I’ve played Irish music and written poetry for most of my life, but have generally kept these two worlds separate.A major exception to this practice took place at St. Mark’s Church in lower Manhattan on November 10, 1982, when an Irish-American night at the Poetry Project (organized by my friend Bob Callahan, who passed away last year) took place. Bob asked me and a number of other poets to read, and also invited my band, Celtic Thunder, to play a concert set after the reading.In addition to Bob and me, the line-up included Maureen Owen, Robert Kelly, Susan Howe, Eileen Myles, and Ted Berrigan. It was a historic night — I’m not sure Irish America has seen anything like it before or since.
A friend of Bob’s, whose name I’ve forgotten, took some photos that night, and for reasons I don’t recall, Bob gave me a contact sheet. The photo above is from that contact sheet and shows, left to right, Ted Berrigan, Maureen Owen, Robert Kelly, me, Bob Callahan, and Susan Howe (Eileen Myles, for whatever reason, is not in the photo). At that point in our history, Celtic Thunder included Dominick Murray (guitar, vocals), Linda Hickman (flute, vocals), Tony DeMarco (fiddle), Jesse Winch (bodhran [drum], bouzouki), and me (button accordion). Tony was sick the night of the reading, but the photo below (taken by the late Pat Cady) shows Celtic Thunder's 1982 line-up at a ceili in, I think, Baltimore.
There were many great moments that night at St. Mark’s.I especially remember Eileen Myles striding to the microphone dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl, much to the delight and enthusiasm of the audience, and then delivering a terrific reading.Everyone, really, was at his or her best.But the highlight for me was Ted Berrigan’s uproarious and masterful performance.
Ted had a huge number of friends, fans, and followers, attracted by his charisma and humor, but most of all by his deep love and commitment to poetry and his inventive, expansive, inspiring work.Michael Lally (who, if he hadn't moved to L.A. back then, would certainly have been part of the St. Mark's reading) turned me on to Ted’s book The Sonnets in 1971, right after I moved to D.C. from New York, and I was hooked. Besides the night of the reading, I think I met Ted only one other time, in October of 1977, when Doug Lang invited him to D.C. to read at Folio Books, the site of Doug’s legendary reading series.Ted hung out for a couple of days and we got to know each other a bit. He even signed my copy of Red Wagonwith “For Terry, whose poetry I like very much, best, Ted Berrigan.” That was a compliment I was happy to get.
About four years ago I bought a CD recorder so I could start digitizing some of my old LPs, which I never got rid of, as well as hundreds of cassette tapes, mostly from the ’70s and ’80s, stuffed into empty tissue boxes.Last week I digitized the 1982 reading.I’ll include Ted’s segment (in two parts that overlap: Download Ted Berrigan 1, with intro by Bob Callahan; Download Ted Berrigan 2). Ted once said, in an interview: “My poetry is mostly talk, and sometimes it’s heightened speech.It’s not the words of rhetoric so much as the tone of rhetoric; it’s an Irish kind of speech—sometimes I’m making speeches, other times I’m talking—like I’m talking a walk to the store to buy the paper and back.” You'll see what he means when you listen to his reading.
On July 4th, 1983, just eight months after the Irish-American event, Ted died, at age 48. What a tremendous loss this was. There was a memorial reading at St. Mark’s four days later in which a number of his friends (including Kenneth Koch, who concludes his remarks with a reading of the last two pages of Ted's "Tambourine Life": Download Kenneth Koch remarks) paid tribute to him. I digitized that tape yesterday, and was halfway through the process before it dawned on me that yesterday was the 26th anniversary of Ted Berrigan's death.
-- Terence Winch
(ed. note: This post originally appeared on July 5, 2009.)
For registration or other information, visit the American Irish Teachers Association or contact Doris Marie Meyer at dorismeyer@aol.com or 917-691-2883
In celebration of American Archives Month, the National Archives has partnered with the Academy of American Poets to present original poems inspired by the holdings of the National Archives.
Ray DiPalma’s new book, Obedient Laughter (Los Angeles, Otis Books /Seismicity Editions) is made up of six sections, all of which showcase DiPalma’s lifelong exploration of the uses of language “without a fixed destination, as a matter of form,/bargaining notations, mnemonic targets, omertà.”
The longest and most engaging section of the new book is called “Equivoques,” which consists of forty-five pages of mostly two-line pieces that seem to be part fortune cookie, part fractured syllogism, with puns, mondegreens, and other odd, playful, wise, and inventive uses of language throughout. Here are some of my favorites:
AS THOUGHT OCCURS
Microcurrents are detectable in the finger muscles.
WHEN I DIE
That’ll be the day.
JUNKYARD DOGS
Now living in the penthouse by the reservoir.
A WHITE SPORT COAT
And a pink potato.
OUT OF EGYPT
Into the frying pan.
DOGS FOR THE DEAD
’Scuse me, you misunderstood, it’s dogs for the deaf.
SACRED AND UNDENIABLE
No, Tom, let’s go with self-evident.
BUT DON’T GET ME WRONG
I wish they all could be hallelujah girls.
THE DEAD MARX BROTHER
Groupo.
HE’S A GREAT IRISH MUSICIAN AND POET
But how many more times can he get beat up?
CORRUPTION DEMON WORSHIP AND SORCERY
Further reasons the pump don’t work.
COPLAND’S APPALACHIAN SPRING OR BARBER’S MEDEA SUITE
Neither one.
WRITING SLOWLY ENOUGH
For the ink to flow through the letters.
HOW HAVE YOU CONDUCTED YOURSELF IN THIS LIFE
Because now awaiting you on the other side are 72 vegans.
In honor of Percy Bysshe Shelley'srecent birthday and John Milton's perpetual relevance, here are two pieces from Doug Lang’s funny, dazzling, and supremely inventive sonnet collection, dérangé (which full disclosure requires me to acknowledge that I happily helped bring to publication):
Paradise Dude sonnet
Of Mans First Disobedience, dude, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, dude, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, dude, OMG, and all our woe,
With loss of EDEN, dude, till one greater Dude, dude,
Restore us, dude, and regain the blissful Seat, dude,
Sing Heav'nly Muse, OMG, that on the secret top
Of OREB, dude, or of SINAI, dude, didst inspire
That Shepherd, dude, who first taught the chosen Seed, dude.
In the Beginning, dude, how the Heav'ns and Earth, dude,
Rose out of CHAOS, OMG: Or if SION Hill, OMG
Delight thee more, dude, and SILOA'S Brook that flow'd, dude,
Fast by the Oracle of God, dude, WTF; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song, dude,
That OMG with no middle flight intends to soar, dude, just sayin’
Last week, on 17 May 2014, in the Theater at Madison Square Garden, I gave the graduate commencement address and received an honorary doctorate from my alma mater, Iona College.A number of friends have suggested I post the text of the speech, and so here it is.
Thank you, Iona faculty & staff, friends & family.It’s an honor to have this opportunity to speak to you, my fellow Gaels,this afternoon here at Madison Square Garden.I’m still recovering from a recent vocal cord surgical procedure, so please excuse my fragile voice.
Like all of us vulnerable humans who finally finish with formal schooling, at least for now, you are about pursue a post-student life of fear, doubt, ambition, and self-delusion.To assist you as you confront the universe as newly credentialed, highly educated persons, I offer you my address today, which is called
Contentment Is Wealth: The Top Ten Ways to Ultimate Success & Happiness in Life
10.Self-Forgiveness—Learn to forgive yourself, for you know not what you do much of the time, at least if you’re like me. It’s harder than one might think to engage in self-forgiveness.Sometimes it’s actually easier to go with guilt, depression, anxiety, anger, self-loathing— these and other well-established choices are always available to our needy psyches. But shun them. Life is too short, something those of us who are getting up there know better than anyone. And while you’re at it, try even to forgive others. See also: self-acceptance.
9.Anger management—Do not press “send” when you’re pissed off without first having someone you trust read the crazy diatribe you’ve just written.I have learned the wisdom of this directive through ugly & painful firsthand experience.
8.Hygiene—Get your teeth cleaned professionally twice a year.Believe me, you’ll save a lot of money and grief in the end.
7.Accomplishment—If there’s something meaningful you want to accomplish, don’t get overwhelmed. Achievement is most often the result of an accumulation of many minor incremental steps that are really no big deal. Alcoholics Anonymous encourages recovering drinkers to take it one day at a time.The truth in that advice applies to many of life’s struggles. The great novelist & short-story writer Flannery O’Connor wrote in one of her letters, “If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you’ll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.” Scholars talk of how African-Americans—over centuries of spirit-crushing slavery and its long aftermath—practiced the art of Making a Way Out of No Way, of transcending suffering as much as possible through resilience and creativity. And through that fierce commitment to make a way out of no way, came incredibly rich traditions in music, literature, and other areas of accomplishment, not the least of which were sheer survival and endurance.Never give up.
[left: Flannery O'Connor]
6.Finances—Don’t lend money to poets or fiddle players. Although I must make clear that poets and fiddlers occupy a place of high status in my own worldview. I am also very fond of button-accordion players, to whose ranks I belong.I started playing music as a kid, but I never really had much by way of instruction, so I wound up a musical illiterate, which sometimes drives my son Michael, who is a very accomplished musician, a little crazy. I like to say that I’m self-taught, and that I had a really bad teacher. But here, let me say something about perfection:perfection is another thing to shy away from.During my years at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in DC, I helped produce many publications, and among the first of them was a book on Navajo blankets. I learned that it was and is the practice of Navajo master weavers to always introduce something they call “the spirit line,” a little flaw woven into the pattern of the rug, so as not to compete with, and thus offend, the Creator, the Great Spirit. Imperfection, in any case, makes life more interesting.Oh, and let me retract what I said at the start of this number:If you want to be favorably immortalized by poets or have musicians compose a tune in your honor, always lend them money, or, even better, save yourself the trouble & just give them the damn cash.
5. HaveMercy—I love the sound of the word mercy. A one-word poem. I want some mercy. For me. For everybody. Forgiveness implies a wrong erased, but mercy is more the simplebestowing of benevolence. Visit people in the hospital or the nursing home even though you, along with the rest of us, hate hospitals and nursing homes. Significant intangible power is generated when mercy is released into the atmosphere.
4.Critical Thinking—Don’t respect your elders or people in authority unless they have actually earned that respect. Let me here recommend a piece of writing that I first read as an undergraduate at Iona & that has stayed with me since, and that is George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language,” written in 1946. Orwell [photo left], who once memorably assailed what he called “all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls,” was a prophetic writer, as his novels 1984 and Animal Farm clearly show.Orwell will help you de-construct all the intellectual malware infecting our political discourse.For me, critical thinking involves inventing your own definitions by thinking about what any concept really means to you. People today often say, for example, they are “spiritual” but not necessarily religious, and I felt I needed to define spirituality for myself, which I decided means having an inner life, interior life, the life of the mind, the examined life. It means to go deeper into yourself. Likewise I define “critical thinking” as intellectual wakefulness, mindful attentiveness to whatever you encounter. Not always easy to do. Let me also salute William Blake [right], the great visionary & eccentric 19th-century English poet, who said: “Without Contraries Is No progression,” and “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind. “Those are among a number of Blake’s proverbs I memorized when I was an Iona undergraduate & they’ve stayed with me all my life.And they seem as true to me today as they did in the 1960s.
3.Fake It—Sometimes you will have to fake it, you will have to make it up out of nothing, you will have to just go on your nerve, as the great poet Frank O’Hara once prescribed, and those are often the times when you break through to a sense of clarity & insight about yourself. O’Hara also wrote, in one of his poems, that
the only thing to do is simply continue is that simple yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do can you do it yes, you can because it is the only thing to do
I have always found great comfort in those lines, in their wonderful assertion of spirit & tenacity.And speaking of faking it, don’t forget the Imposter Syndrome, that sense we have that we’re all just pretending to be something we’re not. It’s okay, it’s all part of faking it. Let it go. Live with it. We are all imposters. Forgive yourself (see #10).
2.Risk Taking—Never get the extended warranty. And always buy the raffle ticket—I’ve won the raffle at least 3 times in my life; if you want to be an opera singer, or work with chimpanzees, or start your own detective agency, don’t wait till you’re an old person. On the other hand, don’t drive blindfolded.
1.The last & most important of the top 10 ways to ultimate success & happiness in life—TheMoll Niland Principle.My mother was a farmgirl named Bridie Flynn from Loughrea in county Galway in Ireland. She was one of 11 children, and she died in 1962 when I was 16 and still in high school, and I still miss her, 52 years later. Out of those 11 in her family, only 3, my mother and 2 of her brothers, came to the U.S. So I have many relatives back in Ireland, including cousins in Ballyvaughan, county Clare, on my father’s side. And in 1980 I went over there with my band—the one, true, authentic Celtic Thunder (not to be confused with that slick PBS tv program that, shall we say, borrowed my group’s name)—and asked my then-girlfriend Susan, whom I married the following year, to come with us.
During that trip, we had many adventures, but the highlight for me was when I took Susan to meet my Auntie Moll, the eldest of my mother’s siblings, amazingly still alive & going strong in 1980 at age 96.
[photo: My mother, Bridie Winch [nee Flynn],wearing the dress with the big bow, with friends & relations, Galway, 1930.]
She lived in a very humble, thatched-roof cottage in the countryside, where she still cooked on an open hearth turf fire. She had these beautiful, big eyes and a benevolent aura about her. Recalling her now, remembering the richness of her spirit, brings to my mind the title of a well-known traditional Irish tune called “Contentment Is Wealth.” Susan and I sat next to each other, Auntie Moll facing us. We chatted for a bit, but then at one point she took hold of our hands, grabbed them firmly, and looked us both in the eye and said, “Are ye enjoying life?”We thought for a moment because it felt like the most important question we’d ever been asked, & then said yes we were. She squeezed our hands happily and said, “That’s good. Enjoy life.” I know—it’s not a complex or arcane idea, but coming from this extraordinary old woman who had lived so long & knew so much, it felt to us like the most profound and profoundly simple & necessary lesson of human existence:
ENJOY LIFE.
Thank you, and congratulations to all of you.
Terence & Jesse Winch with Auntie Moll (Niland), Ireland, 1980
(L to R: Meghan O'Rourke, Michael Lally, Terence Winch)
Tuesday, April 29, 2014 7:00PM
Brooklyn Public Library
Central Library, Dweck Center
10 Grand Army Plaza Brooklyn, NY 11238
718-230-2100
Founded in 1966, Brooklyn-based Hanging Loose Press is one of the oldest independent presses in the US. This reading will showcase the latest work from three of their award-winning authors: Meghan O'Rourke, Michael Lally, Terence Winch.
Meghan O’Rourke’s books of poetry include Halflife, which was a finalist for Britain's Forward First Book Prize, and most recently Once. She is also the author of the memoir The Long Goodbye, a chronicle of mourning written after the death of her mother. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Terence Winch's most recent book of poems is This Way Out (Hanging Loose, 2014), which was preceded by Lit from Below (Salmon, 2013) and Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor (Hanging Loose, 2011). Boy Drinkers, a series of mostly narrative poems that center around religion and Winch's New York brand of Irish-Catholicism, came out in 2007. His collection of non-fiction stories, called That Special Place: New World Irish Stories, grows out of his experiences playing traditional Irish music with Celtic Thunder, a band he startedwith his brother Jesse in 1977. Terence Winch lives in Washington, D.C.
Michael Lally is the author of twenty-seven books, including two collections of poetry and prose from Black Sparrow Press — one an American Book Award winner for 2000, It’s Not Nostalgia — and the long poem March 18, 2001, jointly published by Libellum and Charta, with artwork by Alex Katz. He is also the author of Cant Be Wrong from Coffee House Press, which won the Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Award for “excellence in literature.” He has appeared in many films and TV shows and worked as a scriptwriter, or “doctor,” from the late 1970s to the early 2000s.
Ed. Note: We have been interviewing poets who are ex-virgins about how they lost theirs. Our inspiration: this poem by Terence Winch from his new book "This Way Out" (Hanging Loose Press, 2014). Keep those anecdotes coming.
How I Lost My Virginity
I cannot tell you how I lost my virginity. It’s a secret that to some extent depends upon the meaning of virginity. When I go out at night, as I did tonight, and I wander these beautiful 19th-century rooms, which is what I did, and I speak to very smart people about art and books, and who might run for president next time around, I do not tell any of them how I lost my virginity. No. Instead, I tell them one of my many pig jokes, and they are very amused, as they should be, for these jokes of mine about pigs are very funny and I’m pretty good at delivering the punch line.
Later, in the car on the way home, I sit in the back and we have an intense discussion about some very serious fallings-out among our erstwhile friends. One of our old friends, it turns out, is a child molester, but a lot of people are unaware of that about him. Even I, for many years, compartmentalized this information and remained his friend until it slowly began to dawn on me: this guy’s a child molester. Until it happens to you with someone you care about, you won’t really understand what I’m talking about.
So don’t judge. As for my virginity, I lost it a thousand times, once in an apartment, and once outdoors at the beach, with a full moon above, the two of us pretending to be in love. And on one other occasion, I never lost my virginity at all, as far as I can recall.
(Ed. note: I had just about exhausted every crime series available on Netflix when Terence Winch wrote to suggest that I check out Love/Hate, an Irish crime drama series broadcast on RTÉ Television. The show is irresistible, and I was especially drawn to Darren, a central character played by the compelling young actor Robert Sheehan. Just the other day, this poem appeared in my in-box. I love it! Thank you T.P. Winch for letting me share it here. -- sdh)
This song, written almost 20 years ago by me (lyrics) and Regan Wick (music), appeared on our (i.e., the original Celtic Thunder's) 1995 album, Hard New York Days, with Laura Murphy on vocals, Regan Wick on piano, and guest musician Ralph Gordon on cello. TO LISTEN:
Like many people my age, I have never shaken off the horrible shock of JFK’s murder fifty years ago. His abrupt removal from American life—in so bloody and surreal a fashion—was a loss felt with special intensity by Irish Catholics. Hard to process, as we say today. The photo below was taken on 22 November 1963. In suit jacket and skinny tie, I am exiting the chapel on the campus of Iona College in New Rochelle, NY. Students were streaming in and out of the chapel that day in a frenzy of stunned bereavement. I was in my first semester of college and it was brutally clear to me that life in these United States would never be the same. I pick at the what-ifs in my mind all the time, as I’m sure is true of many others who remember that day.
Admonition
I have been three kinds of dog: Border
Collie, Wolfhound, Black Mouth Cur. I remain
talented at herding and hunting. I have also been
an owl, a raccoon, a rat, and a monkey.
There’s so much history inside my head it’s hard
to keep it straight. The Barbarians at the Gate,
the False Popes, Hammurabi’s Code,
the Potato Famine, the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.
I even saw Victor Mature kill a lion barehanded.
These days I travel mostly by time machine, though
I have a really bad sense of direction. I crash into
the past, careen into the future. It’s so confusing.
I tried to warn President John Fitzgerald Kennedy
not to go to Dallas on November 22nd, 1963.
But I got off at the wrong exit. Not that he would
have listened. I saw him once, in Manhattan, in 1962.
It was the Columbus Day Parade and he drove by
in a convertible, beautiful, tan, godlike. “Don’t go
In February 1977, the alluring and gifted Jamie MacInnis came to Washington DC from New York to read with Doug Lang in one of the earliest of the legendary readings at Folio Books in Dupont Circle. This reading series was, in fact, organized by Doug. But when I called him recently to check on Jamie’s historic, though brief, visit to DC, he thought she had read with me, not with him.Neither of us has any convincing memory of the event.
It would be hard, however, not to remember Jamie herself.She was about 35 at the time. Her one and only full-length book of poems, Practicing (Tombouctou, 1980), was still a few years in the future, but Hand Shadows, published by Larry Fagin’s Adventures in Poetry press, came out in the mid-1970s, filled with her characteristic witty, unpretentious work:
Jazz to Spare
A voice tells me there’s
jazz to spare. I don’t
know, it must be my own
voice.
“There’s jazz to spare,”
it says, but when I listen
to the music I worry that
there’s not enough to go
around.
In December 1978, Fagin, who had a long-time on-and-off relationship with MacInnis, also published an edition of his magazine Un Poco Loco devoted to Jamie’s poems.The writing in Hand Shadows and Un Poco Loco make up most of what wound up in Practicing.Jamie and I connected, shall we say, during her visit to DC and wrote to each other for about a year. I have a dozen or so wonderfully smart, funny, unguarded letters from her.One of them included a poem (“for Terry, obviously/from Jamie, obviously/ 6/77”) that later appeared in Practicing:
Irish Musician
The train starts by accident
leaving Washington D.C.
A flowered kimono lies wrinkled in my canvas bag.
The rays go dim as I travel east
out of your frequency.
You are like me
You admire people who like you.
I read your book
The Beautiful Indifference
looking for clues.
The train starts by accident
stopping in Newark.
Here, there’s a neighborhood,
Down Neck,
where people have grape arbors in their yards
next to ivy-walled factories.
Old Newark.
A man with a banjo sits in a chair.
The train starts by accident.
Big flowers.
A businessman tells me his story.
The train tells its story of people
having a drink at 80 miles per hour.
The factories go by telling their stories
in billboards and a hundred tiny windows
talking at once.
The letters stopped in early 1978, and I don’t believe I ever again heard from her.So when she came to mind a few weeks ago, I did what we all do now—I went to Google in search of any information about her.Two findings surprised me: one, that there was so little trace of her, not even a photo; and two, the one source I did find that mentions her at length (a book entitled Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian) reveals her vivid and dramatic role, previously unknown to me, as a 20-year-old beauty in Jack Spicer’s circle in the early 1960s:
“The daughter of a legendary trial lawyer, MacInnis was a woman of deep poise,moving with ease between the worlds of the upper class and the bohemian Beat.Among the habitués of Gino & Carlo’s, she stood out:her shining young health,beautiful bone structure, precise speech, and fine skin were a reproach to the pasty male drinkers she mixed with. She was stylish,outspoken, and lovely....She was extravagantly talented as a poet.”
My favorite anecdote from this book involves an encounter she had with one of her detractors among Spicer’s set who said to her, “How would you like it if we took you out in the alley and gang-raped you?”Jamie’s response: “Oh, dear, do you really consider yourselves a gang?”That come-back would take some poise.
Larry Fagin alerted me to an uncaptioned photo of Jamie from a 1964 book called Our San Francisco, which appears above in this post; in addition, he sent me a scan of this ca.1970 fresco of Jamie by the late George Schneeman:
Some sleuthing by Arlo Quint of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project suggests that Jamie, now around 71, may be living in San Francisco.
Jamie MacInnis was also an addict. In the poem "Science," she writes: “Heroin gives you its dreams/and takes yours away...”
[Update, Jan. 19, 2014: I made a PDF of Practicing, which Charles Bernstein has added to the Electronic Poetry Center . See this link. Some of the poems were slightly truncated in the scanning process, which I didn’t realize until too late. Apologies.]
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.
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.
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)
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.
(ed note: This post originally appeared on December 21, 2011)
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 16th 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
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.
"Lively and affectionate" Publisher's Weekly. Now in paperback.Click image to order your copy.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark
