Terence Winch: Craic-Head Poetry

  In its 21 July 2008 issue, The New Yorker ran a piece by Jonah Lehrer called “The Eureka Hunt,” about attempts by scientists to explain “the insight experience,” those “moments of insight” that lead to problem-solving breakthroughs. The story is mostly set inside the brain, tracing the efforts by various neuroscientists and others to pinpoint what happens in the brain during these epiphanies. In the end, Lehrer writes, “it remains unclear how simple cells recognize what the conscious mind cannot….” Lehrer quotes one researcher: “This mental process will always be a little unknowable…. At a certain point, you just have to admit that your brain knows more than you do.” I was surprised that the story didn’t examine the ways in which creative breakthroughs in the arts resemble scientific insights. My thinking about the intersection of scientific and esthetic “eureka moments” took shape when I was a graduate student in the late 1960s. One of my most memorable teachers was Elizabet...

  The way I got my first real job was to me a miracle. I was finishing up graduate school as a doctoral fellow at Fordham University in the Bronx and needed money now that my fellowship stipend was about to expire. A college classmate of mine named Terence Hegarty, who worked at Dover Publications in lower Manhattan, helped me get an interview there for an editorial position. But I had no real professional work experience. I had worked as a construction laborer for four summers; I was a movie usher for a while when I was fifteen; I was a temporary postal worker one Christmas vacation when I was eighteen; I spent the summer of 1969 working the graveyard shift as an elevator operator in a swanky building on Park Avenue; I played the drums in ceili bands in the New York area for years. When I was sixteen, I spent the summer as the drummer in a very strange trio that played six nights a week at the Emerald Isle House in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, the so-called...

                        Bronze statue by Sally McKenna of the poet Antoine Ó Raifteirí, located in Kiltimagh, County  Mayo  Many decades ago, my brother Jesse took a beginners’ course in the Irish language. Out of that experience, he memorized a short, beautiful poem by Anthony Raftery , usually called “Mise Raifteirí.” On a visit to Ireland in October of 2016, he suggested that we visit Raftery’s grave, which turns out to be in the vicinity of the town of Loughrea, in county Galway, the same area where our mother was from. So, with our cousin Martin Flynn and our good friend Dominick Murray, we took the short ride from the Flynn household in Cahercrea to the Reilig na Bhfilí (Cemetery of the Poets) in Killeeneen where Raftery is buried.                                Terence Winch at the poets' cemetery where Raftery is buried in Galway....

  O n Easter Monday of 1916, 150 or so Irish rebels took armed action against their British rulers, seizing the General Post Office (GPO) in Dublin. After a week of fighting, they were defeated by the thousands of British troops arrayed against them; but the Easter Rising ultimately led to Irish independence from the mighty British Empire. Given the musical and literary traditions of the Irish, it is no surprise that the rebellion also gave rise to poems, songs, movies, and books. In fact, Patrick Pearse , one of the leaders of the Rising, was himself a poet. Probably the best-known of the poems to have been inspired by the conflict is William Butler Yeats 's “Easter 1916.” Several of poem's memorable phrases continue to echo more than a hundred years later:  Easter 1916 I I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered aw...