Terence Winch: Craic-Head Poetry

When I was five I was involved in an accident that has affected me deeply for the last 7 5 years. My best friend was a boy named Dennis O'Toole, who lived in the building next to mine on Daly Avenue in the Bronx. One summer day in 1951 the two of us filled up our water guns in my family's apartment & headed out to play. I remember that my mother was ironing & cautioned us to be careful as we ran out of the house. But we weren't careful. I was about a foot in front of Dennis as we tore across the street, shooting our guns in the air & laughing. Then, suddenly, I sensed something had changed.  When I turned around, I saw that Dennis had been knocked back to the other side of the street, where he was propped up against the tire of a parked car. It was a ghastly scene, imprinted in horrifying detail in my mind ever since. To my left was the black truck that killed him. Clearly, I had very narrowly escaped my friend's fate.  My memory of all this has always play...

Ted Greenwald and I were friends for more than 40 years. Around 1973, I saw a poem of his in a poetry journal & loved it. I don’t remember the poem or the journal. I also don't remember how I tracked him down, but somehow I did, and soon thereafter we became connected for life. 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 in 2016 and I still miss him greatly, as I know is true for so many who loved him and his work. Ted was indeed a steadfast comrade. He was also a brilliant and stunningly productive poet. He told me a year or two before he died that he had thousands of pages of unpublished work stored in the drawers of a dresser. I hope all that writing is in safe hands and will one day be published. 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—in May of 2016, a month before...

                            Chris Mason at Normals Books & Records in Baltimore. Photo by T. Winch Baltimore is a wondrous place whose praises I have sung, literally ( "In Praise of the City of Baltimore" ). It is the home of the American Visionary Art Museum , my favorite place for outsider art. My old friend David Franks , who practically invented performance poetry, was active there as a poet and performer until his death in 2010 . The late Michael Ball r an the legendary i.e. reading series , bringing the work of a wide range of poets to intimate and homey space s . The indefatigable Stephen Reichert and Clare Banks edit the impressive literary journal Smartish Pace . Along with the Ivy Bookshop, Stephen and Clare also organize The Hot L Baltimore reading series. And my dear friends David Beaudouin and Don Berger add tremendous depth to Baltimore’s poetry community. Finally, I can’t leave out the em...

  Were he still alive, John Ashbery would be turning 99 in two days. I first met John in November of 1973 when I went with a group of friends to hear him read in DC. Maybe it was the Library of Congress. I can’t remember. Michael Lally had turned me on to John’s 1970 book, The Double Dream of Spring , which knocked me out.  This was poetry that was grand, symphonic, silly, profound, and comic all at once. His formal virtuosity and his mastery of language set a new standard for many of us young poets back then. We stayed in touch over the years. John read in Washington with some regularity and would often put me on the guest list for pre- or post-reading get-togethers. He loved a good party, preferably one that included plenty of drink, dope, wit, and attractive young men. [photo at left by Allan Penn from the New York Times Magazine ] He was extraordinarily prolific. In his 60s, he published one of my favorite Ashbery books—the dazzling, monumental Flow Chart, a 216-page ...

                                                  Geoff Young blessing the multitudes   Let us now praise Geoff Young . In particular, the poems in Lights Out , which I think of as one of the necessary books of our time. In Geoff’s work, all kinds of pleasures abound—you get the playful silliness and verbal inventiveness of Ashbery, the sharp urbanities of O’Hara, the autotelic experimentalism of the Language school. Which is not to say that Young’s work is a collage of other writers’ talents. No, he is a unique voice. Lights Out , his most comprehensive book, is a full-service collection, in which all your poetry needs are met, whether for wit, narrative, or love and its loss: Geoffrey Young I am light, comfortable, and best of all, I really work. I’m still headquartered here but production takes place nearly anywhere, having come a lon...

  The FFV in Adelphie, Maryland, in the early 1970s. Jesse Winch, Terence Winch, Doug Pell, Alan Oresky, Joe Stork. A long time ago, in late 1971, one of the strangest string-bands in American musical history was  formed, and I was there at the beginning. The Fast Flying Vestibule (named after a train  celebrated in a song) did a little bit of everything, from Charlie Poole to Carl Perkins to doo- wop to Kerry polkas. We lived to have a good time. We were not purists like The New Lost City Ramblers, preserving the sacred traditions of the past, or the Red Clay Ramblers, the brilliant North Carolina group that stayed pretty close to the approved text. We did whatever felt good.      I remember a conversation I had some years ago in McGinty’s pub in downtown Silver Spring,  Maryland, near where I live. I told a friend that my old string-band was planning its first reunion in  decades. “Oh, I love old-timey music,” she said. “What did ...