{"id":123871,"date":"2018-04-18T09:00:28","date_gmt":"2018-04-18T13:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=123871"},"modified":"2018-04-18T10:28:32","modified_gmt":"2018-04-18T14:28:32","slug":"first-of-all-im-naked-on-the-collected-poems-of-michael-lally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/18\/first-of-all-im-naked-on-the-collected-poems-of-michael-lally\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cFirst of All I\u2019m Naked\u201d: On the Collected Poems of Michael Lally"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Michael Lally reading at Folio Books in Washington, D.C., c. 1977, with Doug Lang and Terence Winch.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Michael Lally\u2019s Another Way to Play, <\/em>out next week,<\/em> is an awesome book and you should read every word of it. You won\u2019t do it in a day or in many days, but during the passage of reading it\u00a0<\/em>you will learn something about time. Another Way to Play <\/em>seems to offer advice\u2014and it\u2019s advice from self to <\/em>self, which might be the only way to enact advice truly. Plus, who is that \u201canother\u201d? Somebody else?<\/p>\n

As I\u2019m 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 \u201cWatching You Walk Away,\u201d which was dedicated to Gregory Millard, one man who died collectively\u2014of AIDS, so there\u2019s an imputation here\u2014of being a survivor of love, even being a man of a certain age or moment who knows that being a loving man and<\/em> loving men now has both its glory and its price:<\/p>\n

The world is all around us, even at night, in bed
\nin each others arms
\ndistilled & injected into the odor we leave on each others
\nbacks & thighs, between the knots & shields of all we lay
\ndown in the dark to pick up in the morning
\nI like your brown eyes when you talk<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This collected poems or collected poem is constructed of similar yet all different mostly brave moments. It\u2019s a compendium of what one is possibly brave enough to do\u2014to labor, to fail, to lounge, to love. Lally\u2019s not fessing up, but he\u2019s proud. This is undoubtedly the book of a proud man. Proud to a fault, and he\u2019s 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 <\/em>is that you\u2019re kind of in a relationship with this guy. Whether you\u2019re male or female. Which is kind of octopussy, but stylistically Lally is a dancer, habitually reeling from form to form. It\u2019s a broken book in the best sense. There\u2019s no whole here, the self is never resolved, but what\u2019s delivered, weltered in poem form, is a novelistic series of impressions. It\u2019s a real thing and a changing thing. An aesthetic and a biographical one. Years ago I read in James Schuyler\u2019s \u201cMorning of the Poem\u201d that Schuyler approved of Michael Lally because he looked you straight in the eye. Here we\u2019ve got an extended Lally poem (\u201cThe Jimmy Schuyler Sonnets\u201d) that tells us much the same thing\u2014that \u201cJimmy knew what mattered.\u201d The men\u2019s mutual admiration, their like for one another has a special feeling, a leveling affect. They invite us into their intimacy. Their public \u201clike.\u201d Which makes me want to step out too and acknowledge that I\u2019m discovering that I\u2019m extremely influenced by Michael Lally and I hadn\u2019t thought so much about that until I was dwelling in Another Way to Play<\/em>. Because his affect occurs through so many different gestures. In the most existential way, his poem is an act.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He starts one like this:<\/p>\n

SUPERREALISM<\/p>\n

First of all I\u2019m naked
\nwhile I\u2019m typing this,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I mean I know I <\/em>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\u2019ve read in Chris Kraus\u2019s 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 <\/em>long naked poems. So naked that he stopped writing poetry entirely. The trick is to manage to stay in. And this, Lally\u2019s, was a way. Michael began <\/em>his poem like that. Naked. Yet it wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s a working-class man so it\u2019s a chore. To be real. And to make that <\/em>new.<\/p>\n

Open my brain, poems fly out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And it pretty much looked that way when I first met or really laid eyes on Michael Lally in about 1975.<\/p>\n

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 D.C. 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\u2019s My Life <\/em>through her own Wyrd Press. That publication was the reason for the event. The room was packed. This good-looking dark-haired Irish guy\u2014someone who had run for office in that counterculture way (and lost!), who slept with men and women, and the breadth of Michael\u2019s living absolutely impressed the two guys who invited me. It\u2019s 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<\/em>. 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 so apart from the wider culture yet they were ours<\/em>, each an example, pamphleteers in a way, speaking for the vitality of small culture then. They were not larger culture\u2019s 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 counterculture then, and poetry was the mouthpiece of it, and Michael was that day\u2019s star. He refers to \u201cMy Life\u201d 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\u2019s not too hard on himself. The poem\u2019s sort of funkily buffed like Just Kids<\/em>. I like \u201cMy Life\u201d as an example of how a poet can occupy space and stand as pure legend, yet it\u2019s 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\u2019s writing is that he really isn\u2019t trying to do it again. His most famous poem is his emptiest poem. He knows that. That\u2019s its joke. His last poems in this volume are his best poems and so are his earliest ones. He\u2019s 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\u2019s holding the line, so that finally if you just wanna talk about Lally as a poet, he\u2019s a sonneteer. A guy with a lute. A maker of that precise little form that spawns so many multiples of itself, \u201cThe South Orange Sonnets,\u201d \u201cThe Village Sonnets\u201d reveal the classiness of a poet. He\u2019s the novelist who just wouldn\u2019t bother <\/em>he is so busy living and dreaming. He is real because <\/em>he\u2019s courting the myth. \u201cMy Life\u201d is such an arrival, here\u2019s the boat, that he exhausted the approach in a one off, sort of ended his life early on so he could keep going \u2019cause so what. Why be a star really? Isn\u2019t that missing the point. This is a wise book. And a book of life has to be a book of wisdom. It\u2019s really so much more moving to read a love poem to a woman or man\u2013or talking to his children. Or going to Ireland to find a few Lallys and not be corny about it and it\u2019s not. Or to read the much older Michael\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 <\/em>while he\u2019s living and writing. Which is easy to play. \u2019Cause it\u2019s your book too.<\/p>\n

No, all I want to do
\nis sound like what I am always becoming,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist, performer, and art journalist.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from\u00a0<\/em>Another Way to Play: Poems 1960\u20132017<\/a>, the definitive collection of verse from the poet and activist Michael Lally, published by Seven Stories Press on\u00a0April 24, 2018<\/span><\/span>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Michael Lally\u2019s Another Way to Play, out next week, is an awesome book and you should read every word of it. You won\u2019t do it in a day or in many days, but during the passage of reading it\u00a0you will learn something about time. Another Way to Play seems to offer advice\u2014and it\u2019s advice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1228,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[33604,8960,5365,33605,11337,3338,7820,33603,33616,852],"class_list":["post-123871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-another-way-to-play","tag-chris-kraus","tag-eileen-myles","tag-gregory-millard","tag-james-schuyler","tag-just-kids","tag-kathy-acker","tag-michael-lally","tag-ntozake-shange","tag-patti-smith"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cFirst of All I\u2019m Naked\u201d: On the Collected Poems of Michael Lally<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"\u201cMichael began his poem like that. Naked. Yet it wasn\u2019t about it at all. 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