another
way to play
POEMS 1960-2017
michael lally
introduction by eileen myles
seven stories press
new york • oakland • london
Copyright © 2018 by Michael Lally
Introduction © 2017 by Eileen Myles
A Seven Stories Press First Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Seven Stories Press
140 Watts Street
New York, NY 10013
sevenstories.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lally, Michael, 1942- author. | Myles, Eileen, writer of introduction.
Title: Another way to play : poems 1960-2017 / Michael Lally ; introduction
by Eileen Myles.
Description: A Seven Stories Press first edition. | New York : Seven Stories
Press, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017056451 | ISBN 9781609808303 (paperback)
Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / American / General.
Classification: LCC PS3562.A414 A6 2018 | DDC 811/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003722
Thanks to all the editors and publishers of the books, anthologies, and magazines these poems appeared in and to those who helped or inspired me with some of these poems, especially: Hey Lady and Morgan Press, Some Of Us Press, The Stone Wall Press, Blue Wind Press, Wyrd Press, Salt Lick Press, Vehicle Editions, Jordan Davies, Hanging Loose Press, Little Caesar, Coffee House Press, Quiet Lion Press, Black Sparrow Press, Libellum and Charta Presses, Word Palace Press; and Morgan Gibson, Peter Schjeldahl, Robert Slater, Lee Lally, Ed Cox, Tina Darragh, Ed Zahniser, Kim Merker, George and Lucy Mattingly, Janey Tannenbaum, Jim Haining, Annabel Lee, Bob Hershon, Ron Schreiber, Dick Lourie, Emmet Jarrett, Mark Pawlak, Susan Campbell, Alex Katz, Dennis Cooper, Lynn Goldsmith, Edie Baskin, Allan Kornblum, Brian Christopher, John Martin, Vincent Katz, Paul Portuges, Ray DiPalma, Aram Saroyan, Eve Brandstein, Eileen Myles, Ted Berrigan, Karen Allen, Jamie Rose, Hubert Selby Jr., Gus Van Sant, Paul Abruzzo, Dan Simon, Rachel E. Dicken, and to all I am forgetting, and last but not least my lifelong “irreplaceable” friend and consultant on all things poetic, Terence Winch, and my children Caitlin, Miles, and Flynn.
contents
Actual Lally by Eileen Myles
Poems
STUPID RABBITS
“So, the novels . . .”
Hitchhiking To Atlantic City
Letter To John Coltrane
Hard Rain
In The Distance
THE SOUTH ORANGE SONNETS
from The South Orange Sonnets
DUES
American Renaissance
Re
Two Poems While Something Crumbled
Once
Aint No
Watching You Walk Away
Revolution
Counterrevolution
Weatherman Blues
ROCKY DIES YELLOW
“Now I’m Only Thirty-Two”
You Remember Belmar NJ 1956
Song
Kent State May 4, 1970
Newark Poem
Dreaming Of The Potato
“We Were Always Afraid Of”
***Marilyn Monroe***
Poem To 1956
Poetry 1969
Weatherman Goes Out 1969
Conversation With Myself
I Wish I Could Tell You About It
MY LIFE
My Life
CHARISMA
Listen
More Than
Sonnet For My 33rd
Testimony
CATCH MY BREATH
Need
from Running Away
Empty Closets
JUST LET ME DO IT
Violets
2:Talking
In Harlem In 1961
Their Imagination Safe
So
Queen Jane
Today What If Everything Reversed
File
You Walk In
9.13.73
(“I Stand”)
In America
You Are Here
A Little Liszt For Olga
Valentine
Dark Night
Peaking
No Other Love Have I
Life Is A Bitch
In The Recent Future
On Turning 35
She’s Funny That Way
WHITE LIFE
Life
Superrealism
April Fool’s Day 1975
“To Be Alone . . .”
So This Is Middle Age?
ATTITUDE
The Other Night
Honky Hill (Hyattsville Maryland)
Out In The Hall
Eric Dolphy
“In 1962 I Was Living . . .”
Feeling
Lists
Touch
Falling In Love
Fathers Day
What We’re Missing
2/4/76
Notice To Creditors
Snow 2
The Cold
Mother’s Day 1978
Loving Women
Coming Up From The Seventies
“As Time Goes By”
HOLLYWOOD MAGIC
My Image
Something Quaint
The Women Are Stronger Than The Men
from DC
Another Way To Play
from ***On The Scene***
Don’t Fuck With Anti-Tradition
Tough Times
New York New York
The Secret
In The Evening
Sometimes
Alone Again, Naturally
Piece Of Shit
from Hollywood Magic
“Soft Portraits”
from It’s Not Just Us
Dues, Blues, & Attitudes
The Night John Lennon Died
Fuck Me In The Heart Acceptance!
CANT BE WRONG
Going Home Again
Sports Heroes, Cops And Lace
Holiday Hell
20 Years Ago Today
Disco Poetry
The Sound of Police Cars
Having It All
Something Back
Young Love
Isn’t It Romantic?
They Must Be Gods And Goddesses
Obsession Possession And Doing Time
That Feeling When It First Goes In
I Overwhelmed Her With My Need
I’m Afraid I’m Gonna Start
from Fools For Love
Lost Angels 2
Last Night
Attitude And Beatitude
Turning 50
Where Do We Belong
OF
from Of
IT’S NOT NOSTALGIA
It’s Not Nostalgia—It’s Always There
Patterns
4.4.80
Lost Angels
Six Years In Another Town
On November Second Nineteen Ninety Three
My Life 2
IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE
What?
Heaven & Hell
Who Are We Now
Is As
from Hardwork
from The Rain Trilogy
Brother Can You Spare A Rhyme?
Know
Walk On The Wild Side
The Healing Poem
Forbidden Fruit
Ba
d Boys And Women Who Want It All
Attitude, Gratitude, and Beatitude
More Than Enough
It Takes One To Know One
MARCH 18, 2003
from Match 18, 2003
SWING THEORY
Before You Were Born
Birth/Rebirth
The God Poems
Swing Theory 1
The Geese Don’t Fly South
Give Me Five Minutes More
Dear Birds
from The 2008 Sonnets
Tea Party Summer
Swing Theory 2
Poem On The Theme: Arthritis
Swing Theory 3
String Theory
from So And
The Jimmy Schuyler Sonnets
November Sonnet
The San Francisco Sonnets (1962)
Swing Theory 4
How The Dark Gets Out
To The Light
Love Never Dies
Fighting Words
Swing Theory 5
THE VILLAGE SONNETS
from The Village Sonnets
NEW POEMS
from New York Notes (2004)
To My Son Flynn
Most Memorable Movie Mothers
Two Post-Brain-Operation Observations
Blizzard of ’16
Take It Easy
Too Many Creeps
First Two Reactions
The Times They’re Always Changin’
Love is the Ultimate Resistance
Actual Lally
This is an awesome book and you should read every word of it. You won’t do it in a day or in many days but during the passage of reading Another Way To Play you will learn something about time. Another Way To Play seems to offer advice – and it’s advice from self to self, which might be the only way to enact advice truly. Plus who is that “another”? Somebody else?
As I’m climbing over the rocks, the poems of Michael Lally, this incomplete utopia, a rugged landscape of a book, it occurs to me that what Michael takes on is nothing less than the feat of being alive and the exploding and strewn nature of that exactly on its own terms (living in a body) while this writer keeps trotting out his own arrogance like a family joke and deep humility is in there too, humility is the gas station of so much of what Michael Lally does and is, poet and man. Lally is mostly a straight guy but you may viscerally experience the embrace of another man in “Watching You Walk Away” which was dedicated to Gregory Millard, one man who died collectively—of AIDS, so there’s an imputation here—of being a survivor of love, even being a man of a certain age or moment who knows that being a loving man AND loving men now has both its glory and its price:
The world is all around us, even at night, in bed
in each others arms
distilled & injected into the odor we leave on each others
backs & thighs, between the knots & shields of all we lay
down in the dark to pick up in the morning
I like your brown eyes when you talk
This collected poems or collected poem is constructed of similar yet all different mostly brave moments. It’s a compendium of what one is possibly brave enough to do—to labor, to fail, to lounge, to love. Lally’s not fessing up, but he’s proud. This is undoubtedly the book of a proud man. Proud to a fault, and he’s the first to tell you that as well. I mentioned family before. Yet what one more likely feels throughout the four hundred-odd pages of Another Way to Play is that you’re kind of in a relationship with this guy. Whether you’re male or female. Which is kind of octopussy, but stylistically Lally is a dancer, habitually reeling from form to form. It’s a broken book in the best sense. There’s no whole here, the self is never resolved, but what’s delivered, weltered in poem form, is a novelistic series of impressions. It’s a real thing and a changing thing. An aesthetic and a biographical one. Years ago I read in James Schuyler’s “Morning of the Poem” that Schuyler approved of Michael Lally because he looked you straight in the eye. Here we’ve got an extended Lally poem (“The Jimmy Schuyler Sonnets”), which tells us much the same thing—that “Jimmy knew what mattered.” The men’s mutual admiration, their like for one another has a special feeling, a leveling affect. They invite us into their intimacy. Their public “like.” Which makes me want to step out too and acknowledge that I’m discovering that I’m extremely influenced by Michael Lally and I hadn’t thought so much about that until I was dwelling here in this book. Because his affect occurs through so many different gestures. In the most existential way, his poem is an act.
He starts one like this:
SUPERREALISM
First of all I’m naked
while I’m typing this,
I mean I know I tried it. Was it after him. Perhaps. I think I tried fucking myself while writing. Inserting a dildo and then writing an art review. I’ve read in Chris Kraus’s biography of her that Kathy Acker sometimes wrote naked. And I kind of remember Peter Schjeldahl telling me a long time ago that he wrote naked too. And Peter wrote long naked poems. So naked that he stopped writing poetry entirely. The trick is to manage to stay in. And this, Lally’s, was a way. Michael began his poem like that. Naked. Yet it wasn’t about it at all. It was another way to begin again. Which Lally is always doing. Here nakedness kind of invented the studio of the poem. Just matter of fact. Which is the constant position in the work. He’s a working class man so it’s a chore. To be real. And to make that new.
Open my brain, poems fly out.
And it pretty much looked that way when I first met, or really laid eyes on Michael Lally in about 1975.
Two poets I knew, Harry and Larry, invited me to go up with them to the Gotham Book Mart to hear some famous poet from DC. Or maybe the poet had just moved to New York. Harry and Larry explained that Michael was more than a bit of a showman, a sham perhaps but winning finally, definitely worth going to see. I was a new kid in town and female so these guys, all men, were responsible for my education. Harry and Larry admired Michael Lally they blushingly admitted. They had a boy crush on him. They also loved Janey Tannenbaum of the Gotham book mart and she had made a little chapbook of Michael’s My Life through her own Wyrd Press. That publication was the reason for the event. The room was packed. This good looking dark haired Irish guy—someone who had run for office in that counter culture way (and lost!) who slept with men and women and the breadth of Michael’s living absolutely impressed the two guys who invited me. It’s true, they gasped, exasperated, delighted and there he was seated at a table in a clean blue (I think) shirt presenting his poem in a low key almost cowboy way. Like you all know this. I am a ritual. He calmly looked up. Lally looked like someone I might have grown up with, very Irish, cute, but carrying himself like a man, not a pretty boy yet someone firmly planted in his own affect. The Gotham being at its zenith at that time only hosted stars. Ntozake Shange gave a solo reading as well around then and saintly Patti Smith had read to this glamorous room a few years earlier. Mid seventies was a moment of poetry stars, these people were not soo apart from the wider culture yet they were ours, each an example, pamphleteers in a way, speaking for the vitality of small culture then. They were not larger culture’s absence but its depth. And each of these cults opened onto other cults of sex, politics, and race, music and painting. It was acidy. It was a wide counter culture then, and poetry was the mouthpiece of it and Michael was that day’s star. He refers to “My Life” in other poems in this book as his famous poem and it is and was plaintively that. The poem revels in its own facets. Contradictions. Though the poet’s not too hard on himself. The poem’s sort of funkily buffed like Just Kids. I like “My Life” as an example of how a poet can occupy space and stand as pure legend yet it’s by far not his most interesting work. You can see the echoes building up to it within this book and poems later on audition a similar stance in short and long versions for the rest of his writing life. What I love about Michael’s writing is that he really isn’t trying to do it again. His most famous poem
is his emptiest poem. He knows that. That’s its joke. His last poems in this volume are his best poems and so are his earliest ones. He’s so big as a flawed human, as the apologist of Michael Lally, as the St. Augustine of Michael Lally, so endlessly expansive in his context yet still not ever breaking into prose. He’s holding the line, so that finally if you just wanna talk about Lally as a poet, he’s a sonneteer. A guy with a lute. A maker of that precise little form that spawns so many multiples of itself, “The South Orange Sonnets,” “The Village Sonnets” reveal the classiness of a poet. He’s the novelist who just wouldn’t bother he is so busy living and dreaming. He is real because he’s courting the myth. “My Life” is such an arrival, here’s the boat, that he exhausted the approach in a one off, sort of ended his life early on so he could keep going cause so what. Why be a star really? Isn’t that missing the point. This is a wise book. And a book of life has to be a book of wisdom. It’s really so much more moving to read a love poem to a woman or man – or talking to his children. Or going to Ireland to find a few Lallys and not be corny about it and it’s not. Or to read the much older Michael’s sonnets about the village when he was a kid. This is a poet who is probably more shaped by his love for black girls than being Irish. Or is it both. Part of the wonder of Lally’s work is that he is the performance of how race and class dovetail. One punk kid who makes poetry all his life about a black girl who he loved all his life and she him is the living coalition. What I mostly finally love about Lally is that like Gertrude Stein he insists we all stand with him while he’s living and writing. Which is easy to play. Cause it’s your book too.
No, all I want to do
is sound like what I am always becoming,
—Eileen Myles
NYC, June 2017
POEMS
whatever it is I want to do it
like I want to sit down for awhile
by myself this week, get a personal
letter from William Saroyan as though
he’d been reading my books since childhood,
stand up at the reunion of everyone
who ever did me a favor & those I lied to
& abused or made an ass of myself trying to
impress and say, very softly, in a voice
like the works of an Indian we all expected
to be a poet but instead was warrior
“everything is a fiction”
sounding more like a Spanish philosopher
afraid to kick Franco in the ass and
spit on the church?
No, all I want to do
is sound like what I am always becoming