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Memo to Bridie Flynn [Terence Winch]

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  [Note: this post first appeared on the now defunct Best American Poetry blog on 9 May 2010. It is revised and updated here.] 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. Known as Bridie, my mother died of breast cancer on 14 January 1962, at age 55, after a long illness. 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 never before published....
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Doug Lang in America [Terence Winch]

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[This post appeared first on the now defunct Best American Poetry blog on July 31, 2008. Updates appear at the end of the post.] I n 1973, the last American ground troops left Vietnam, the World Trade Center opened for business, the Watergate scandal rolled downhill, the IRA bombing campaign was in full swing. Agnew resigned. Allende was overthrown. And Doug Lang arrived in the U.S. His arrival was historic—it changed my life, as it did the lives of his many friends, colleagues, and students over the past three decades. Doug came here from England, by way of Wales, where he is from. Specifically, the town of Swansea (also Dylan Thomas’s hometown).                                                 at Folio Books, Washington, DC, 1970s In the 1970s, I used to write Clerihews about my friends. Doug’s was: Doug Lang likes to be one of the gang. That’s why he talks fu...
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Brendan Behan Remembered [Terence Winch]

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  [Note: this post first appeared on the Best American Poetry blog on 20 March 2019. It is slightly revised and updated here.] There’s a p hoto of Brendan Behan standing outside the Dublin Zoo with an enigmatic look on his face and a large snake curled around his neck.  The image reveals much about Brendan, who died on March 20, 196 4 , at the age of forty- one .  He was a comedian who liked to shock people and who wasn’t afraid to take chances.  He was an unstoppable ham who would do nearly anything to entertain his audience.  His life, or legend, almost outstretched his work in its claim on public attention.  His fans were sometimes more interested in the snake around his neck than in his writing. He was a man of many talents, with the charm and magnetism of a movie star.  An accomplished singer who knew hundreds, maybe thousands, of songs, Brendan came from a musical background—his father played the fiddle, his uncle wrote the Irish National Ant...
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Re-Reading Michael Lally's South Orange Sonnets [Terence Winch]

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                                                                      Michael Lally, March 2022   [Note: this post appeared on the Best American Poetry blog on 30 July 2008. It has been slightly edited and updated here.] I do a great deal of my reading on the Washington subway, as a daily commuter to and from my job in DC. (I’m one of the few poets I know who works a 9 to 5 office job. I’m not complaining―I like my job―but full-time work does take a serious bite out of one’s day.) My subway reading this morning was Michael Lally’s South Orange Sonnets , a little book of 20 poems that had a significance influence on me as a young poet more than 35 years ago. Michael Lally is a singular, original voice in American literature. I first met him in November of 1971, right after mo...
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