The Soul of a Poet : Champion of verse Lee Mallory of Newport Beach is a college teacher by day and an intense creative spirit by night.

“Lee Mallory alert! Lee Mallory alert!”

These are words that can shoot BBs of dread into the gut of journalists in local newsrooms. It means a writer has just had a call from the poet Lee Mallory. The poet Lee Mallory is like a relentless insect intent on boring into someone’s brain. The poet Lee Mallory will keep calling every extension until he finds satisfaction.

Hi, come to our reading. Hey, I just ran the L.A. Marathon for poetry. Listen, here’s a poet you should come hear. We’re presenting surf poetry--maybe Sports would be interested. Hey, Jim, aren’t I fixated on poetry?

It’s reached a point where we have to either write about him or shoot him. I, for one, am not willing to do prison time because, should Mallory survive, he’d doubtless get around to starting a poetry program there.

So, here meet the poet, the fixated, Lee Mallory.

We joined him last Wednesday evening as he addressed a group of black-T-shirted poetry club members and other students in the auditorium of Brea Junior High School. He had already begun his lecture and seemed to be going to extremes to show the teens that he’s not an ordinary teacher, but an unruly poet.

“We’re going to break all the old rules,” he was saying, pantomiming snapping yardsticks across his knee. “But the poet does it to heighten his message,” he continued, illustrating that with awkward Atlas poses.

Mallory prowled the front of the hall. “When I write I want to adventure . We want to get a little crazy . If you have a poem about the earthquake, I want to feel this shake “--he jiggled a blackboard--”I want to know the sweet taste of blood in your mouth. “

If, during Mickey Rourke’s steady career descent, you happened to see him playing the Charles Bukowski-like poet in the Bukowski-penned film “Barfly,” you might recall his affected speech pattern, which seemed heavily based on the cartoon cat Snagglepuss, of “ Exit , stage righhhht “ fame. Mallory’s speech is a bit like that, making a lingering emphasis on anything resembling a key word.

“The poet has to be in touch with his world more than any other person . What color is the sticker on the license plate of your dad’ s car ? What letter is not on the telephone dial ? You guys are not paying attention to the world. You’re not checking details that can make your poem fly , to make your writing solid or make a reader soar .”

One small detail Mallory himself seemed to miss was that when he’d hurl his chalk at the blackboard for dramatic effect, it sometimes went ricocheting into kids in the front row. Maybe they can write a poem about it.

At one point Mallory asked a student what poetry meant to her. She responded, “Death.”

“OK, if she says ‘death,’ ” he said, turning to another student, “what word does that make you think of?”

“Cool!”

*

Later, in a restaurant, over light beers, the 48-year-old Mallory was still tirelessly promoting poetry. Divorced since 1989, he lives on Newport Peninsula’s 33rd Street--”the biggest party street there is.” His explanation why--and of why he rides the bus every day to his teaching job at Santa Ana’s Rancho Santiago College--had the emphatic tone of Harry Dean Stanton reciting the Repo Man Code:

“I like the action. Poet’s gotta be where the action is. Poet’s gotta be taking the pulse of everything going on around him . Poet’s gotta stay in touch. You don’t wall yourself out.”

(I’ll be turning up the “italics filter” from now on, so that only the words Mallory really, really emphasized will get through.)

Mallory says he teaches 60 hours a week and often stays up all night grading papers. Still, he finds time for all those poetry-related phone calls and flyers. In the past 25 years he has logged 3,500 pages of journal entries. He has had hundreds of his poems published in small magazines and has written four volumes of poetry, most recently 1990’s “I Write Your Name.” It will be joined this June by “Full Moon, Empty Hands” from Fullerton’s Lightning Publications.

He has also conducted the county’s longest-running poetry night, dubbed the Factory Readings, held the first Monday of every month at the Casa Palma Restaurant in Santa Ana. More recently, he instituted readings at the Alta Coffee House on the Newport Peninsula, held every second Wednesday. He has taught poetry at Rancho Santiago since 1989. He says the classes are always full, despite school administrators initially telling him it was a “blue collar” campus where students only wanted to learn practical, job-related skills.

*

Mallory wrote his first poem in 1968 while a student at UC Santa Barbara.

“I lived in an apartment house in Isla Vista that looked like a tenement, with the stucco walls streaked with the dampness of the night and a bike rack with various parts of bikes still chained to it, rusting. It was a dreary place.

“One time I saw an unkempt little boy in the parking lot. The apartment place was called Edgewater, and the first poem I ever wrote was called ‘Son of Edgewater,’ about how youth in its innocence and beauty has a seriousness when at play. I think I’d read something by Aldous Huxley that said man’s most important mission in life should be regaining the seriousness he had as a child when at play. It was a poem of hope, and hope was needed because just a year later the streets were being cruised by dump trucks full of county sheriffs firing tear gas.”

In the societal schism that tore at the late ‘60s and particularly that campus--where banks were burned and students shot--Mallory found himself straddling an uncomfortable fence. Classified 1-A for the draft, he’d enrolled in ROTC.

“It was schizophrenic: I’d be drilling on the UCSB campus on Saturday morning but hanging out with poets at night in water towers or at (famous dead poet) Kenneth Rexroth’s house, or sitting with Rexroth on a nude beach in Summerland surrounded by attractive young co-eds. I played it straight enough to do the military thing but was accepted by this bohemian group of writers, who must have thought I had some glimmer of talent. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten out of that straddling of lifestyles,” Mallory said.

Back in Southern California in the early ‘70s, like many other young poets he was drawn to the apartment of poet-iconoclast Bukowski, who would put up with them if they’d arrive with a 12-pack.

“He was a despicable man, but he was a lovable man,” Mallory recalled. “His house was ant-ridden; there was garbage in the refrigerator, but he’d sit on his couch and smile like he was king of the mountain. Then he’d lapse into a mood, and say, ‘It’s almost 3, and the high school girls will be coming by.’

“I said, ‘What’s wrong with that?’

“ ‘Nothing, Lee, I can peek out through the shade.’ Then he said, ‘But when I see them I tremble to lift the window shade. Because it hurts so much . Their beauty hurts so muuuch .’ He was 52 then, with his acne and his terribly pock-marked face that he compared to having been bitten by red ants. He’d say, ‘Look at my face , baby. It’s all true .’

“I once asked him, ‘What is reality?’ and he said, ‘Reality is waking up to blood in your underwear.’ ”

One evening behind the Golden Bear, Bukowski threw up on the shoes of a friend of mine. I don’t think he ever washed them after that. Bukowski’s every utterance, even the liquid ones, was worshiped by his fans, who regarded such gestures as tokens of an artistic soul too tragically sensitive to life. Mallory says he parted ways with Bukowski after interceding one evening when the elder poet had thrown his Christmas tree through a window and was about to follow it with his girlfriend.

Much as Mallory played the rampaging poet to his teen-age audience in Brea, he’s not especially the hurling type.

“That’s a dichotomy in me,” he said. “I’m recognized and published as a good writer, but just a few of us have a little bit of an organizational sense and the feeling that you need to have that. Maybe people think these poetry readings just happen , that it’s some spontaneous thing, but it takes planning, press releases and getting out a mailing list to 400 people.

“I’m still stretched the way I was in college because my straight job is teaching. In the daytime I follow the lesson plan. I go on in a businesslike way and teach what I have to teach. But to people who know me, at night my demeanor is entirely different. And I have to say this, for me my poems are absolutely authentic, because if I write a poem at night I feel it intensely . And the proof of that is if a reader feels it too.”

Here’s a Mallory poem, carefully selected as being the shortest one in his most recent book:

YOUTH

I sleep

among flowers

wake myself

in tee-shirts of

girls

caught in the carpets

of bloom

He has better poems than that, and certainly longer ones. Some, though, are poems about being a poet, a region I find as wanting in magic as rock songs about being a rock musician.

There’s no denying Mallory is fixated on the stuff. Where others riding the bus are just riding the bus, for him it is to experience “the essential beauty and oneness in life, that the Lido Isle man going by in his Mercedes is cut off from.”

If he runs the L.A. Marathon, as he did last year, it is “to shatter the stereotype of the poet as some sort of effete intellectual” and to discover, “It’s a metaphor for poetry. It’s hard and lonely, and the writer is usually the hyper-conscious individual, which means when the average guy may just be feeling blue, the poet’s way down in the depths in the pits, but when he wakes and sees a beautiful sunrise, or sees a good-looking lady walking down the street, he is so high he’s soaring. He tastes the extremes.”

I guess. Where you or I might simply go “yucko,” when Mallory confronted a stench in the alleyways of Paris, “my nostrils flared like Rimbaud,” he recollects.

Were (the significantly dead French poet) Big Art Rimbaud here, he might well say “yucko” to that. Poetry schmoetry, he eventually said too, and went off to run guns in Africa.

*

Laugh at Mallory if you want--I sort of like to--but when it comes down to it, he’s just a man trying to be more alive, and to drag a few people along with him.

I think he’s spot-on when he says, “There’s a lot of people who feel this vague uneasiness and emptiness, who know there must be something more to life,” and can even buy that “poetry can make you feel the real life sustenance . I think it is going to be the salvation for a lot of people who are stuck in the estrangement of modern society. It’s real people writing about real things that matter, not the the color of the vision on Channel 5.”

“I know he drives people and the newspapers nuts,” says Mallory’s former student John C. Harrell, a quiet man whose 1992 “Twenty Years” is a moving poetic account of his decades in an Army medical unit. “But he doesn’t do these things for himself, but for other people, like he did for me.

“He’s gone to bat for a lot of people. He’s a mentor to most of the poets in Orange County. He has a way of reaching people and bringing the talent they’re afraid to let someone else see. I would never have published my poems without his encouragement. He really loves poetry, and he loves for people to hear about it. He really lives, eats and breathes it.”

Should you doubt that, Mallory is planning poetry readings on the Newport Pier this year, along with assaults on local cable TV, more readings, more. . . Well, I imagine he’ll be calling us with the news.

Are you fixated? If so, please let us know by writing to: Fixations, The Times, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626. Please include your phone number.