Re-Reading Michael Lally's South Orange Sonnets [Terence Winch]

                                                          Michael Lally, March 2022
 

[Note: this post appeared on the Best American Poetry blog on 30 July 2008. It has been slightly edited and updated here.]

I do a great deal of my reading on the Washington subway, as a daily commuter to and from my job in DC. (I’m one of the few poets I know who works a 9 to 5 office job. I’m not complaining―I like my job―but full-time work does take a serious bite out of one’s day.)

My subway reading this morning was Michael Lally’s South Orange Sonnets, a little book of 20 poems that had a significance influence on me as a young poet more than 35 years ago. Michael Lally is a singular, original voice in American literature. I first met him in November of 1971, right after moving to DC from the Bronx, and we became instant best friends, which we’ve remained ever since.He was responsible for organizing Mass Transit, a weekly open poetry session in DC that helped launch the writing lives of many poets down here. In the years since, Michael has published a prodigious amount of work, including two recent, fat books of poetry and prose from Black Sparrow and a long poem called “March 18,2003,” written at the start of the Iraq war, that is the best piece of political poetry you will read on the context for that terrible misadventure. He also became a fairly successful actor, with parts in many t.v. shows (Law and Order, JAG, Deadwood, etc.) and movies. Michael even had the lead a couple of low-budget horror films that scared me, if no one else (but I have never been able to watch horror movies). If you read any substantive sample of his work, you will get a vivid sense of his life story and his obsessions―Michael’s writing is, at its heart, an absolutely convincing and brilliantly rendered enterprise in self-mythologizing. In last few years, his eclectic interests―rooted in a passionate knowledge of politics, music, poetry, and life―are on almost daily display via his blog, called Lally’s Alley.

Here is a sample from SOS:

4

In East Orange Carol Robinson decided I

was her boyfriend. Her father found out

before I did. Told his friends and neigh-

bors how he didn’t want no white boy hang-

ing around his little girl. One asked me

not to pass the time at his house anymore

listening to his son’s Clifford Browns or

talking to his twin daughters. Walking

home that night three teenagers sitting

on a stoop on Halstead Street yelled: Hey

white boy, whatchu doin aroun here? You

know where you are? Where you from? When

I answered South Orange this fat girl said

Shoot, that muss be Carol Robs turkey.

9

When my mother died two Irish geat aunts

Came over from New York. The brassy one

wore her hat tilted and always sat with

her legs wide apart. At the wake she told

me loud You look like your grandfather

the cop if you ever get like him shoot

yourself. The other one waited til after

the funeral to pull my ear down to her

level and whisper Youre a good looking

young man but if you don’t shave off them

side boards people will mistake you for

a Puerto Rican. We had so many cousins

in our neighborhood everybody called my

mother Aunt Irene. Even the Italians.

20

My father lost the store, we all went to

work when I was ten. Then he became a

ward healer. My grandfather was dead before

I knew he spoke Gaelic. My father could

remember when they had mules instead of

automobiles and you had to remove your cap

and step to the curb to let the rich walk

by. My grandfather was glad to die in the

USA. He’d say if you can’t find a job within

thirty miles of New York City there aren’t

any jobs to be found. My father would say

You can write all the poetry you want to

when youre a millionaire. Eddie would say

You got to try a shoe on before you buy it.

The South Orange Sonnets has never lost its impact for me. The language is perfectly in tune, with not a wasted note or an extra space anywhere in the text. This book is also a classic of contemporary Irish-American literature.

____________________________________________________________________________________

UPDATE:   Since this post first appeared in 2008, Michael has not been idle. His two most important recent collections are Another Way to Play, a magnificent selected poems from Seven Stories Press, and Say It Again, his extraordinary 450-sonnet autobiographical epic from Beltway Editions. Both books come with great intros from Eileen Myles and Doug Lang, respectively.

                           Terence Winch, Michael Lally, and Doug Lang. Silver Spring, MD, June 2018.

                                                             Michael Lally, cover of Little Caesar 11, 1980

  ©Terence Winch  
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