Terence Winch: Craic-Head Poetry

  In my last post, I wrote about Tim Dlugos, the tremendously gifted poet who died of AIDS in 1990. Thinking of Tim calls to mind a makeshift reading tour Tim, Michael Lally, Ed Cox, and I threw together in 1973. We had many adventures on the road—from car break-downs to one-night stands, but what I remember most was discovering a chapbook entitled A Munster Song of Love and War by James Liddy in a bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. Flipping through the book, published in 1971 by White Rabbit, I was immediately taken with Liddy’s poems: 11 “ Irishmen make bad lovers,” Says Bishop was how The newspapers had it and we walked In night’s service of evil to fall in love                again sure love was not                a word but a contagion Of the English. Being in love casts out love. How else could any of our fuckings be haunted           ...

T he last time I saw Tim Dlugos was 30 December 1989. We met for dinner at Kramer Books & Afterwords, the first bookstore/café in the land (as far as I know). It’s one of the few independent bookstores still going strong in DC, but probably more because of the food than the books. Tim had been battling AIDS for a while, and I remember being a little apprehensive about seeing him, wondering to what extent the disease might have changed him. So his arrival came as a relief, a cause for optimism—he looked better than ever, and seemed full of energy and purpose. Starting in the early 1970s, Tim and I were part of a group of poets who participated in an open reading every Monday night in a room over the Community Book Shop on P Street in Dupont Circle in DC. The readings, called Mass Transit, were started by Michael Lally in 1971. Mass Transit was a poetry lab, where all experiments were welcome, or at least tolerated. Many poets came up through Mass Transit, and became friends—E...

  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. My mother was funny, smart, and tough, with an endless supply of Irish farmgirl wisdom: you have to eat a pound of dirt befo...

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 funny and always wears a hat. In Wales, everyone does that. Doug has taught writing at the Corcoran School of Art since 1976. He is revered there, and elsewhere. His work is hard to c...