It's Not Nostalgia

A movie and television actor as well as a poet, Michael Lally is acutely aware of America's obsession with celebrities and what he calls "the overnight killings on the stock market of salable image. "In the compulsively honest, rivettingly self-revealing poems and prose vignettes of It's Not Nostalgia, Lally unreels "glimpses of the private movie I have always starred in and now have flashes of wanting only to direct."This book is Lally's rough cut, the rawest scenes intact. Its narrative trajectory is an up-and-down ride, with change the only constant. As political activism in Washington D.C. (1969-1975) gives way to rebel bohemianism in New York City (1975-1982) and then to screen-star aspirations in Santa Monica (1982-1998), the tone of Lally's private movie turns from exuberant and defiant to rueful and reflective.<br /><br />A youthful Michael Lally burst on the downtown New York art scene like a supernova, flaming out in frank poems of sexual experimentation -- a self-styled "big mouth, a voice of the sixties" -- as he puts it in the 1974 shocker "My Life." While still haunted by dreams of fame, later poems in It's Not Nostalgia also confront harsh truths about aging and the fading of glamour:<br /><br />We are the generation of lost<br /><br />angels. We rarely feel these<br /><br />days like we have anything new<br /><br />to do or say &amp; yet our lives<br /><br />are totally changed, even from<br /><br />what they were a year ago, three<br /><br />months ago, yesterday, trying<br /><br />to finally be honest about our<br /><br />feelings about each other's fame<br /><br />&amp; glory, while still trying to<br /><br />get or forget our own...