Terence Winch: Craic-Head Poetry

  [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....

[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...