The Best American Poetry

Michael Lally: Pick of the Week [ed. by Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Lally, ca. 2008

The Night John Lennon Died

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One warm night, when I was a kid,
we were all playing ringalario in
the high school field at the bottom
of my street when Mrs. Murphy, known
mostly for the time her hair turned
purple when she tried to dye it, stuck
her head out the door and yelled across
the street to us, “Go on home now and be
quiet, Babe Ruth just died.” And we all
did go home where everything was somber
and serious and adult and strange,
worse than when one of the family died,
because then there were outbursts of
emotion as well as jokes and stories
and good drunken parties, but
the night Babe Ruth died, everyone
felt as sad as if it was a close close
friend or a sister or a brother,
but no one was really related so
there was no call for an actual Irish
wake or funeral party. I couldn’t help
remembering that night again, the
night John Lennon died. Nobody
threw a wake or a party where we
could all get drunk and high and
have a good cry together. We all
went home and wandered around our
rooms and heads looking for answers,
unable to sleep or forget or accept
or understand what had happened.
It had to be a mistake and it was,
a fucking senseless, horrible,
deadening mistake.
                        It’s hard to
recognize even the most familiar
things. I don’t know where I am
half the time, the other half I’m
flashing on some song or line or look
or attitude so close to my own
personal history I thought it was
mine. But it ain’t, cause it’s gone
with John and I feel like I got to
go do something now to spread a
little joy and loving and honest
fucking answers and questions about
the world I live in and the only times
we ever have, our own. I hope I’m
not alone.

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A former jazz musician, Hollywood actor, and radical organizer, New Jersey-born Michael Lally is first and foremost a poet. The author of more than thirty books of soulful, outspoken poems that have inspired many other artists, Lally writes with wry humor and the simple grace that is the mark of deep thought and conviction. He is the recipient of an American Book Award, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and other honors. Commenting on Lally’s landmark selected poems,  Another Way to Play: Poems 1960-2017 (7 Stories Press, 2018), Charles Bernstein wrote:  “Michael Lally’s risky, talky, autobiographic, ethnic, disarming, poignant, desperate, consoling, elegiac, wily, vernacular lyrics have been challenging the poetry world for half a century.” 

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Ted Berrigan on the 38th Anniversary of his Death: Posthumous Pick of the Month [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Mark Hillringhouse Photography

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New Personal Poem

to Michael Lally

You had your own reasons for getting
In your own way. You didn’t want to be
Clear to yourself. You knew a hell
Of a lot more than you were willing
               to let yourself know. I felt
Natural love for you on the spot. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Right.
Beautiful. I don’t use the word lightly. I
Protested with whatever love (honesty) (& frontal nudity)
A yes basically reserved Irish Catholic American Providence Rhode
               Island New Englander is able to manage. You
Are sophisticated, not uncomplicated, not
Naïve, and Not simple. An Entertainer, & I am, too.
Frank O’Hara respected love, so do you, & so do we.
He was himself & I was me. And when we came together
Each ourselves in Iowa, all the way
That was love, & it still is, love, today. Can you see me
In what I say? Because as well I see you know
In what you have to say, I did love Frank, as I do
You, “in the right way”.
That’s just talk, not Logos,
               a getting down to cases:
I take it as simple particulars that
               we wear our feelings on our faces.

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Ted Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. He attended Providence College for a year before joining the army in 1954 at the age of 19. After serving in Korea he received a BA in English from the University of Tulsa in 1959 and an MA in 1962. Berrigan moved to New York in the early 1960s where he edited and published C Magazine and C Press Books, wrote art criticism, and collaborated with writers and artists Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, and Anselm Hollo. Berrigan taught at the St. Mark's Poetry Project and was writer-in-residence/visiting poet at the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Yale University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, University of Essex in England, Northeastern Illinois University, and the Naropa Institute. In 1979 he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Berrigan was a central figure in the second generation of the New York School of Poets, which included Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Jim Carroll, and Anselm Hollo. He was the author of more than 20 books, including The Sonnets (1964), Bean Spasms (with Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard) (1967), Poems, In Brief (1971), Red Wagon (1976), and A Certain Slant of Sunlight (1988).  Blue Wind Press published So Going Around Cities: New & Selected Poems, 1958--1979 in 1980. The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (edited by Alice Notley with Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan) came out in 2005 from the University of California Press. [bio mostly from Poets.org]. Ted Berrigan died on July 4, 1983.

Michael Lally blogs at Lally's Alley.   [Also check out this post on Michael from 2008.]

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                                           Alex Katz,Ted Berrigan,1967.

 

             Ted Berrigan,Tim Dlugos, Penny Milford, Michael Lally, Caitlin Lally (profile) at Michael & Penny's wedding, NYC, 14 Feb 1982.

                                                 

 

Lally on Winch

Plunging through my closeted archives, I came across copies of The Poetry Project Newsletter. A piece by Michael Lally on Terrence Winch caught my attention. A few hours later in real time (but 43 years in literary time) I came across Winch selecting Lally

At David Lehman's request, here's the Poetry Project piece:Previous Post

Nicanor Parra (1914-2018) [by Michael Lally]

I became a fan of Chilean poet Nicanor Parra's poetry when I saw the title of his 1967 New Directions book: POEMS AND ANTIPOEMS. The idea of antipoems fit with my own approach to poems, which at the time I was having a lot of published in what we called then "little magazines" and "underground newspapers."

I couldn't read much Spanish, so I depended on the translators of the poems in the book, which ranged from Allen Ginsberg and Denise Levertov to W. S. Merwin and Miller Williams, all of whom I knew then, a time when it was possible to know most of the poets on your side of the poetry fence.

Miller Williams was the main translator and wrote the introduction, in which he stated something that I thought expressed my approach, or my desire, at the time: "antipoetry is unadorned, is unlyrical, is nonsymbolist; in antipoetry what you see is what you see; antipoetry is chiseled, solid."

I met Parra a few times, but it was in 1970 at a reading in DC where he signed my copy of POEMS AND ANTIPOEMS, with just a big cursive version of my name followed by an explanation point: "Michael!" then "Nicanor" and under that "70" and under that "Washington." A chiseled, solid inscription.

He was a scientist as well as a poet, and he was 103 when he passed. I am grateful that he led such a rich, full, long life and was recognized as an important and influential poet. He was to me.

Here's Miller Williams' translation of a short poem from that book:

ROLLER COASTER

For half a century
Poetry was the paradise
Of the solemn fool.
Until I came
And built my roller coaster.

Go up, if you feel like it.
I'm not responsible if you come down
With your mouth and nose bleeding.