The Best American Poetry

Memo to Bridie Flynn (by Terence Winch)

My mother's name was Bridget Flynn.  One of eleven children, she was born just outside of the town of Loughrea, in county Galway, Ireland, on 23 November 1906.  Eight of her siblings stayed in Ireland, so I have many cousins there. The house (greatly modernized) and land are still in the family, owned by my cousin Martin Flynn, with whom I am close.  My mother immigrated to New York sometime in the early 1920s.  She married my father, Patrick Winch, in 1930. I am the youngest of their five children (first came Kevin, then Patricia, Eileen, and James).

Known as Bridie, my mother died on 14 January 1962, at age 55, after a long struggle with breast cancer. I was 16 at the time, and took her death very hard. In many ways that loss has marked me for life, and its aftermath has certainly had an impact on my writing. I had forgotten about the poem included here, which was written in 2005 and has never before been published.

My mother was funny, smart, and tough, with a bountiful supply of Irish farmgirl wisdom: you have to eat a pound of dirt before you die, she'd say. Or: you'll be better before you get married.  Or: you could talk the cross off an ass. I would guess that the photo above was taken when she was about 17, probably not long after arriving in the U.S. But since she came here as something akin to an indentured servant, I wondered about the stylish outfit she is wearing in the photo.  My cousin Mary Winch suggests that the photography studio may have provided it.  My mother missed Ireland all her life, but loved New York and hated going beyond the city limits.  The photo below is one of the last I have of her, taken by the back door of the Dew Drop Inn on 114th Street in Rockaway Beach, Queens, in the summer of 1960. Rockaway was "The Irish Riviera" in those days, and we spent all or part of the summer there when I was growing up. She was already sick when the photograph was taken, but not yet bedridden.     

___________________________________________________
 

­­­­­

Memo to Bridie Flynn

Your eldest son says he is dying fast, but he’s been claiming

that for years and still seems solid and hardy. Your middle son’s life

is an ongoing party of which he is the host. Your youngest son

has a job with his own little cubicle. He walks a lot, listens to music.

Makes tea every hour and a half or so, like all the Irish. 

For your elder daughter, life is a very happy

social event.  She lives in a doublewide  in Florida

with her husband, who just turned seventy-five. She loves

to talk, but her health isn’t too good. Your younger daughter,

the family beauty, is also the most spiritual of us all.

 

  

 

You’d be ninety-nine if you were still alive.  But you found

it necessary to die in 1962.  Jesus, Mom, 1962!  Kennedy

was president. I was in high school. Even I, your baby,

am now older than you ever were.  I knew there was no God

when you died.  I knew there was no afterlife when you

failed to visit me from the beyond.  I know there is food,

sex, music, books, sleep, art, movies, friends, talk, love.

Please tell me that’s enough. Just once, pay a little visit.

Tell me what I need to know before you go.

 

(ed note:  This post first appeared here on May 9, 2010)

William McPherson’s "Testing the Current" Takes an Encore [Terence Winch]

It was something of a surprise to the literary world when William McPherson published his first novel, Testing the Current, in 1984. Not that Bill was exactly an unknown—a former book editor at Morrow in NYC,  founding editor of The Washington Post’s Book World section (and later a Post columnist), and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism in 1977, Bill seemed to know everyone on the East Coast who had ever written a noteworthy paragraph. At Book World, he opened the doors to coverage of contemporary poetry and even recruited people like me, Michael Lally, and Doug Lang as frequent reviewers. His creative and generous spirit really set him apart from other members of the literary establishment. Though he’d published some poems in The New Yorker and elsewhere, Testing the Current was to be a turning point in his life. He would, eventually, permanently leave the reviewing stand for the stage itself. (above: William McPherson, 1987. Photo (c) Nancy Crampton)

Maybe if the book had bombed, Bill would have remained primarily a journalist, but Testing the Current was met with the kind of reception writers fantasize about. In my copy of the original, I stuck three of the reviews that  greeted the novel’s appearance. Russell Banks, in the NY Times, opens his piece with this: “William McPherson’s first novel is an extraordinarily intelligent, powerful and, I believe, permanent contribution to the literature of family, childhood and memory.”  People proclaims that Testing the Current  is “a beautiful first novel that provides a sharp, glowing portrait of a Midwestern town on the eve of World War II. McPherson’s loving attention to detail and the ... funny, moving point of view keep the writing constantly fresh and involving.” USA Today says the novel  “...is brilliant. In places it is absolutely breathtaking.”  Testing the Current tells the story of a boy of around eight years old named Tommy MacAllister. Bill followed up on Tommy’s story three years later with To the Sargasso Sea, also well-received.

Ever the adventurer, Bill headed to Europe in 1989 to witness firsthand the fall of the Communist empire, winding up on and off for most of the next six years in Rumania, where he became something of a national celebrity. While that intriguing and amazing sharp turn resulted in some first-rate reporting for several journals, it left his readers still awaiting the third novel in the MacAllister saga. What’s more, the first two novels had long been out of print. (right: Michael Dirda & William McPherson, Politics & Prose Bookstore, DC, 26 Jan 2012)

But, now, thanks to New York Review Books and D.T. Max (who wrote the Afterword), Testing the Current, originally published by Simon & Schuster, is back in print.  And last night at Politics & Prose Bookstore in D.C., a multitude of Bill’s friends and fans turned out for a Q&A between Bill and the eminent writer and critic Michael Dirda, all to mark this significant comeback of an American classic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bill McPherson signs a book for DC artist Susan Campbell, Politics & Prose, 26 Jan 2012.

A Bronx Irish Christmas Long Ago (by Terence Winch)

  
In the kitchen at 1912 Daly Ave, Bronx, NY, ca. 1961: Paddy Winch, Bridie (nee Flynn) Winch, my brother-in-law Kenny Reich, Jesse [Jimmy] Winch, Terence  Winch, P.J. Conway.

 

C E L E B R A T I O N

___________________________

In our world, nothing compared

with Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.

God’s power surging through the congregation,

from altarboys in our stiff collars and big red bows,

to the solid men of the parish in their finest array:

Blue suits, gold wrist watches, crisp white shirts.

The women perfumed and girdled, lipsticked

and bejeweled.  Enough incense

in the air to do the Wise Men proud.

 

The procession wound through the church,

organ honking, voices lifted in the special

Christmas sense of the slate wiped clean

and the universe beginning anew.

The tree in the house lit with fat colored bulbs

that looked good enough to eat. The old suitcase

full of fragile decorations, buried treasure found

every year on Christmas Eve and set free again.

The baby Jesus alive and well!  Herod thwarted!

 

This called for presents.  Toys, games, maybe

a watch or a knife.  Along with Jesus came the whole

cast of Yuletide characters—Santa, Rudolph,

the Chipmunks, Bing Crosby, Frosty, Scrooge. 

I’m surprised the Easter Bunny didn’t crash

the event.  My father put out apple pie

and a glass of milk for Sanny, the remaining traces

of which on Christmas morning were proof enough

for me and my brother Jimmy of the entire

supernatural infrastructure of Bronx Irish culture.

 

But it was the party after Midnight Mass

that I remember most.  Relatives and neighbors

would pour into our apartment for an all-nighter.

My mother would get the percolator going,

and start making breakfast for half the parish.

Bacon, eggs, blood pudding, plates of fresh rolls

with poppy seeds bought that day

in the Treat Bakery on Tremont Avenue. 

 

Eating breakfast at two in the morning!

This was a miracle for a ten-year-old boy. 

Bottles of Seagram’s and Canadian Club

stood at attention on the kitchen table,

silver ice bucket ringed with penguins

awaiting duty beside them.  Ladies smoking

and gossiping.  Glasses clinking.  Laughter

throughout the house.  The smell of pine,

the delicious aroma of sizzling bacon,

all welcoming Jesus back for another year.

 

Then the music and singing would start up,

my father on the banjo, P. J. Conway on the box.

The Stack of Barley, The Lakes of Sligo,

medleys of marches, waltzes, and polkas.

Theresa McNally, from my mother’s own town

in Galway, would sing “Galway Bay.”  Steps would

be danced, jokes told, more drinks mixed and gulped.

 

I would go to bed so filled with the spirit

it seemed impossible to believe that life could

ever return to normal.  Lying there exhausted,

but anxious to sneak down the hall at the earliest

opportunity and tear open the tantalizing packages,

I believed in everything: Jesus our Lord, Santa

our magic benefactor, my parents the immortal source

of the ongoing celebration that could never end.   

 

 [from Boy Drinkers, Hanging Loose Press, 2007]

 

Celebration, read by Pat Broaders of the Chicago-based band Bohola

 

 

P.J. Conway, my father Paddy Winch, and Brian Keenan in 1958.  P.J. and my father performed locally in NY as "The Two Pats."  If they had a drummer for any particular gig, it would either be me, my brother Jesse, or P.J.'s nephew Brian Keenan, who immigrated from England in the '50s.  Brian went on to become the drummer for The Chambers Brothers, who were popular in the '60s and later.  He died pretty young, and lived pretty hard, as I recall. I am the steward of P.J.'s Walters D/C# accordion and my father's Vega tenor banjo, seen in this photo. I used to have one of those green plaid tuxedo jackets, too, but it has vanished.

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The Chambers Brothers

(ed note: This post originally appeared on December 23, 2010)

Vermouth plus what equals Martini?

On his blog,, the indefatigable Tom Clark salutes Terence Winch today.

A toast
to both these gentlemen
on the occasion of this post.

To the question above, the answer is
a) sin, b), gin, c) the din in your local gin, d) a win-win situation.

"Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine." -- DL

Going Out Talking---Remembering John McCarthy (Terence Winch)

Left: Doug Lang, Myron Bretholz, John McCarthy, Terence Winch, Beth Rake, Bernard Welt, Becky Levenson, Susan Campbell, late 1970s, 1920 S St NW, DC

 

 

 

 

Nine years ago this month, I got a call at work from Beth Rake, my friend John McCarthy’s wife, informing me that John was in the hospital with a diagnosis of liver cancer.  He died about a month later, at age 60. In that last month, however, he showed such unbelievable courage and good humor that those of us close to him still marvel at the way he died. John & I grew up in the same neighborhood in the Bronx and became friends when I was about 14 and he was 17. He was the only child of a father from county Kerry and a mother from Tipperary. He was also an amazing storyteller, comedian, mimic, singer, and spoons-player. With John’s permission, I recorded 3 or 4 of our final phone conversations. When Beth asked me to write something for the funeral program, I proposed instead that I put together a “poem” taken from some of the words John spoke during those conversations. Here is that piece:

Going Out Talking

I’m not gonna get better, barring a miracle,
which I don’t close the door on. But at the same time,
I can only deal with what’s on the table.  It’s strange
enough to die, but it don’t even seem odd to me anymore.
It just seems to be my time.

My appetite hasn’t left me, but neither has
my appetite and need for spiritual nourishment.
I like the Pope personally.  I have no problem with him.
However, there is the fact that he’ll meet with terrorists
before he’ll meet with gays.

Doctors all say the same things. 
“Roll over” is one of their big ones.

Today I feel fine.  Yesterday I o.d.’ed on codeine.  It was terrible.
I called them up and told the nurse, “You know these Tylenols with codeine?
If I had the strength, I’d throw them out the window.  I’ll never take another
one again.”  I said to her, “I want morphine.”  Which I don’t have a severe
reaction to.  They brought me morphine, man.  There’s enough here
to start a business. I got morphine in the fridge, and some here by my bookcase
in case I have a problem during the night.  So far, I haven’t had much pain.
I got a new pain the other day: the inside of my liver feels like there’s a finger
pointing in it, which I began to refer to as “The Finger of Doom.”

It’s all about death.  It’s all about time, and making you comfortable,
and dying at home. That’s the deal: the doctors are out, the pain management
people are in, the nurses come to monitor the progress.  The cards are stacked
for a peaceful death. I have stuff for aggravation—if I get aggravated,
I have stuff I put on my tongue. Maybe I could get some for you. 
You could keep it in your desk at work.

The nurses were saying, “This must be terrible pain.”  I immediately
and deliberately told them—I repeated it three times, so I hope they got it—
“This is okay.” I keep saying to them, “It’s okay, it’s okay, don’t you understand? 
It’s really okay.”

I’ve become part of you.  You’ll remember things we did together. 
Things will come to you.  Stories.  In a mysterious, spiritual way.
You’ll say something that’s a McCarthyism.  You want me to haunt you? 
I’ve even thought jokingly of threatening people if I didn’t get my way
on what I was demanding on my deathbed: “I swear I’ll haunt you.”

I like the idea of flying.  I’m beginning to really like the idea
of joining my mother and father and meeting God.

Pressure’s coming from all angles.  Got a tumor coming down from the top,
liver cancer from the side.  After a short time sitting down,
I get nauseous and dizzy. A few times I ran from the table to vomit.
I can probably still run faster than you. 

I’m built low, dark, and blocky.  That’s what the woman said to me in Ireland:
“You’re like all the McCarthys—they’re built low, dark, and blocky.” 
Kerry people are odd.  They look at you suspiciously. But I got along well
with them.  She took me to the stone with an old plaque that said,
“Here’s lies Sean O’Connell, the Seanachie [the Irish word for “storyteller”].
His stories will live forever.”   I read the plaque, I was looking at the stone,
and she said: “Your grandmother and the Seanachie were first cousins.”
I didn’t feel like a tourist there anymore.

They took me to a ruin that’s so beautiful, and so obscure, and so lovely,
and the man says, “This house was built as a present to your grandmother
and grandfather. And if you took it, we’d be grateful. 
We’re certainly never going to sell it to the Germans.”   

Turning a dollar was never one of my talents. 
Turning away money I’m pretty good at.

I reached a new station. I call it a station on the downtown train.
I’m not hungry, but I have hunger.  Everything is reduced to halves,
and I’m sometimes not even interested in the halves. 
It’s not gonna go any other way.  Meanwhile, I’m here. 
Just like my plan: that the last thing that will give out is my voice.

My life is full of blessings. 

You know what it is?  You get tired of this.  Tired of this routine.
This medicine I drink is rough—they never had anything like it in O’Grady’s.
Even just taking the pills becomes hard.  I don’t want to take no more pills.
All these constant throughout-the-night visits to the bathroom. I just get tired.
After a while, more distance is created.  You’re further away from life.
Further away from life’s concerns.  You drop the reins. 
You get to the point where you’re dead, and people say: “How serene.”

We’re here on this big rock traveling around a ball of fire, and you’re talking
about security.  You’re talking 401Ks.  We’re out in space, hurtling around
a ball of fire.  All my life, I really believed that, but when the time comes,
it’s startling.  I didn’t think I had cancer.  Never mind to such an extent.
But I’ve been okay since the second day in the hospital, and I’m okay today. 
These days count. I woke up the next day in the hospital in a good mood—
I can’t understand it.  There’s only one thing to do: you got to live till you die.

I got what I wanted: to talk my way out.

I found a funeral card that says, “Grieve Not.”  I like that.
It says what I want to say.

----John McCarthy in the fall of 2003

 below: John McCarthy on the roof, W. 16th St., NYC, 1970s; photo by Jesse Winch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sonnet in Memory of John McCarthy

You are smiling at us for eternity
but we don’t see what’s so funny.
You are up there on the roof, chest bare,
and you will not come down again, not ever.
We have a cup of tea on 16^th Street in your name.
Once when you were drunk, you almost broke
my thumb. Failure was your great success.
You hated authority and hypocrisy, loved dogs,
cats, Irish songs. You were a hundred percent excess.
Fearless, ballsy, brilliant. Around you, I felt brave. 
You made fun of me, I made fun of you.
No one ever died with such grace and humor
as you, my dear. You told us not to grieve.
I can hear you joke, “I thought he’d never leave.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John McCarthy & Terence Winch, mid-80s, DC; photo by Jesse Winch

"Don’t Tell Me You Love Me" [by Terence Winch]

I had a falling out with an old friend many years ago
and I can’t stand to even hear anything about her.  Can’t
stand it.  Drives me crazy.  People say you must try
to transcend it all, let it go.  I have to hear about
her fucking pilates classes, her irritating stock
portfolio gains.  Why do they all torture
me with this shit?  Can’t they see how sensitive
I am?  It’s up to me to worry about the budget,
the contract deadlines, the flu-shot schedules,
the fucking mortgage amortization table,
but I’m  supposed to deal with this crap too?
It’s too much for me.  I don’t transcend. I give
in to temptation, and everything is a temptation.
Ice cream in the freezer, bottle of wine
under the sink, porn on the internet, cheap
mail-order drugs from Canada.  The psychologist
calls and notes how happy she is in North Carolina.
The students arrive for class, full of a love
for learning.  I could care less.
They are happy it’s been raining for days,
the drought finally over.  But I liked the drought.
That’s the way I roll.  I don’t fucking transcend.
I brood. I complain.  I work myself into a state
of whatever the opposite of grace is.  I don’t
fucking know anymore. The priest goes from room
to room in the hospital, offering safe passage.  No one
can resist.  Everyone gives in.  But I don’t want to take
that ride.  I want to stay stuck in this twisted
moment of my own passionate moral inferiority.

-- Terence Winch

from Vanitas (Spring 2012)

New Photo of Emily Dickinson---Is It Herself? (Terence Winch)

See the New York Times version of the story.

Happy St. Patrick's Day (by Laura Orem)

This is going to sound a little like gloating because...well, because I'm gloating. Last night, I got to start my St. Patrick's weekend by attending the Celtic Thunder reunion in Baltimore.

This is the real Celtic Thunder, not the Enya-crossed-with Michael-Flatley cheesy-schlocky thing on PBS, the real group co-founded in the late 1970s by BAP's own Terence Winch and his brother Jesse. The sold-out show was presented by the Creative Alliance at the Patterson on Eastern Avenue, and it was wonderful. Great Irish music both new and old, amazing step-dancing, and Terence's poetry between songs, with an appropriately rowdy and appreciative audience clapping, tapping, and singing along.

If you haven't heard Celtic Thunder (the real Celtic Thunder, mind), then I feel sorry for you. You can buy their CDs online (but make sure you get the REAL Celtic Thunder CDs!) In the meantime, here's a sampling of last night's revelries, as they perform Terence Winch's "When New York Was Irish":

(Left to right, Jesse Winch on bouzouki, Dominick Murray on vocals and guitar, Linda Hickman on flute and vocals, Tony DeMarco on fiddle, and Terence Winch on button accordian)

There are faint rumors that this reunion might become an annual event. Here's hoping!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Or, as they say in the old country, Lá Fhéile Pádraig Shona!

Paddy Kavanagh’s “A Christmas Childhood” (Terence Winch)

Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967) continues to inspire conflicting feelings and opinions. John Nemo, writing in The Dictionary of Irish Literature, puts it this way: “His followers, a varied but vocal group, speak of him admiringly as an important force in Irish letters, second only to Yeats. His detractors, fewer in number but every bit as vocal, dismiss him as a loud-mouthed, ill-mannered peasant who disrupted rather than advanced the development of modern literature.”  As a loud-mouthed, ill-mannered peasant myself, I will take my place among Kavanagh’s followers.

One of his most ardent admirers was my old friend James Liddy, an Irish poet who spent most of his adult life as a professor at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee until his death in 2008. Many years ago (in the ‘70s sometime), James sent me a copy of an Irish journal called The Lace Curtain, which included his “Open Letter to the Young about Patrick Kavanagh.” Describing Kavanagh’s work (and, really, his own as well), Liddy writes, “Or there is a poetry in which real ideas from living come at us. This kind can be direct statement with a reference behind to the story of what happened to the poet. It relies on the mind staying alive, on the man making the statement keeping his emotional intelligence alive.”

Kavanagh brings that emotional intelligence, I think, to “A Christmas Childhood,”  a poem one encounters regularly this time of year in Irish circles on both sides of the Atlantic.  As an Irish accordion player, I relish the mention of his father’s melodeon (pronounced melojin), which is a single-row button accordion.  

The poem introduces us to the thrumming imagination of a six-year-old Irish farmboy, ca. 1910, who is perfectly in tune with the magical world around him.

 

A Christmas Childhood

by Patrick Kavanagh

                           I

One side of the potato-pits was white with frost—
How wonderful that was, how wonderful!
And when we put our ears to the paling-post
The music that came out was magical.

The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven's gable. An apple tree
With its December-glinting fruit we saw—
O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me

To eat the knowledge that grew in clay
And death the germ within it! Now and then
I can remember something of the gay
Garden that was childhood's. Again

The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch
Or any common sight the transfigured face
Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

 

                           II

My father played the melodeon
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.

Across the wild bogs his melodeon called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.

Outside the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.

A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.

My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon. The Three Wise Kings.

An old man passing said:
‘Can’t he make it talk’—
The melodeon. I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.

I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife’s big blade.
There was a little one for cutting tobacco,
And I was six Christmases of age.

My father played the melodeon,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary’s blouse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At his wedding in April 1967; Kavanagh died in November of that year.

One final note: Kavanagh’s best-known poem is probably “On Raglan Road,” which was written to the tune of an old march called “The Dawning of the Day.”  Many singers have recorded the song since the ‘60s, including Van Morrison and Sinead O’Connor. 

Greg McBride Wins Liam Rector Prize (Terence Winch)

In a confluence that was personally gratifying for me, I recently learned that one friend of mine won a prize named for another friend of mine. Greg McBride, who arrived in the poetry world a few years back at around age 60, and who proceeded to make up rapidly for lost time, has been named the winner of the Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry.  Greg’s career as a government attorney was preceded by his experience as an army photographer during the Vietnam War.  That wartime service has engendered many excellent poems, such as this one from his chapbook, Back of the Envelope:

IN-COUNTRY: DAY ONE

            Vietnam, 1969

Duffel bag stuffed in the back, he bounced down

Cong Ly on the suicide seat. The sergeant crowed

they’d stolen the mud-scarred jeep the night

before on a whorehouse street in Cholon.

 

His starched jungle fatigues and boots, a joke

in a city of millions, .45 hard

on his hip. Dressed in yellow, Saigon hummed

like a factory. Fuel-stench hung like a scrim.

 

The sun seared down on angels in ao dais,

silk panels in a red soft as wet blood,

in the green of his mother’s eyes.

They skimmed the simmering sidewalks,

 

at ease in their beauty under the palm-leaf

shade of conical nons, the calm rise

of dry heat, skirts wafting in spiraled mists

of nuoc mam, the smog of fried steam rolls.

 

That night, he sauntered down Tu Do Street.

The bar girls called and the cyclos spat

their two-cycled rasp. Distant iron bombs dropped

from B-52s burst out of the dark,

 

laying a blanket of moans over him

and the street and the girls too young in the night.

He glanced at the stars and felt himself

holding onto his gun with both hands.

The new book, called Porthole, will be out next year from the Briery Creek Press.  Meanwhile, McBride is also the editor of a first-rate on-line magazine called the Innisfree Poetry Journal.

It’s hard to believe that Liam Rector, whom I met in the early ‘70s, has been gone for more than four years.  I think he would have been pleased at McBride’s selection for this first-book prize.  Liam, himself a notable poet, was a persuasive advocate for poetry and a forceful defender of free speech, once even attempting to explain Amiri Baraka to Bill O’Reilly: