Terence Winch: Craic-Head Poetry

Today I am thinking of my old friend James Liddy . He was born and raised in Ireland (though his mother was born in New York), but spent much of his adult life as an English professor at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We first made each other’s acquaintance via the USPS in 1973, and corresponded frequently thereafter until his death in November of 2008. We were fans of each other’s work—I wrote the entry on James for The Dictionary of Irish Literature and he wrote one on me for The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America .  Below is a short piece on his work that I wrote for a festschrift called Honeysuckle, Honeyjuice: A Tribute to James Liddy (ed. Michael S. Begnal, Galway, Ireland: Arlen House, 2006). ______________________________________________________________________ James Liddy: Real Ideas from Living There is no turning in the widening gyre, no sailing to Byzantium (except by allusion), no digging metaphors out of the Ulster bog.  That’s not what goes on in Ja...

  In October of 2003, I got a call at work from Beth Rake, my friend John McCarthy’s wife, informing me that John was in the hospital with a diagnosis of liver cancer. He died about a month later, at age 60. In that last month, however, he showed such unbelievable courage and good humor that those of us close to him still marvel at the way he died. John & I grew up in the same neighborhood in the Bronx and became friends when I was about 14 and he was 17. He was the only child of a father from county Kerry and a mother from Tipperary. He was also an amazing storyteller, comedian, mimic, singer, and spoons-player (though his talents were not known far beyond his circle of friends and acquaintances). With John’s permission, I recorded 3 or 4 of our final phone conversations. When Beth asked me to write something for the funeral program, I proposed instead that I put together a “poem” taken from some of the words John spoke during those conversations. Here is that piece: Going ...