The Best American Poetry

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:  

 

 

Elinor Nauen & Lord Byron (Terence Winch)

 

After the publication of his early work Childe Harold, Lord Byron (1788--1824) memorably said that he “awoke one morning and found myself famous.”  He became, in fact, something of a global superstar, adumbrating  the kind of fame later reserved for the likes of Sinatra and Elvis, who weren’t even poets. English lit students will remember his club foot, his incestuous affair with his half sister, his invention of “the Byronic hero,” his death at age 36 while fighting for Greek independence from the Turks. His great masterpiece is, of course, Don Juan, a poem of more than 2,000 stanzas of ottava rima, a nimble 8-line vessel that rhymes abababcc and is borrowed from the Italians. This extraordinary poem, which Byron called an “Epic Satire,” remains funny, biting, and highly readable. The “Fragment” that usually begins texts of the poem includes these lines:

                                And for the future—(but I write this reeling,

                Having got drunk exceedingly today,

                                So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)

                I say—the future is a serious matter—

                And so—for God’s sake—hock and soda water!

He is, he writes later, “fond of fire, and crickets, and all that,/A lobster salad, and champagne, and chat.”

  I loved reading Byron long ago when I was a student, but my impression has been that his fame has waned, his influence abated, in the 187 years since his death.  At least that was my feeling until I came upon one of the most impressive and audacious long poems of our time—Elinor Nauen’s So Late into the Night (Rain Mountain Press, NYC), some 625 stanzas of ottava rima containing a poem that is at once a homage to Don Juan and a completely contemporary comic epic in its own right.  Like Byron’s, Nauen’s poem is full of acute observations, wry reflections, loves, resentments, and silliness.  You will learn about her two romantic obsessions (Derek Jeter and her husband Johnny Stanton), her thoughts on  poetry, politics, even cars:

                The fastest car I ever drove (versus

                The car I drove fastest) must have been Paul

                Stallings’ Ferrari. Slowest? The worst is

                My ’70 Datsun 510, which qual-

                Ified for many unkind curses

                Each time it wobbled. Not a car to haul

                Ass in! I loved it, though, as I did my

                Every vehicle. Till we said goodbye.   

 

 And belief:

                                        ...I can’t seem to endorse

                A stance on the presence of God or soul.

                I’ve resolved to assign whatever force

                Is the reason for existence the role

                And name “God.”  It’s how to live in the presence

                Of the mystery that tests my essence.

Part of the narrative of So Late into the Night involves a road trip, but, really, the language of the entire poem has unrelenting drive and acceleration, a rollicking momentum that gets you home right before the poetry curfew kicks in.  Byron and ottava rima, Nauen says in her introduction, gave her the means to “contain, shape and propel everything I could possibly want to say—narration, social commentary, description—in a persona I could both reinvent and stay true to. I knew I would discover more and more ways to live inside this form.”  She has certainly succeeded. Next thing you know, she’s going to wake up famous. 

 

Jimmy Cagney's Last Scene in "The Roaring Twenties"

 
courtesy Terence Patrick Winch

"Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor" by Terence Winch [by David Lehman]

Terence Winch's new book, Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor (Hanging Loose Press), his best to date, expresses the poet's defiant resistance to the forces of intellectual conformism -- it asserts the prerogatives of the autonomous self against all that would militate against it. Like a Bartleby for our times, Winch would prefer not to go along with whatever the hell he is supposed to accompany. Sometimes the imp of the perverse takes charge, as in "Don't Tell Me You Love Me": "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."  Sometimes he bravely presses the reality principle against the insincere promissory notes of a culture that issues them too freely, as in "Oral History": "You promised me a raise, but when I went to see the boss, / they fired me. You said meet me on the corner / and I'll give you a ride. / I'm still on the corner. / You guaranteed you'd call me right back. / I'm still standing by the phone. You said if / I ate my broccoli, I'd grow up big and strong. / Yet I'm a miserable weakling."

Winch's poems exemplify the value of an organizing conceit ("Belief System"), of wit as an engine for invention and discovery ("Remorse Code'), and of "the incessant hum of erotic desire" ("The Jennifer Connelly Sestina," "Sex Elegy," "Eternal Love"). He has great last lines -- the title of the book is one of them. The first poem in the collection defines things to come: "The future sprawls out like a drunk on a bed." The last poem in the book tells of what is past and passing:  "The present is the life insurance premium automatically / deducted from your paycheck, while the past burns / out of control in a vacant lot on the outskirts of town." Between the two everything happens: sons rebel against the fathers they become, photograph albums are opened and by the time they are closed the people have died, and the revolution has fizzled into a busted cliche: "We all showed up for the rally that night with our guitars / and sang a Joan Baez song about rivers and stars. / Give a man a fish that wll last forever."

This is a moving book, a funny book ("Dad, you're not funny"), a poignant book, a charming hook, a disarming look, a shout in the street, a cop on his beat who is the hero of his imaginary son's third-grade assignment, a dance with the erotic angels of Paradise, a politically incorrect orgasm, a flagrantly delicious pie in the face of somone who should know better, a dream within a dream with a dish of pistachio ice cream and the prospect of a warm bath with the radio playing the songs of Destiny, a young woman who works for a travel agency in Ottawa. In these pages disappointment turns into the noblest form of rapture. -- DL

Ai Weiwei, Dylan, and Despotism in China (Terence Winch)

At first I felt a profound disappointment, and some anger, when I heard the reports that Bob Dylan had allowed Chinese authorities to censor his setlist for a recent concert in China.  There would be no answers blowin’ in the Chinese wind.  At a time when progressives in this country are leaderless and de-energized, when “the left” and “the far left” seem more like scare terms of the right than realities, Dylan’s seeming accession to the demands of the Chinese autocracy was even harder to understand and accept. 

Particularly in light of the arrest and disappearance of the mesmerizing Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei, whose courage in the face of despotism is truly inspirational.  If you have not been following the Ai Weiwei story, there is an abundance of discussion going on. My friend Michael Lally, for one, has been highlighting the case of Ai Weiwei on his blog Lally’s Alley.

Ai Weiwei was arrested by Chinese authorities on April 3rd, and has not been heard from since. News updates are readily available on-line (see, e.g., this piece). Frontline also offers an excellent short film delineating Ai Weiwei's life and career.   

Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd went after Dylan in the Times, only to be savaged herself by Sean Wilentz in The New Yorker.

By now, I had begun to feel the need for further reflection. One focus of mine was Dylan's attraction to the strange turn, especially in the last 10 or 12 years. Highlights include:

■His awkward and extended appearance on "Dharma & Greg" in 1999.

■His bizarre Victoria's Secret ad in 2004

■His arrest in New Jersey in 2009 essentially for being an "an eccentric old man"  wandering around with no i.d.and wearing two raincoats.

■ And my personal favorite—the video he did of "Must be Santa" to promote his 2009 Christmas in the Heart album. 

Dylan is clearly playing by his own rules, and I find myself coming around to his side. Is there really a censor in China who could capably de-code Dylan’s performance to ensure his songs wouln't rock the rule of the authorities over there?  I think not. I begin to suspect tricksterism. Dylan clearly feels no obligation to be a spokesperson for anything or anyone.  He’s made that very clear for a long time. He doesn’t want anyone dictating his behavior as an artist. I find myself thinking that his alleged cave-in to Chinese regime is not worth taking seriously. He likes to confound.  As does Ai Weiwei.

Whose father was a famous poet named Ai Qing (1910-1996), exiled during the Cultural Revolution and forced to clean toilets. “To live is to struggle,” he writes in this 1978 poem:

Fossil
With such agility in your movements,
Such buoyancy in your strength,
You leaped in the foam
And swam in the sea.

Unfortunately a volcano's eruption
Or perhaps an earthquake
Cost you your freedom
And buried you in the silt.

After millions of years
Members of a geological team
Found you in a layer of rock
And you still look alive.

But you are now silent,
Without even sight.
Your scales and fins are whole
But you cannot move.

So absolutely motionless,
You have no reaction to the world.
You cannot see the water or the sky,
You cannot hear the sound of the waves.

Gazing at this fossil,
Even a fool can learn a lot:
Without movement
There is no life.

To live is to struggle
And advance in the struggle;
Even if death is inevitable.
We should use our energy to the fullest.

(for a selection of Ai Qing's poems, visit this site.) 

Doug Lang's 70th Birthday (Terence Winch)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Susan Campbell, Doug Lang, Terence Winch. Cafe De Luxe, D.C., April 10, 2011

 

Today marks the 70th birthday of my good friend Doug Lang, who came to the U.S. by way of Wales (Swansea), Greece (Paros), and England (London) in 1973.  Since his arrival he has been a major figure in Washington’s literary world, as poet, teacher, impresario, and mentor to many.  He remains on the job as a beloved and popular professor at the Corcoran College of Art, where he has taught since 1976.  He writes amazing poems that inspire his friends, who are usually the only ones who get to read them.  That situation will be corrected when his large selected poems, called In the Works, comes out in the near future from Rod Smith’s Edge Books in DC.  Yesterday, Doug and his friend Sandra Rottmann threw a party at the Cafe Deluxe, near the National Cathedral. Some people came from far—Diane Ward came in from L.A., Tom Mandel and Beth Joselow from Lewes, Delaware—and near (Andrea Wyatt and Lansing Sexton, Peter Inman & Tina Darragh, Rod Smith & Mel Nichols, Phyllis Rosenzweig & Alan Wallach, James Huckenpahler, Becky Levenson & R.T. Smith, Bernard Welt and Arthur Gary, Lee Haner & Carla Badaracco, Casey Smith & Laura Peterson, Tom & Linda Green, Kathryn Wichman, Pat Kolmer and Bo Stanley, Jesse & Francesca Winch, and Susan Campbell).  Everyone had an excellent time. I delivered the toast, which was called "Doug Is Awesome," a sentiment shared by many.

 

l. to r.: Lee Haner (back to camera), Rod Smith, P. Inman, Tina Darragh, Mel Nichols, Carla Badaracco, Andrea Wyatt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doug has been writing a lot of experimental sonnets recently. Here’s one he emailed me a few weeks ago:

The Sinking Colony sonnet

 I am tracing a skinny dribble of memory, playing into a zone of shimmering beauty.

THIS IS MY LIFE. She say my name, she say my name, she say my name, she say my

name. Today, now, today in this metropolis the women are dressed to keel in their

widebrimmed hats, their Manolo Blahniks, their Proenza Schoulers, their Paul Smiths,

their Collette Dinnigans. Their legs are short, their asses are huge, their teeth are

crooked, their lips are luscious, their hands are gnarly, their dogs are vicious, man. 

They all dig LeanSpa with Acai. J'espère que je ne vous ai pas deranges. Don’t bogart

that joint my friend… and it’s 1, 2, 3, what’re we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t

give a damn, next stop is Vietnam, and it’s 5, 6, 7, open up the pearly gates. Do you

think that anyone calls Bill Gates “Pearly”? I know who: Buddha ha-ha. In the

darkness of a stand of larches I use NLS Thera A 3mm and a mixture of Dianichi

sinking pellets. This has done wonders for my fronts. I also treat them with Tetra

Jumbo Krill. Penguin poo viewed from space reveals new Antarctic colony locations.

& Bob’s your uncle. I’ll never forget you. I'll never forget how we promised one day

Lee Lally's These Days (Terence Winch)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lee Lally, early 1970s, at home in the house on Emory Place in DC.  Photo (c) by John Gossage.

 

I don’t know whether Lee Lally would have become a poet of significant accomplishment had she lived long enough, but I suspect she would have. I met her when I first arrived in Washington, DC in 1971, the same time I met her husband Michael Lally. We all became good friends. In fact, when Michael and Lee eventually divorced, I was the mutually agreed-upon witness for both of them at the divorce hearing. Lee became a leader in DC's feminist and gay circles for a while, but wound up with a boyfriend towards the end of her short life. In the late ‘70s, Lee and her companion often came down to The Dubliner pub on Capitol Hill when my band was playing there. She loved the music, the beer, the atmosphere, and I was always happy to see her. Lee's enjoyment of life's pleasures sadly ended, however, when she became the unfortunate victim of medical malpractice while undergoing surgery, and wound up in a coma for six years, before finally passing away on March 3rd, 1986, leaving behind two teenage children, Caitlin and Miles. There’s little lingering evidence of her work that I have been able to uncover. The most extensive account of her life and work that I know of appeared in 2007 in Doug Lang’s now largely dormant blog on DC poetry, in a piece that includes a brief remembrance by Doug and a short biographical sketch of Lee by Michael Lally. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lee Lally published only one chapbook, These Days, which came out in 1972 from our poetry collective, Some of Us Press.  Here are two poems from that book:

 

Hurricanes

They name them after women.

You’ve been through a few

you say.

Hurricanes, tornadoes,

tropical storms,

women.

I understand that natural rage.

 

Tropical storm Agnes

swept through tonight

like a real lady.

Greeted rich and poor

with equal vengeance.

The poor will remember her

longer

with less detail.

With wild breath,

unyielding

she spit.

Small rivers run

now

in the streets.

I understand that rage.

 

Tornadoes, tropical storms,

hurricanes,

they name them

after women.

 

__________________________

 

“Never Take More Money to the Bar

Than You’ll Drink up or Gamble Away”

                for my Grandmother who said that

 

Mamie was six foot tall and carried

a hard salami, so hard

she had used it a few times as a billy club.

They were all you needed you told me.

You drank with your friend

and called to giggle at two in the morning

in a way I understood.

                                He left you alone

                                with four children

                                and is not dead yet.

You were 27 one day and 65 the next.

Save electricity, you said, with the one

lightbulb plan.  I never noticed the darkness.

The optometrist told me different and I remember

you squinting at Elizabeth Taylor on magazine covers

in the dusk light at the kitchen window.

You were strong enough to open all jars alone.

                                The daughter died in your arms.

                                The sons turned their paralyses

                                into their energies.

The amusement park trips even when I was

a little too old.  Mostly for the boat ride.

The apple piggy bank, the apple kuchen,

homemade sausage Easter, Christmas.

You worked, even for fun your hands working.

Worked till you died rubbing the bodies

of the ‘wealthy ladies.’

They loved you.

 

I loved you, Anna, of the strong hands,

rubbing backs

until their troubles had been massaged away.

Ours were just beginning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lee Lally & Terence Winch, Mass Transit poetry reading, early '70s, DC. Photo (c) by Jesse Winch.

 

A Bronx Irish Christmas Long Ago (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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