Terence Winch: Craic-Head Poetry

  [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...

                                                                      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...

[an earlier version of this post appeared first on the now defunct Best American Poetry blog on Sept. 29, 2013.]  I n 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 memorable, though brief, visit to DC, he thought she had read with me. 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 o...

  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 count myself 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 w...