After retiring from teaching, it would have been easy for poet Lee Mallory to stay at his Southern California beach-town home and bask in his well-established local reputation while penning the occasional free-verse love poem.
Instead, he moved to Las Vegas a year ago and is trying to reinvigorate the poetry community.
In the time he’s been here, he has already performed his poems at coffeehouses, bars and even a casino.
“I want to bring poetry to the people — it’s my passion,” Mallory said. “I want to shatter the stereotype that poetry is something boring and irrelevant to our lives. I give a very dynamic, highly compressed and exciting show.”
Mallory considers two different poets to be his mentors: Kenneth Rexroth and Charles Bukowski. The former was more of an academic, traditional poet, known for idyllic, romantic and pastoral poems. The latter was a hard-drinking, earthy, no-holds-barred poet. The pair couldn’t stand each other’s work and often asked Mallory what he saw in the other.
“My work falls somewhere in between the two extremes of Rexroth and Bukowski,” Mallory said. “I’d like to think I took the best elements of the two of them to create my poems.”
Outside of the academic world, Bukowski is the better known of Mallory’s mentors, but he is concerned the public misunderstands him.
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