and expanded version of an earlier edition that was already a huge book when you read that version decades ago, but I binged read this with enthusiastic joy despite the tragic figure it depicts in more detail and critical appraisal than any other book about Kerouac.

As I say in my blurb for this book, it's "the definitive text" and it is. I may not always agree with Nicosia's critical assessment of each of Kerouac's books (though I mostly do) but I appreciate the thoroughness of his coverage of the writing of each and the life experiences of Kerouac at the time of their creation. If you're like me in digging the details of the creative processes of people whose work you find compelling, then buy this book and settle in for the ride. 

[full disclosure: Gerry and I have become friends since I read the first version of this book, and I recommend starting with the prelude on page 55 and going back to the earlier prefaces later] 

HAPPY B'DAY HOUSTON

 
Me and one of my favorite poets, music makers, and humans: Mello-Re Houston, at my poetry reading at Beyond Baroque in Venice CA in December 2018. Wishing her the happiest of birthdays today, August 25th. I totally identify with her commitment to making her life into her art.

KENWARD ELMSLIE R. I. P.

 
This photo (taken by ?) best captures the way I remember Kenward in the 1970s when we spent a lot  of time at his place or mine for dinners and parties and just hanging out. He was, to me, an exceptionally gentle and generous person. At the time he was the wealthiest human I'd ever been friends with, and I may have been as exotic to him. 

He was a poet/playwright/performer/fiction writer/opera and song lyricist, whose most outrageous work a lot of people didn't get, but I love everything I ever read of his or saw performed. His writing was sometimes compared to the Dadaists of the early 20th Century, and he was also seen as part of the first generation of "New York School" poets who were all his friends.

His most accessible writing (though it all seems accessible to me, if you can surrender to its own logic) were lyrics for an opera about Lizzie Borden and the "only song" he wrote lyrics to that "ever made it to a juke box" as he told me, called "Love-wise"–but the writing that impacted me the most was his short fiction collection:The Orchid Stories.

Last time I saw him, I thanked him for all his kindnesses to me and as always he seemed embarrassed by my gratitude, but also touched by it. I'm still grateful.

DAY AFTER BLOOMSDAY QUOTES

"...as he walked down the avenue and felt the gray morning light falling about him through the dripping trees and smelt the strange wild smell of  the wet leaves and bark, his soul was loosed of her miseries." —James Joyce (from Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man)

"Are you right there, Michael, are you right? Do you think you can hold on by sitting tight?" —James Joyce (from Finnegans Wake) 

FOR THOSE OF US WHO

 

DALE HERD'S DREAMLAND COURT

 
Back in the early 20th Century there was a lot of talk in the literary world about "The Great American Novel." Some thought it had already been written in the previous century (e.g. Moby Dick) or claimed newer titles (e.g. The Great Gatsby) or midcentury (e.g. Invisible Man) or later ones (e.g. Beloved). In this century it seems like the absurd game it always was and who cares anyway.

But if we were still playing, I'd throw Dale Herd's Dreamland Court into the mix along with the examples cited above and others. A series of mostly overlapping monologues by a varied crew of smalltime drug dealers and thieves and general fuckups and their partners and lovers and spouses and friends, Dreamland Court may not sound inviting, but once you've met them and been drawn into their stories by Herd's original styling and eye and ear for character, you're hooked, 

Reading Dreamland Court is like watching one of those streaming series that you can't help binging on because you want to see what happens to these uniquely distinct individuals that you've come to know so intimately. Someone once wrote about Hubert Selby's achievement in his novel Last Exit To Brooklyn being that he got readers to care about the "lowlifes" he was writing about. In Dreamland Court the characters themselves seem to write themselves and their stories into existence, and so authentically they continue to live in my consciousness long after I reached the end of the book, which I was sorry to.

SOME OLD FAVORITE QUOTES (HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY JACK)

 from The Scripture of The Golden Eternity:

"While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light."

"...it's impossible to miss your reward."



from a letter to Don Allen, Fall 1957:

"I have been writing my heart out all my life..." 

"I would like everybody in the world to tell his full life confession and tell it HIS OWN WAY and then we'd have something to read in our old age, instead of the hesitations and cavilings of 'men of letters' with blear faces who only alter words that the Angel brought them...."



from Vanity of Dolouz:

"...all life is but a skull bone and a rack of ribs through which we keep passing food and fuel just so's we can burn so furious (tho not so beautiful)..."

"If you don't say what you want, what's the sense of writing?"

"—who's going to come out and say that the mind of nature is intrinsically insane and vicious forever?



from Visions of Cody:

"(but I've known the world, it's all happened before, why do I kid myself with these artificial newnesses)"

"—I must write down books too, story-novels, and communicate to people instead of just appeasing my lone soul with a record of it—but this record is my joy."

"All you do is head straight for the grave, a face just covers a skull awhile. Stretch that skull-cover and smile."

"Time is the purest and cheapest form of doom."



from Visions of Gerard:

"My heart is where it belongs."

PS:

Here's another list off the top of my head of ten more personal "Black History Month" icons, these not as famous maybe but all have inspired me, and many others, and I'm lucky to call all of them friends (as I do two previously posted about personal "Black icons" Quincey Troupe and Etheridge Knight):

Nana-Ama Danquah

Mindy Thompson Fullilove

Mello-Re Houston

Angela Lockhart Aronoff

Nadia Owusu

Patricia Spears Jones

Wanda Phipps

Wanda Coleman

Ty Granderson Jones

Lorenzo Thomas

[there are more but these were

the first ten to come to mind]

NEW INTERVIEW

The digital version of the March issue of The Artful Mind, a Berkshires arts publication, with a cover photo of me by longtime dear friend photographer/poet Bobby Miller, and inside more photos of me by Bobby and a recent interview he did of me, and two recent poems of mine, is now online and here's the link (the hard copy comes out March 1st).

SEASON'S GREETINGS

Part of one of my many yet to be organized bookcases (photo by Hannah Bracken).

[click on photo to read]