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Lee Mallory + poetry + the Double Down Saloon

“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted,” Percy Bysshe Shelley once said. But did he ever read his poetry in the Double Down Saloon? Imagine the mirror he’d have to lug into that distortion field! Depending on your tolerance for exuberant grunge, the Double Down, proud home of Ass Juice and “puke insurance,” is either the fabulous navel of our cultural underbelly or the drain at the bottom of the behavioral sink. Either way, while it’s not without its spurts of literary mojo — owner P Moss has authored two collections of gritty short fiction, and plenty of local scribblers have scratched in their booze-stained notebooks at the DD’s bar and tables — it’s not a place you think of when you think of poetry readings. The differences between distorted to beautiful can seem awfully tricky there. “This night will stretch me,” says poet Lee Mallory, who’ll read his verse there Sunday at 8 p.m.

Could be that’s why he picked the place, though. Its rude vitality (Anthony Bourdain loves it!) and the fact that it’s not the sort of place where poetry usually meets its tiny public — not a standard coffeehouse or an academic setting where a tenured professor of Turtleneck Studies might dole out his dense quatrains. (He’s no fan of the academic approach to poetry.) This’ll be harder, stranger. “DD tells you to maximize your bet — for a poet, always a must,” Mallory writes in an email. “If you can't grab readers in the first few minutes, shattering the stereotype that poetry is boring and irrelevant, you're dead. You must savagely bond with your audience. …” So perhaps not a wholly unexpected venue for a guy who frequently cites his friendship with the late poet Charles Bukowski, avatar of the booze-stained notebook.  In Ass Juice veritas!

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Still, it’s a big change of place for the grandfatherly looking Mallory, and he’s not unmindful of the need to kick it up a bit. Asked what changes he might make in his reading style, he joked: “None except vantage point, audience, image and tone.” He’s known as “The Love Poet,” because much of his work deals with the sexes; for the Double Down, it's likely he'll draw from the racier portions of that oeuvre, offering up a kind of horndog bebop, the better to savagely bond with the DD’s presumably edgier, seen-it-all clientele. “The boss” — Moss — “says the right reading will please customers,” Mallory says. “Where no one is offended, shamed or outraged.” For a guy who says he once spontaneously licked a woman’s leg during a reading, that’s probably a good thing.

In the end, he’s just a “zealot for the word,” going wherever that takes him, however off-kilter the venue. “I really believe poetry will bring us out of our 21st century estrangement — our isolation and the solitary confinement of television, video games and overall materialism. We sense a deep need to rediscover universal touchstones. Poetry can help with that.” A slug of Ass Juice probably doesn't hurt, either.

For the reading, he’ll be backed by musician Nate Segundo and inspired by “muse Stacey Honore.” More at doubledownsaloon.com.

(Disclosures: 1. I performed a copy-edit of one of Moss’s books; 2. Mallory will read a new poem, “Ass Juice,” dedicated to me: One of my old memories of the Double Down provided the poem’s inspiration —SD.)

Scott Dickensheets is a Las Vegas writer and editor whose trenchant observations about local culture have graced the pages of publications nationwide.