by Garrison Frost

In the mid-1970s, a poetry movement took shape around a small restaurant in Hermosa Beach called the Alley Cat, located where the sports bar Bestie’s now sits. Back then, the readings constituted one of the two feet that Los Angeles poetry stood upon, the other being at Beyond Baroque in West Los Angeles.

Partly as a way to pay the participating poets, and partly as a way to document their work, each reading was accompanied by a thick book of art and poetry called “The Alley Cat Readings.” The books and the readings were the brainchild of poets Michael Andrews and Marcus J. Grapes, who were both active participants in the scene.

The books, each more than 100 pages and perfect bound, stand as a testament to another time. Decorated with the work of local artists of the era, they feature poetry by most of the major players in the poetry scene of that time. Included among these are nascent poets who went on to much greater fame such as Kate Braverman, Wanda Coleman and Jim Krusoe.

“The ‘Alley Cat’ was sort of a counter-revolution,” remembers Andrews, who still lives in Hermosa Beach. “There was sort of this attitude that there was something wrong with slick New York publishing, so it wasn’t considered good unless it was ugly or on mimeo. But we wanted nice looking books. We wanted the best we could do.”

According to Andrews, he and Grapes had printed several small chapbooks before the “Alley Cat Readings” took shape. Essentially, the “Alley Cat” books were a way to pay poets for their participation. Andrews and Grapes sold ads to local businesses and charged a few bucks for the books at the readings.
“Any kind of payment at all was unusual back then,” Andrews says. “The goal was always to find a way to pay the poets something.”

According to Andrews, the publishers got a break on printing from Gemini Graphics in Venice. “The owner of Gemini was sort of a good fairy back in those days,” Andrews says.

One of the things that sets the “Alley Cat Readings” books apart from other anthologies, even those printed today, is the high quality of the art. Issue number three featured the art of then-Manhattan Beach artist Sari Staggs. Robert Rosenthal, who lived in Hermosa Beach back then, contributed cartoons and etchings for issue number two. “The artists were mostly local people, and they were all people ran into at one time or another,” Andrews says.

Although the “Alley Cat Readings” were successful in that they got a lot of advertisers and sold a lot of copies, they were never able to turn much of a profit for the publishers. Andrews said that after seven or eight editions, he and Grapes stopped publication sometime in 1977. “I had to finally go to work,” Andrews recalls.

However, during the course of publication the two men founded Bombshelter Press, which continues to publish the poetry journal Onthebus to this day out of Hermosa Beach.

(Feb. 28, 2003)

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