Poetry still in motion

Newport Beach poet Lee Mallory considers himself a poetry pusher and poetry pimp.

For nearly 20 years, he’s put on monthly poetry readings in Newport Beach, hoping to coax talent out of new and aspiring poets.

“If I can just get them in the door for two nights, then maybe they will go home and sit down and write,” Mallory said.

A bespectacled bard with a pencil mustache, Mallory has smashed dinner plates together over his head like cymbals, showering the audience at his monthly readings at Newport’s Alta Coffee Co. with tiny shards of ceramic.

He once shoved his hand into a ceiling fan near the coffeehouse bar, using taco sauce to simulate blood as onlookers gasped.

“I’ve seen Lee do just about everything but get naked during a reading,” said fellow poet John Gardiner, who has been going to Mallory’s readings for the past 20 years. “I’ve seen him stand up on top of chairs, wave his magic wand like Don Juan in a windmill, all to get people’s attention.”

Mallory’s latest collection of poems, “Now and Then,” is available from Orange County poetry publisher Moon Tide Press. On Feb. 10, he will read selections from the book, his eighth, at an 8 p.m. poetry reading at Alta, 506 31st St.

When he’s not writing lines of introspective free verse, or mentoring young poets, Mallory teaches English at Santa Ana College, riding the bus each day from his home on the Balboa Peninsula to work. He doesn’t own a car, a cell phone, a computer or an ATM card.

“I’m kind of old-fashioned,” he said. “I don’t need any of that stuff. I’m a poet.”

“Now and Then” includes work ranging from the bawdy “Laundry Poem,” with lines like “I’d like to be your washer/ soak in you in warm liquid,” to the romantic “Poem for the Lady in Red.”

“My feelings are the stream/ turning on its sandy bed,/ whose waters still our words/ at depths of bottomless pools,” the latter selection reads.

Mallory’s inspiration for much of his poetry is his girlfriend of 22 years. She’s a retired emergency room nurse, and Mallory is “a walking emergency,” as he’s fond of saying. Someone once dubbed Mallory the Love Poet, and the name has stuck, much to his chagrin. But Mallory admits that much of his writing is indeed about love.

“It’s what I call a poet’s meat — the loves lost, the unpaid bills, the babies and the broken relationships,” he said.

If You Go

What: Poetry reading from Lee Mallory’s eighth book, “Now and Then.”

When: 8 p.m. Feb. 10

Where: Alta Coffee Co., 506 31st St., Newport Beach

Singer-songwriter Courtney Montgomery also will perform.