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Cant Be Wrong

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Slum kid from Newark, SDS leader, Iowa City Writers Workshop poet, TV & film actor in Hollywood and always Cupid's priest, Lally's coats protect him from loss as he looks for love that is his for being himself. In this book, he visits his long-dead first wife, whose unconditional acceptance of him still haunts, and looks for roots in Ireland. Here again, Lally models consciousness in the act of becoming consciousness, mind & feeling expanding over the edge of their event horizon: Coltrane as poet.

Michael Lally, B-Boy charmer on the contemporary poetry set since the 1950s, steps right up to the "Cant Be Wrong" podium, his 22nd book, and freshly delivers that confessional prose poem reserved for a renegade Irish Catholic working class kid from New Jersey doing well in Hollywood as only he can cant it.
The rhythm is east coast chitchat ripples splitting out to greater discourses in the river that is Lally's lifesong. Line breaks guide Lally's rhythm, embody this performer's sway on the page, so that each line laps around a necessary rock and breaks froth, spuming destinies within destinies. Lally's poems are water, wine and blood, torrents he has fallen into and tells of, and in the telling, falls again into a new cant.
The poems in "Can't Be Wrong," tales of a mess of a man straightening up and flying right, pay tribute to the "Poetry in Motion" method Lally and partner Eve Brandstein brought to standing room only Los Angeles nightclubs every Wednesday night for six years in the mid-1980s.
Reintroduced in "Cant Be Wrong" (Coffee House Press, Minneapolis), a good portion of the titles are from the good old days when Lally and Brandstein would ask Poetry In Motion performers to read on a topic. Falling between "Going Home Again" and "Where Do We Belong?," Poetry In Motion buffs will delight in the full text versions of "Having It All," "They Must Be Gods and Goddesses," "Lost Angels," "Attitude and Beatitude" and other nightclub faves in Lally's torrential log.
The collection's undercurrent, however, is Lally, adrift in the "cant be wrong" eddy, asking if the telling of the tale can ever be as pure as the living that made the tale.
New York or Ireland, widower or son's girlfriend's lover, disco dancer or "god," Lally shores up at home with himself, a million destinies away from the beginning, but still in the middle. As a child in his father's house (from "Sports Heroes, Cops, and Lace"): "It was like living inside a/ Damon Runyon story, and I dug the romance of it,/ because despite the idea people/ usually have who have never lived that life, it is romantic,/ in fact, that's one of the appeals/ of that world, any kind of underworld, the bookies/ the petty crooks and over-the-hill/ champs, there was a glamour and/ a romance there, even with the old bags and bums like/ Boots and Mary, hey, I used to see/ them holding hands as they searched the ground for butts."
"Cant Be Wrong" flows. Poem one to 23, this collection is easy to jump into.

Very occasionally--I mean VERY occasionally--shards of wisdom and insight will break out of the long, continuous, breathless skeins of Michael Lally's verse, showing him to have been an active combatant in the cultural and social wars of the 1960s. Ninety-nine percent of the time, however, it's just Lally talking about himself--endlessly, emphatically, dully about himself--with nothing in the way of memorable language, image, or even storytelling to hold the reader's interest. "Can't Be Wrong" is exactly the sort of navel-gazing stuff that gives Beat poetry a bad name.