Ireland Over Here: Inventing Irish-American Poetry [Terence Winch]

 

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

            as they are and the lips

            heard in any poem

How should we go to bed again















This was a far cry from Yeats and company. It was a revelation to me that an Irish poet could be producing work with this kind of edge. I tracked him down somehow, and we began a correspondence. Liddy lived and taught at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee from the ’70s until his death in 2008. Although we met only four or five times in person over the years, we kept in touch. My literary/music archive at Boston College contains dozens of James’s amazing letters, almost like poems themselves.

James Liddy, like Eamonn Wall, another Irish-born poet who has lived in the States for decades, re-defined the meaning of “Irish-American” for me. As the child of Irish immigrants to New York, I used to exclude automatically from our hyphenated ranks anyone born in Ireland. But Liddy and Wall, among others, bring a passion for American poetry to their writing that shows up clearly in their own work. In many ways, they are more influenced by writers like Jack Spicer, Allen Ginsberg, and The New York School greats than by the icons of Irish modernism.

             Terence Winch, Charles Fanning, and Eamonn Wall, St. Louis, May 2024.

Very soon after we became friends, Liddy and I decided that the world urgently needed what was going to be the first anthology of Irish-American literature, which we would co-edit. It would be called Ireland Over Here: An Anthology of 20th-Century Irish-American Poetry and Prose. The title comes from a song I remember well from childhood called “If We Only Had Old Ireland Over Here,” popular among Irish immigrants in the 20th century. For at least three or four years, James and I mailed suggestions back and forth to each other, with samples of the work we liked by prospective writers. For the introduction, James would adapt an essay he had written on “The Double Vision of Irish-American Fiction” and I would expand upon a review I wrote for the American Book Review in 1985 on the Irish-American roots of William Kennedy’s Albany trilogy. We would include all kinds of expected and unexpected candidates—Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Elizabeth Cullinan, Maureen Owen, Michael Lally, Alice McDermott, Eileen Myles, Robert Creeley! The literary world would be awestruck. Once we collided into the reality of permissions and the fees thereof, however, our noble project ran out of steam. I still have my big, fat “Ireland Over Here” file and fond memories of what might have been.

Fortunately, other, more resourceful people came along to take up the challenge. In fact, over the last forty plus years, there has been a momentous awakening to the idea of Irish America, the very concept of which used to be greeted by everything from puzzlement to scorn by many. I know about the latter—I’ve gotten into my share of arguments with the scornful on this subject. Scholars like Charles Fanning and Timothy Meagher, however, have brought immense talent and insight to their analyses of Irish American identity and history. My old friend Bob Callahan, who passed away in 2008, brought out The Big Book ofIrish American Culture and edited a sui generis journal called Callahan’s Irish Quarterly. There’s even a four-color monthly magazine called Irish America. New York alone supports two weekly Irish newspapers—The Irish Echo and The Irish Voice (the latter now online only). Glucksman Ireland House, NYU's "center for the study of Ireland and the Irish diaspora," is a central hub for Irish-American studies, with eminent scholar Marion Casey in residence. And the New York Irish History Rountable and its journal is a treasured historical resource. A song that I wrote in the 1980s, called “When New York Was Irish,” became an instant hit in the Irish-American world, with the title itself getting recycled for use in scholarly books and conferences.  

         George O'Brien and Timothy Meagher, July 2021, DC.

There have even been a few anthologies over the years. But the most impressive omnium gatherum of all came out in 2007. Published by the University of Notre Dame Press and edited by poet/scholar Daniel Tobin, The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present represents a signal moment in the history of this literary tradition. Tobin has produced a definitive collection, a book I am delighted to have in my life and on my shelves. Some names may surprise some readers—Thoreau, Whitman, Jeffers, Frost, Schuyler, Ammons, et al. Go see for yourself. I had the honor of participating in a reading—along with John Waters, Dan Tobin, Jean Valentine, Greg Delanty, and Joe Lennon—at NYU’s Glucksman Ireland House to mark the publication of this 900-page gorilla. It was an historic evening, and no fights broke out, though we did go out for a drink afterwards.



See also:


This post first appeared on the erstwhile Best American Poetry blog on July 29, 2008. It has been revised and updated here.


©Terence Winch  
Permission required to use any of the contents of this post.


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