Ted Greenwald and I had been friends for more than 40 years. Around 1973, I saw a poem of his in a poetry magazine & loved it. I don’t remember the poem or the magazine. But I got in touch with him soon thereafter and we became lifelong friends. Ted would come to DC to do readings and hang out. And I would see him in New York on my visits back to my native city. He died earlier today and I will miss him greatly, as will his many other friends.
And he was a true friend and steadfast comrade. He was also a brilliant and stunningly productive poet. I believe that recognition of the significance of his achievement as a writer will only increase with the passage of time.
We talked---for the last time, as it turned out---last month. He had been sick for a number of years, but was doing better and sounded optimistic. And whatever the conditions of his life, he remained prolific to the end, with several new books out this year alone.
Ted was the most straightforward, no-bullshit person I’ve ever known. He told you exactly what he thought in a style that could sometimes be imperative, but which I always took delight in. He insisted, e.g., back in the ‘80s that I figure out quickly how to get a song I had written, which was very Irish and traditional-sounding and which Ted loved, to Frank Sinatra. He was convinced that Frank would jump at the chance to record my song. Ted dismissed my argument that this song didn’t really seem to be up Frank’s alley. He was like that as a friend---fiercely loyal and full of appreciation and affection.
Here’s an excerpt from a review I wrote of one of Ted’s books: “Ted Greenwald’s work has always been rooted in speech, street language, word of mouth. ...Greenwald often conjoins street talk and technical innovation. ...Ted Greenwald knows what real American talk sounds like, understands the rhythm and pulse of the language, and knows how to write poems that are built around that knowledge. He is one of America’s most ambitious and provocative poets.”
I want to pick up the phone right now and call him back to us.
On Easter Monday of 1916, 150 or so Irish rebels took armed action against their British rulers, seizing the General Post Office (GPO) in Dublin. After a week of fighting, they lost to the thousands of British troops arrayed against them, but the Rising ultimately led to Irish independence from the mighty British Empire. Given the musical and literary traditions of the Irish, it is no surprise that the rebellion also gave rise to poems, songs, movies, and books. (In fact, Patrick Pearse, one of the leaders of the Rising, was himself apoet.) Probably the best-known of the poems is William Butler Yeats's "Easter 1916":
Easter 1916
I I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
II That woman's days were spent In ignorant good will, Her nights in argument Until her voice grew shrill. What voice more sweet than hers When young and beautiful, She rode to harriers? This man had kept a school And rode our winged horse. This other his helper and friend Was coming into his force; He might have won fame in the end, So sensitive his nature seemed, So daring and sweet his thought. This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vain-glorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song; He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
III Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter, seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute change. A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute; A horse-hoof slides on the brim; And a horse plashes within it Where long-legged moor-hens dive And hens to moor-cocks call. Minute by minute they live: The stone's in the midst of all.
IV Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? That is heaven's part, our part To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild. What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death. Was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith For all that is done and said. We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead. And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse -- MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
_________________________
One of the best of the many songs that came out of the Easter Rising is "The Foggy Dew," written in 1919 by Charles O’Neill, a parish priest from County Down. This version by the great Dublin singer Frank Harte, who died a few years ago and who was once described by my friend Doug Lang as having "a voice like a tenor sax," is my favorite(listen here to "The Foggy Dew"), though Sinead O'Connor's rendition with the Chieftains also gives me the chills.
The Easter Rising became the starting point for modern Irish history, its echoes clearly audible throughout the recent Troubles in the north of Ireland (as this song of my own, called "The Streets of Belfast,"demonstrates). In the years immediately following the Rising, the struggle for independence from Britain continued, eventually leading to the partition of Ireland as a condition for the establishment of the Irish Free State. Partition, in turn, spurred a terrible civil war among Irish nationalists that tore the country apart. This grim and bloody period has inspired a number of searing films, including two of recent vintage: The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Ken Loach's 2007 film starring Cillian Murphy, and Michael Collins, the 1996 Liam Neeson film written and directed by Neil Jordan. But for me the greatest of them all is the 1935 John Ford classic,The Informer, based on a Liam O'Flaherty novel and starring Victor McLaglen as Gypo Nolan, an ill-fated "gutter Judas," to use the New York Times's memorable phrase. (Here's a clip of McLaglen at work.)
I found the poem below recently in a pile of papers from around 2008. I had no memory of having written it, but I’m sure many writers have the same kind of experience. Forgetfulness enshrouding us all. What intrigued me is that the poem seems to predict what happened a year or two after I wrote it. In late 2010, I sold a precious piece of my past—an Irish button accordion I got when I was around 8 years old. I can still dimly remember going to Manhattan with my father and his best friend P.J. Conway to buy this instrument, which I think cost about $200, a fortune for my family in those days. It was beautiful but hard to play—the keyboard action was high and stiff.
The Black Box, painting by Susan Campbell
When I retired from the Smithsonian in 2009, I needed to look for some extra money, and that’s when selling the old box occurred to me. I’d hardly touched it since 1980-81, when I replaced it with a succession of instruments that are easier to play. I don’t think it was a bad decision to sell it. My father had a kind of Zen-like non-attachment to material things, and I think he would have blessed the de-accessioning of the box. It was bought by a Dublin accordion-player of impressive ability named Ray Dempsey (pictured below). He in turn sold it to a Frenchman named Laurent Jarry, who presides over an accordion emporium in the Paris suburb of Montreuil that I would love to visit one day.
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)
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
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
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