Terence Winch: Craic-Head Poetry

  Were he still alive, John Ashbery would be turning 99 in two days. I first met John in November of 1973 when I went with a group of friends to hear him read in DC. Maybe it was the Library of Congress. I can’t remember. Michael Lally had turned me on to John’s 1970 book, The Double Dream of Spring , which knocked me out.  This was poetry that was grand, symphonic, silly, profound, and comic all at once. His formal virtuosity and his mastery of language set a new standard for many of us young poets back then. We stayed in touch over the years. John read in Washington with some regularity and would often put me on the guest list for pre- or post-reading get-togethers. He loved a good party, preferably one that included plenty of drink, dope, wit, and attractive young men. [photo at left by Allan Penn from the New York Times Magazine ] He was extraordinarily prolific. In his 60s, he published one of my favorite Ashbery books—the dazzling, monumental Flow Chart, a 216-page ...

                                                  Geoff Young blessing the multitudes   Let us now praise Geoff Young . In particular, the poems in Lights Out , which I think of as one of the necessary books of our time. In Geoff’s work, all kinds of pleasures abound—you get the playful silliness and verbal inventiveness of Ashbery, the sharp urbanities of O’Hara, the autotelic experimentalism of the Language school. Which is not to say that Young’s work is a collage of other writers’ talents. No, he is a unique voice. Lights Out , his most comprehensive book, is a full-service collection, in which all your poetry needs are met, whether for wit, narrative, or love and its loss: Geoffrey Young I am light, comfortable, and best of all, I really work. I’m still headquartered here but production takes place nearly anywhere, having come a lon...

  The FFV in Adelphie, Maryland, in the early 1970s. Jesse Winch, Terence Winch, Doug Pell, Alan Oresky, Joe Stork. A long time ago, in late 1971, one of the strangest string-bands in American musical history was  formed, and I was there at the beginning. The Fast Flying Vestibule (named after a train  celebrated in a song) did a little bit of everything, from Charlie Poole to Carl Perkins to doo- wop to Kerry polkas. We lived to have a good time. We were not purists like The New Lost City Ramblers, preserving the sacred traditions of the past, or the Red Clay Ramblers, the brilliant North Carolina group that stayed pretty close to the approved text. We did whatever felt good.      I remember a conversation I had some years ago in McGinty’s pub in downtown Silver Spring,  Maryland, near where I live. I told a friend that my old string-band was planning its first reunion in  decades. “Oh, I love old-timey music,” she said. “What did ...

                                                                               Beginish Some time ago, I was contemplating this medley of tunes from an album called Stormy Weather by the excellent traditional band Beginish: I'm Waiting for You Touch Me If You Dare The Gooseberry Bush And I thought: there's almost a narrative contained in the names of these three reels, an abbreviated sexual story whose climax takes place in a gooseberry bush. And, musically, the tunes seems to belong together. It must have been intentional­—Beginish seems like a witty and mischievous collection of people. "The Moving Cloud," "The Flowing Tide," "Banish Misfortune," "Paddy Gone to France," "The Girl That Broke My Heart," "The Pope's Toe," "We Were Drinking and Kissing the Ladies," "I Have No Money," "Money...