Jerome Sala : Getting It Right: Michael Lally’s Say It Again: An Autobiography in Sonnets, Volume One: The Road Goes Away (the first thirty years) 1942-1972

Say It Again: An Autobiography in Sonnets: An Autobiography in Sonnets, Volume One: The Road Goes Away (the first thirty years) 1942-1972, Michael Lally
Beltway Editions, 2023

 

 

 

One of the many pleasures of reading Michael Lally’s Say It Again, the autobiography of his first thirty years written entirely in sonnets, is meeting up with an incredible cast of characters. There are wild lovers, eccentric family members, jazz musicians, famous and not-so-famous poets, and other folks who are just plain freaks. One of my favorites is Billy, someone the author comes across in the early 60s who is a Duncan Yo-Yo salesman. His spouse, Sandy, has invited the poet over to their “pad” for a little romance (he is unaware she is married). As it all gets going, you find out that Billy is lurking in the background, and, as they say, “likes to watch.” Over breakfast the next morning, the couple tells the poet they have an open marriage and believe in free love—an arrangement no doubt considered rather avant-garde during this era. The poet’s pretending to be hip to all this adds a comic touch to the scene, and then, things get a little wackier as Lally and Billy begin to work together:

Billy works for Duncan yo-yos traveling the
country showcasing his yo-yo skills with the
usual tricks and a few spectacular ones of his
own. At parties he uses two yo-yos and their
strings to illustrate unique sexual scenarios or
he leans a quarter from the top of my ear to
the side of my head, then flicks the quarter off
with his yo-yo, not touching my ear or my hair.
He hires me as part of his stage act, playing
piano behind his tricks, ending with the coin
on my ear bit. He’s handsome in the manner
of old movie stars, with slicked-back dark hair,
smoky eyes, and the wisp of a smile exuding
confidence and some secret deviltry going on. (128)

This concise portrait illustrates the advantage of telling your life story in sonnets. Characters, incidents, and scenes take on an almost cinematic quality—each tightly edited to avoid the boring over-description one often gets in prose. I can imagine a young Christopher Walken playing Billy in some arthouse indie flick. But more than just entertaining, I think there is an ethical logic that inspires such portrayals. The vivid scenes and characters that flash by in the something like 450 sonnets create an alternate culture—one snuffed out by the world from which they are drawn. We find out later in the sequence that Billy and Sandy, busted on trumped-up “morals” and drug charges in connection with the coffee house they run (“a beatnik nuisance”), end up doing time. Billy, in fact, spends a year in solitary confinement. (138)

Lally has commented that “The few movies and books and plays and songs I knew that addressed the world of my family, often used…stereotypes, but never reflected my experience of who these people really were…” (Kimmelman). I think Say It Again extends the wish to “get it right” to all the people and scenes he encountered on his journey to become a poet. As a result, more than a self-portrait, the book is a chronicle of the times, a sort of “history from below” of the birth of what became known as the counterculture. Within these pages you’ll discover everything from how the three-quarter overcoat was a style invented by Puerto Rican street gangs “running from the bulls,” (69) to the impact of the early Beatles on local jazz scenes (159), to telling examples of the how political speech gets manipulated by media. (199)

Lally was in an excellent position to witness such cultural history, as Say It Again, volume one of his autobiography, covers the years 1942-72. His life is an odyssey from working-class South Orange, New Jersey roots, to a life as jazz musician in the Village, to a stint in the Air Force, where he was stationed in cities across the country. The book’s last third, covering the mid 60s to early 70s, is comprised of sonnets written about attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on the GI Bill, starting a poetry scene in Washington DC, and then hanging out again in NYC.

The inspiration he gained through witnessing the changes in the culture and himself gave birth to a major poetic career. Lally became a key figure of the New York School’s second generation, and in my eyes, is the literary godfather of many poetries, ranging from performance to punk. He is also the subject of a documentary currently in production. The cinematic quality of the sonnets perhaps hints at his later career, when he worked as both actor and script writer in the movie industry. Say It Again (Beltway Editions) along with Another Way to Play, Poems 1960-2017 (Seven Stories Press), offer an excellent introduction to his work.

The story behind his decision to write a life in sonnets reveals the project’s animating impulse.  During the “Iowa” section of the book, Lally relates how poet (and later renowned art critic) Peter Schjeldahl did a reading in which he recounted his daily life during a stay in Paris in the form of sonnets. From this, Lally got the idea to “distill the pages of prose on my early life/into twenty fourteen-liners I call THE SOUTH/ORANGE SONNETS, supporting my belief/that my own life is just as important as any/world traveler’s.” (227)

The sonnets, then, are not only a “distillation” of the poet’s journals, but might be seen as a translation of the “Parisian” sonnets into a different life and idiom— modulating the stylistic key from urbane to urban. The result is a streetwise poetics that defines for itself how the rhythm and music of a sonnet should work. Here is Sonnet #17 from the book’s “South Orange” section:

There is some music you have to listen to.
In South Orange there were rich Catholics
rich Protestants and rich Jews. My cousin
became a cop. His brother was stabbed by
an Italian called Lemon Drop. Across the
street lived two brothers called Loaf and
Half a Loaf. My brother became a cop. On
St. Patrick’s Day 1958 I came home drunk. My
mother said He’s only fifteen. My father:
It had to happen once. My grandfather was
a cop. One cousin won a beauty contest at
thirteen. My sister married a cop. By 1959
I knew I was going to be a jazz musician.
My father joined AA before I was even born. (33)

A glance at this sonnet reveals some of the marks of Lally’s style: sneaky internal on and off rhymes (so you hear the echoes, without knowing exactly where they come from), staccato sentences and quick flashing events, repeating words and phrases that pepper the rhythm with swagger. And though not every sonnet carries all these traits, there’s an overriding feature here that appears again and again: this is a social poetry, a poetry as much about life in public as in private, a poetry of names. The writing shares this quality with other art forms that portray subcultures. Think of the lyrics of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” introducing listeners to Candy, Little Joe and Holly; Kerouac’s Sal Paradise and Carlo Marx (to name a few); or that scene early on in Scorsese’s Goodfellas, where you meet Jimmy Two-times, Frankie Carbone, Sally Balls, Freddie No-nose, Nicky Eyes, and the rest of the crew.

In Lally’s sonnets, this poetry of names is extended from people to places; you meet Bambi, Destiny, Cliff, Dewit, the Harlem beauty Theresa, along with Dylan and Ginsberg, at places such as THE FAT BLACK PUSSY CAT, OBIES, PRIDE’S CASTLE. And then, later, there are cameos of writers who were to become poetry “names”: Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Anselm Hollo, Lewis MacAdams, Terence Winch, Diane Wakoski, Ray DiPalma and others. I think of the book as a sort of subcultural pastoral, where nymphs, satyrs, flora and fauna, are replaced by underground celebrities, hangouts and cultural hotspots.

Throughout this collection, such characters tend to bounce into each other, much as their names do, in the tight spaces of the sonnets. This helps create the cadence of the writing and in doing so, mirrors a characteristic of Lally’s world: no one wants to stay in their (socially) “assigned” places. Ethnicities, cultural styles, and sexualities, not only rub shoulders but rub off on each other, changing mores, widening visions.

All of which is to say the mini worlds of the sonnets are places of porous borders. There are racial crossings: the earlier sonnets, the age of the so-called “White Negro,” feature numerous interracial love affairs, at a time when this was a dangerous way to love. The poet’s urban roots, career as a jazz pianist (not to mention his stint in the Air Force), lead to what might have been considered at the time a kind of interracial trespassing. And there is not only interaction, but metamorphosis. The author transforms from alcoholic to sober to drug user, from macho to feminist, jazz musician to poet, vet to political activist, straight to bi. His cast of characters shifts shapes along with him. One of my personal favorites is an activist named “Mike J.” The son of a Broadway producer, “Mike fell in love/with Chicago, its working class and poor,/while he was on a football scholarship to Lake/Forest and dedicated his life to helping them.” (213) A few sonnets later, we see a character reconstructed along both ideologic and stylistic lines, one whose fluid class identity helps serve the movement:

Mike J slicks his blonde hair back greaser style,
as they call it in Chicago, wears a three-
quarter length black leather coat, same as my
own. Known as an SDS leader nationally, after
LIFE did a story on him, he has an idea for
organizing Chicago’s white gang kids into a
radical street organization and wants me to join
him. We begin spending more time in Chicago
and discover he not only runs with the Black
Panthers, and white street gangs, and sons of
hillbilly immigrants from the South, but also
moves with ease among the liberal elite of the
city, raising money and backers for the cause…(217)

Looking at the variety of racial, sexual, ethnic, and class identities, not to mention the cultural idiosyncrasies of culture styles, the choice of the single form of the sonnet to house it all becomes particularly interesting. As I’ve mentioned, the tight editing involved helps these stories move briskly, so much so that I found myself wishing all memoirs were written in taut poetic forms. But in addition to pacing there is, as I hinted at earlier, an ethical advantage.

These sonnets, however internally modified, keep to their classical fourteen lines. As such, the form forces the author to decide what counts. As mentioned, interactions with major media in the sonnets show how words get put in the mouths of the speakers, and how cultural particularity gets distorted when framed in clichés. I read the sonnets as a way of setting the record straight, as if to say: “no, look here, this is what’s important.”  Add to this the fact that the poetry, as a genre, is often seen as an art form that just doesn’t count, and you can interpret the sonnets as a way of insisting on the importance of people, events movements and even forms of creativity that are ignored  or forgotten by the culture at large.

There’s also the fact that the sonnet itself is a somewhat universal form, at least for the Western canon. It’s interesting to note that the saints of universality who populate these poems all meet with assassination. There are sonnets dedicated to Malcom X (killed when he began to explore cross-cultural alliances (203), Fred Hampton (“the/young charismatic, coalition-building-with-poor-and-working-class whites, Chicago Black/Panther leader I’ve met and admire”) (237), and, of course, Martin Luther King, who…

spent years fighting racism and despite attempts
on his life and tons of threats seemed invulner-
able, but as soon as he organized a poor people’s
campaign talking about the haves and the have-nots,
BAM! I wonder if the Marxists have it right. (203)

Though no doubt beyond the author’s intention, in retrospect, it’s hard not to read the insistence of the sonnet form as the one that houses the many, as perhaps a micro version of a utopian wish for a unified movement toward true democracy.

In any case, the sheer utopian joy of metamorphosis in the sonnets is exactly the type of pleasure now under suspicion in our times. US politics and culture seem still fighting a war over the social liberation movements of the 60s and 70s. The great delight these sonnets offer, though, suggests no matter the rhetoric and repressions of our current time, it may be impossible to force the genii of the freedoms represented here back into their restrictive bottle. We need these sonnets now, more than ever, to remind us of not just the tragedies that won these freedoms, but the joy that inspired them.

 

Notes:
Burt Kimmelman, “The Crowd Inside Me.” Interview with Michael Lally. Jacket 2. August 29, 2011. https://jacket2.org/interviews/crowd-inside-me

Jerome Sala’s latest books are How Much? New and Selected Poems (NYQ Books) and a chapbook written in collaboration with his spouse, poet Elaine Equi, entitled Double Feature (Insurance Editions). Forthcoming in 2025 is a new collection entitled Glop from BlazeVOX. Other books include Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books), The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier), and Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull). His work also appears in many anthologies including Pathetic Literature (Grove Atlantic) and two editions of Best American Poetry (Scribners).

Jack Skelley : How Much? New and Selected Poems, by Jerome Sala

How Much? New and Selected Poems, Jerome Sala
NYQ Books, 2022

 

 

 

“Language is a virus,” goes the famous William Burroughs quote. It captures the force (both creative and destructive; Shiva and Brahma in one) of culture itself. For, extending from the language virus, in the largest sense, is the culture virus – the eons-long construct that elevates humans from nature, creates civilizations and shapes minds. It has always been the poets to grasp this double-edged influence: They understand how it forms the “reality” which mediates communications, while they push its limits to pervert or play with its constructions/constrictions.

Where Burroughs and his progeny – prose criminal Kathy Acker, “new narrative” baffler Chris Kraus, or stylistic wrongdoer Dennis Cooper – undermine culture itself by exploding the norms of narrative, in the universe of verse there is a sub-group training the weapons of language upon itself, and upon the throbbing mass of the popular culture. Call them the “pop poets”

It’s a small group. For some reason, the most blatantly pervasive form of culture – pop culture – has gone relatively unexplored by poets. Leaving aside why this is the case (snobbery towards the “low-brow”?), and glossing over the handful of other pop poets of the past few decades, one always returns to Jerome Sala.

For decades now, Sala has troped movies, money, advertising, and other pulpy topics into deeply amusing verse. Much of this insight comes from his lifetime as a professional copywriter. No one else exploits, unmasks and elates the language of marketing and commodification to such edgy fulfillment.

(Here we pause to acknowledge others who have alchemized pop dreck into verse quintessence. Frank O’Hara’s “I do this I do that” poems are in-the-moment mind-gasms plied from tabloids and bottles of Coke; writings so pith-packed, and embodying the act of poesis itself, that they propelled much of the New York School canon. In this group include someone naturally close to Sala: His partner, Elaine Equi, who for decades has wrought exquisite insight from quotidian stuff – from “Ambien” to “Unisex Cologne,” all the way beyond internet memes.)

Now, from NYC Books, comes a crowning volume for Sala – How Much: New and Selected Poems. It gathers his stunning past work, while its newest poems take on “the economy.” Again, I defy you to find another writer assaying such a vastly relevant subject – one that stares us in the face, not only impacting everyone, but also embodying themes ostensibly central to socially enlightened artists: wealth, privilege, injustice. Sala lets his wit loose. These are linguistic puzzles, solving/questioning, via sophisticated-but-clear wordplay, the weighty issues. Their rhetorical arguments are jammed with high-order puns. Like the “conceits” of John Donne and other 17^th century Metaphysical poets, Sala’s verse unwraps surprises.

“Long Shot,” for example, turns investment cliches upon poetry itself:

Long Shot

Like a pension plan manager who invests
in hedge funds because in a low
interest rate environment, where
people are living longer, bonds
no longer stand fast as pillars
of dependable growth, so too the
poem can no longer depend upon
the interest of others to
verify its own value, or even
existence. Instead, like a financial
steward, it must steer an uncertain
course through turbulent waters,
hedging its bets by telling itself
a tale about a future it knows may
be nothing more than a Ponzi scheme.
For the waves of an uncertain planet
may one day wash its pages clean.

The disclaimers of a prospectus warp into a warning sign to the species. “Uncertain” investments and economies mirror the existential fragility of poetry itself (and, by extension, culture as defined above). The terms “hedge,” “bonds,” “growth,” “interest” and “value” do double shifts applying Wall Street jargon to the intrinsic “value” of art … especially (as the final couplet cautions) in the face of planetary destruction. The more you read it the more meaning it milks, including an “Ozymandias” echo in “stand fast as pillars.”

Sala and I recently discussed his approach over at The Best American Poetry: “I’m fascinated by how the spiritual values of our world have been secularized by media, commodification, and simulation,” he said. “To explore this, I like to take what seem like the most fleeting instances of culture and write about them as if they were holy monuments.”

You see the Sala trick apply itself to all manner of material. A major section of How Much? includes “Corporate Sonnets” – 30 formally satisfying and amusing poems layering clichés to gather gravitas. Their high irony channels sonneteers from Edmund Spenser to Ted Berrigan. My favorite (today) turns on the concept of a “personal brand.” Corporate Sonnet 20 dares to suggest that success in the poetry game comes less from what you write than who you know, or how well-known you are. (How big of a fish in that small pond.) Its first lines come right out and say…

          A poem is like an ad; it’s not what it says, but who says it.
          What’s taken for genius, the result not necessarily of wit
          But of the sorts of cultural capital displayed along with it,
          Writers sell shares of themselves on the literary stock exchange.
          Some advance through connections, the famous names they
          They can drop or pick up.

These sonnets are from Sala’s 2020 volume Corporations are People Too! It’s a title that plays off Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign admission of pro-business bias. In Sala’s reversal and enlargement of scope, people incorporate themselves into petit entrepreneurs. Even poets.

How Much? spotlights another Sala specialty: product placement poems. These odes to commodities and how language (specifically, naming, branding, concepting) sells them, display ebullient yet jaundiced insight as only an ad man’s can, here’s…

Ice Breakers Spearmint Mints

The natural joined with the artificial
to flavor this aid to social ease
peppered with mint crystals
in the form of green pin pricks
embedded within a blank tablet.
False ice sooths as it melts, alluding
to the distant fires of sensual feeling
in that Eden some dream about
before such tingles got framed in the prefabricated
commotion a promising commodity brings
to the market. Ice Breakers is owned
by the Hershey Company, today trading
at $90.23 a share on the NYSE. By the time
this poem touches home in the book of the future,
this figure will date it, throwing its status as a member
of the tribe that eschews contingency into doubt.
For now, though, in the dissolving present,
Isn’t it enough to simply feel cool?

The gum allows one to chew colors, tastes, tingles, nostalgia, and sexy social acceptance: just what an ad agency likely pitched to Hershey. The poet goes further. He harkens to dreams of a lost Paradise while eyeing the company’s future value. It’s all cuneiformed into the blank slate of contemporary commerce. (And any decent creative director would have done the same in their meeting with Hershey execs.)

How Much? has more tasty treats, including from his early days as punk provocateur in Chicago. These items are formally unruly, and one sees him ranting them in a nightclub reading. But even these divine social import from seemingly superfluous trends, fashions, TV shows and celebs.

As Sala said to me in Best American Poetry, “Instead of philosophizing about the meaning of life, I have written poems debating the meaning of Coke.” Thus, the book includes his hilarious series of Coke poems too. Frank O’Hara would approve.

 

 

 

 

 

Jack Skelley is the author of: Monsters (Little Caesar Press), Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred & Barney Press), Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing (BlazeVOX) and The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), 2023). He is songwriter and guitarist for psychedelic surf band Lawndale (SST Records).
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/helterskelley/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackSkelley

Jerome Sala : Six poems

 

 

 

Philosophy of the Discount

Money off the original price
means no product maintains a royal status.

All can be brought down
to the level of the commoner.

But there are Rolls Royce limits.
Each product owns a price point
that functions as its horizon line.
To exceed it is to cause sticker shock.
To retreat from it is to be cast from the land of profit
into the outer darkness of lost investment.

That an economy has a soul is an illusion—
a function of the stories it tells itself
so as to appear coherent.

Though it coheres to only a tiny cohort,
it preaches universal access
to avoid the collapse of democratic credibility.

The discount, not a sentient being itself,
pays no heed to such tales.
It constructs rebel enclaves called Dollar Stores
and relentlessly subsumes brand image.

Like the Borg in Star Trek,
it burrows into marketing intelligence,
devouring brand narratives and ontologies,
relentlessly undermining differentiation
until the once celebrated cornucopia
devolves into a colorless blur.

Motivated by the terror of the indistinct,
new technologies are born to relieve boredom.
To make up for lost time initially they gouge and plunder,
until they are replicated beyond difference.

At which point they compete by price
and the cycle begins again.

 

 

The Authoritarian Century

“The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.”
                                                                        —Hegel

When it happened, people were saying it hadn’t;
now that it’s easing up, they’re saying that it has.
We must forgive the owl, Minerva and history itself
for arriving late to the catastrophe. It takes time
to realize you’ve been hit in the head with a bat.
At first, you just see flashbulbs.
Or when you’re in a car wreck.
You awaken from a blackout that followed a wild brightness.
You see broken glass and hear cries. They shine a light
in the window, saying “this one’s dead; leave him for later.”
You shout, “no, no, I’m alive.”
And you start to remember your name.

 

 

Society Must Be Defended

from this poem. Its inconsequence is a problem.
A problem Society doesn’t know about.
Problems known, as we all know (don’t we?)
can be harvested, like souls in need of repentance.
But the uncounted are worse than the uncooperative.
They are likely to increase or disorganize
the way of all flesh if allowed to bask
on their undiscovered beaches. Many unknowns
are out there. They are, in fact, known as “the many.”
The only traces they leave are something like black holes.
You know you see something, but on closer inspection,
you’re just gazing at absence. No one blames you
for looking away. After a while, all social space
seems more and more empty. That it goes on
like this for infinity. Scary. But not to worry.
Authorities assure us this too must end.

 

 

Color My World

Like a line drawing of an orchard
to which you bring your own crayons
but when you arrive at the page in the coloring book
discover that it’s already colored in
and in the colors you’d expect,
it’s hard to discern what causes the ordinary order.
Was it you who made the page the way it is?
Did something guide your hand?
Was it comforting that way?
Hitchcock claimed the movie Topaz
was an experiment in in yellow, white and red
to determine if a color scheme
could influence the plot.
He decided that it did not,
but maybe he was wrong about his wrongness.
Doesn’t the streetlight order traffic
into the plot of green, yellow and red?
“You go to my head”
Bryan Ferry sang in 1983
on the Let’s Stick Together album.
The cover of these cover versions was ordered
by his white suit, blue shirt and black hair.
It stares out from the past,
an order now overcome
by the coloring book of the next era:
you could dress like that today
and it might mean tearing apart
instead of sticking together
like the color red
which once meant left wing
and now means right.
It’s as if red was in a fight with itself.
It’s like the universal
trying on one particular after another
as if reality were a collection of hats.
You’d think after a while it would realize
it doesn’t look good in hats anymore,
but history might find that revolting.

 

 

Vitamin Sea

The health food store reveals itself
for what it was all along: a vitamin shop.
Merchant of condensed wellness
an astronaut feast
in all the colors
that the laws of advanced data analysis
have decreed.

As you are guided through these grocery aisles of supplements
you learn the necessity of the add on:
busy people can’t eat farms.
Attuned to this forum of ingredients they are led
into a chalky future of muscular promise.

At the counter as you pay
they match your phone number
to the savings cult
to which you were granted membership.
Like all secret societies it promises enhanced powers.
Think of the ads in the back of arcane comics—
the kind and fit always triumph
over the crude bodies of coercion
who initially torment them.

Learn to play the long game
supplemental wisdom declares
become a tortoise with a magnificent shell.

 

 

Anti-Ode: Huckleberry Hound

Big smiling blue dog with a phony Southern drawl
Who tipped a yellow straw hat with a corny mischievous look
Who tried to be a dog catcher, a medieval knight, a gladiator and rocket scientist
I don’t remember much of your dumb cartoons
But I remember trying to like them
So you are a forced laugh
An awkward mental handshake
Like when you meet a business connection at a convention
Someone you’re supposed to get next to
And can’t think of what to say
And yet can’t get away
And the connection keeps talking about what you’re supposed to be interested in
And you fight your face against exposing your boredom

Down with Huckleberry Hound!
Down with Saturday morning cartoons!
Down with the idea that when you’re a child you should think like a child
And be enraptured by a stupid blue dog
And the thousand screaming commercials that chase its tail
Unlike the dog catcher Huckleberry Hound unsuccessfully portrayed in a mind-numbingly
   boring episode
In the new world no longer shall we teach children to emulate their captors!
In the new world they shall turn the tables on these monsters!

All power to the Children’s Revolutionary Cartoon Network!
All power to the Children’s Revolutionary Ad Agency!
Down with capitalist running dogs such as Huckleberry Hound.
May they turn back into the rectangles from which they were drawn!

 

 

 

 

Jerome Sala’s latest book is How Much? New and Selected Poems (NYQ Books).  Other books include cult classics such as Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books), The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier), and Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull). Widely published, his work appears in Pathetic Literature (Grove Atlantic) and two editions of Best American Poetry (Scribners). His blog, on poetry, pop culture and everyday life, is espresso bongo (https://espressobongo.typepad.com/).