The Best American Poetry

Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov---Soviet Texts (Terence Winch)

Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov  (1940–2007) died of a heart attack on the Moscow metro  at age 66.  An artist of incisive comic genius with a taste for the bizarre, he would no doubt have found the circumstances of his death somewhat amusing. As Soviet Texts, an excellent new collection of his work translated and edited by poet Simon Schuchat (with Ainsley Morse) and published by Ugly Duckling Presse, makes clear, Prigov’s central literary mission was the dismantling of the language of officialdom. He is a satirist, a parodist, whose writing is a mocking commentary on the political misuses and other abuses of language. [photo left: D.A. Prigov]

The lead-off piece in Soviet Texts is entitled “Under Me,” and it sets the tone for the entire collection.  A long list-poem offering “a procession of details, elements, events, which took place ‘under me,’” it showcases Prigov’s absurd, expansive, comprehensive knowledge of history, art, and culture (not to mention sports and porn):

            And Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Kim Basinger, Michael Jackson appeared under me

            Tarantino, Platini, van Basten, Wim Wenders also appeared under me.

            Jeff Koons appeared under me, too

            And Ciccolina appeared under me

            And Ravi Shankar appeared under me

            Mike Tyson, Schumacher, Agassi, Magic Johnson appeared under me, too

In “Description of Objects,” Prigov takes aim at the deadly form and diction of Soviet propaganda in a series of pieces each beginning with “Comrades!” and proceeding to offer ridiculous definitions of everything from eggs to apes. Authoritative nonsense and faux logic lead to the final conclusion of every description: “For the reasons indicated above, its actual existence is considered unlikely.” In the brilliant mock-heroic “Moscow and the Muscovites,” one of my favorites, Prigov takes on inflated, nationalistic jargon, exposing its ludicrousness along the way: “Moscow is everywhere—its peoples are all over/ And where Moscow’s not—there’s only emptiness.” “Twenty Stories about Stalin” are scripture-like parables about Uncle Joe that are ultimately anti-hagiographic.

Also a prolific visual artist, Prigov clearly deserves the wider appreciation that this book will certainly bring him. As Simon Schuchat [photo right] notes in the frontmatter: “While Prigov’s writing is very definitely of the Soviet and post-Soviet world, it is also fully equal to, and sometimes consonant with, contemporaneous avant-garde writing elsewhere in the world.”   

Soviet Texts thrums with Prigov’s subversive sense of humor, almost making one hungry for something irony-free.  Though I don’t think you find that in his writing,  I thought these lines from “Terrorism with a Human Face” came closest, and could even serve as his epitaph:

            When the years have passed and the currently wild

            People have forgotten many things

            Fear of me will tear through all of Great Russia

            For what I wrote! But it was the truth, after all!

Indran Amirthanayagam---Poetic Globalist (Terence Winch)

Indran Amirthanayagam is one of the most remarkable figures roaming the contemporary poetic landscape. Like some of the poets he most admires—Cavafy, Neruda, Hikmet (all mentioned in the poem below)—he is a citizen of the world. Born into the Catholic Tamil community (a minority within a minority) of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1960, he left with his family for England when he was eight, seeking refuge from his native land’s ongoing strife as well as care for an autistic brother. He lived in the U.K. for six years, attending grammar and primary school there. When he was fourteen, the family moved again, this time to Honolulu, where his father, also a poet, had been offered a job. In Hawaii, Indran was one year ahead of Barry Obama, whom he knew slightly, at Punahou School.  In 1978, he left Hawaii for Haverford College in Pennsylvania. After getting his B.A. there, he moved to New York to become, like Lorca, “a poet in New York.” He picked up a master's at the Columbia School of Journalism and remained in New York until 1993, when he got a job with the U.S. Foreign Service, having  become a U.S. citizen in the late ‘80s.

Indran reading “Fire Department”

His Foreign Service positions have included stints in Argentina, Belgium, the Ivory Coast, Mexico, India,  Canada, Peru, and Haiti. This is a man who gets around.

He writes and publishes in English, French, Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Portuguese (but sadly and ironically, he has forgotten Tamil, his first language). In the DC area, where he has many friends, he runs a reading series at a Haitian restaurant called Port au Prince and has just become editor of the Beltway Poetry Quarterly, an online journal. He is indefatigable; he works full time; he writes a poem a day, at a minimum; he travels constantly. In the first half of this year alone, he felt he simply had to go to San Francisco to help celebrate Ferlinghetti’s hundredth birthday; he caught a train from DC to New Orleans to take part in a literary festival; he brought his 83-year-old mother back to Sri Lanka for the first time in 30 years; he’s made several trips to New York. He may be the most ubiquitous poet on the planet.

He always wears a hat. 

His poems (the ones in English, anyway) have a directness, almost a plainness, about them. His work is deeply literary, full of reverence for his fellow poets, but devoid of stylistic pretensions. The poems are like enhanced emails, addressed to his friends and readers, but made resonant and luminous through the work of the imagination.

 

Gift at the End

I woke up the other day and thought about the best gift

I could offer friends turning a year older on the various

continents—I know people everywhere like you, thanks

to powerful social media—a poem, certainly, electronic

card, phone call, even a visit? Can you imagine boarding

 

a steel and aluminum plane—wood used only

for some interiors in first class, the metallic bird

driven by a well-rested pilot and a series of computers--

to say hello to you in Rotterdam, or Madras,

or in the port city of Alexandria? But I know only

 

Cavafy there, through poetry, and in Moscow,

Nazim tootling about in a car, metallic also, not yet

with dynamite under the hood, and Neruda straddling

a horse through the Andres on the way to Argentina,

walking on the beach at Wellawatta with his mongoose.

 

So how to justify these loose associations, stream

of consciousness running through the World Wide Web

without any brake, no formal mechanism to stopper

imagination and force, at least, the appearance

of form, migration certainly the only truth.

 

and the need to finish the poem, walk it back home,

stop the beast in the kitchen, give him a treat,

some Wilfred Owen, just days before

the War’s end, shot dead—dulce et decorum est—

or straight to the point, the full stop.

 

—Indran Amirthanayagam,  10 July 2019

 

 

 

Poem for Father's Day (Terence Winch)

My father, Paddy Winch (1905--1971), worked as the custodian of St. Thomas Aquinas elementary school in the Bronx, which this poem commemorates. He was a very generous and loving man, much beloved by his children and all who knew him. The photo shows him playing the banjo in 1958 in the house in Cahercrea, County Galway, Ireland, where my mother, Bridie Flynn, was born and raised. My parents were in Ireland that summer, their first trip back in almost 30 years. (Dublin cousins Noel Rogan and Martin Dawson are also seen in the photo.)

 

Custodian

            for charlie fanning

_________________________________

 

I ran the shovel along the street,

a razor path through the sidewalk face,

snow lather parting for me, for my father,

our feet crunching in the city night.

 

We grabbed the garbage cans from school

and church and dragged them up the iron

stairs.  I lugged burlap bags stuffed

with bingo cards, light as cream puffs.

 

We swept the auditorium with green sawdust

from huge drums.  We hammered and drilled

in his workshop, where tools hung on pegboard,

their images silhouetted behind them 

 

For instant identification and placement.

Once he sawed his index finger in half

on the power saw in a moment of inattention

in a life otherwise built of skill and care.  

 

Once a year the Monsignor made him climb inside

the giant boiler and clean it out

with enormous pipe cleaners till he was black

with soot that took days to wash off.

 

Sonny boy, he called me, and laddie buck.

He always said just do your best. 

We loved to watch him fall asleep

on the couch, Daily News over his face

 

Snores filling the apartment

with the music of rest well deserved.

His finger took years to heal enough

for him to play again but a black scar

 

Ran down its center. He’d give me a rub

with his unshaven face, rough as sandpaper.

He’d pretend he didn’t know me, scrubbed from

the tub, the lovely lie delighting me every time.

 

from Boy Drinkers (Hanging Loose Press, 2007)

 

Brendan Behan Remembered [Terence Winch]

There’s a picture of Brendan Behan standing outside the Dublin Zoo with a bemused look on his face and a large snake curled around his neck.  The photo reveals much about Brendan, who died 55 years ago today, on March 20, 1964, at the age of forty-one. He was a comedian who liked to shock people and who wasn’t afraid to take chances.  He was an unstoppable ham who would do nearly anything to entertain his audience.  His life, or legend, nearly overshadowed his work in its claim on public attention.  His fans were sometimes more interested in the snake around his neck than in his writing.

He was a man of many talents, with the charm and magnetism of a movie star.  An accomplished singer who knew hundreds, maybe thousands, of songs, Brendan came from a musical background—his father played the fiddle, his uncle wrote the Irish National Anthem, his brother Dominic wrote “The Patriot Game,” one of the best-loved Irish songs to come out of Ireland’s struggles.  Brendan himself composed many songs, some of which are part of his plays and one which he claimed was written with a threatening pistol at his head.  He was fluent in the Irish language and wrote the first version of The Hostage (an Giall) as Gaeilge.  He had lived in France, spoke good French, and claimed to have written pornography in Paris. He was precocious writer, turning out reasonably good verse as early as age nine.  He first started drinking when he was a boy, so his two major activities in later life—drinking and writing—were off to an early start.

As he grew older and more famous, his taste for “the gargle” took greater hold of him.  In his late twenties and early thirties, when he was turning out the work on which his reputation would ultimately rest, he was capable of long periods of hard work without any intake of alcohol.  But as he conquered the public with his brilliant memoir Borstal Boy and his two best plays, The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, he lost the stamina to keep on producing work of the same stature.   His public demanded the famous tough-talking funny Irish writer, and Brendan hated to disappoint a ready audience. It wasn’t, of course, all the public’s fault.  Brendan loved pub life, good times, music, talk.  He was certainly aware of how he was ruining himself and his future as a writer, but that awareness was no match for his thirst.  

As a boy and young man he was a political extremist, having taken part in a 1939-40 IRA bombing campaign (one with numerous parallels to the later IRA bombings that were part of the Troubles in Northern Ireland) in Britain, where he was arrested in Liverpool at the age of sixteen and sentenced to three years in borstal (something like reform school). Although he had abandoned active participation in the IRA by the time he was an established writer, the same wild and rebellious spirit that landed him in borstal—and in an Irish prison for his part in a shoot-out between the Irish police and the IRA less than a year after his release from borstal—also landed him in numerous bars on both sides of the Atlantic, wherein he challenged his health rather than the established order.  It was in the pubs that he played Brendan Behan, the famous ex-con with a big mouth and great talent. 

Ultimately, the booze got the best of him.  Friends, family, doctors, editors—many of the people in his life—tried to help him control his need for drink.  But he wasn’t up to the task.  There was a public hungry for the character Brendan Behan had created, and he wanted to come through for his fans.  His drinking, though it was bringing him closer to an early death with every passing day, was also a central element of his public act.  Towards the end he was in and out of hospitals frequently. His wife Beatrice, or some friend perhaps, would discover him unconscious in his hotel room in a diabetic coma and rush him to a hospital.  He amazed medical people with his powers of recovery and disheartened those who loved him with his many drunken escapades and self-destructive compulsions.  Much of his talent was destroyed along with his liver, so that at the end he was almost a parody of himself, trying desperately to live up to his reputation as legendary raconteur and tireless literary comedian.

His life was full of contradictions.  He hated and feared death and didn’t even like the subject brought up in his presence.  Yet he destroyed himself at an age when he should have been just reaching the peak of his powers as an artist.  He was known throughout the world as a brawling macho Irishman, yet he was also bisexual and wrote at least one early story, unearthed by Ulick O’Connor in his fine biography of Brendan, which can clearly be categorized as gay.  Even Borstal Boy includes many touching scenes (no pun intended) among the imprisoned boys that are obviously sexual in nature.  Brendan apparently worried about what a public revelation of his sexual complexities would do to his image, but such an expose never occurred in his lifetime.

Brendan’s last books were all spoken into a tape recorder and later put together with the help of his devoted editor, Rae Jeffs.  He had lost the ability to sit down at a typewriter and work at his craft.  In the end, Brendan was in the hospital, dying of alcoholism, when he got hold of some drink through a misguided visitor.  That apparently finished him off.  There were to be no more miraculous recoveries. 

Borstal Boy was Brendan’s masterpiece, the book in which, as they say, he found his voice. In the making over a period of many years, it displays all Brendan’s talents as a story-teller and humorist.  A moving account of his life from his arrest in Liverpool to his release from borstal and return to Ireland, the book is put together with exacting skill and literary vitality. Borstal Boy is in the tradition of portraits of the artist as a young man and rivals Joyce’s more highly regarded Portrait.  If Brendan had gone on to write something approaching the brilliance of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, Borstal Boy would perhaps have a higher rank in literary history than it now enjoys. 

The best-known of his plays, which are both performed from time to time, are The Quare Fellow and the Hostage. They are first-rate works that clearly demonstrate Brendan’s gift for dialogue and his ability to create authentic human drama.  The rest of his output—more plays, two “travel” books, a novel, and a follow-up to Borstal Boy are second-rate only in comparison to Borstal Boy and the two major plays. 

When I was a high school kid in the 1960s, my two favorite writers were James Baldwin and Brendan Behan. I couldn’t get enough of their work. I was thrilled when Brendan released two LPs back in those days. In fact, I pretty much memorized Brendan Behan Sings Irish Folksongs and Ballads, so much so that I can  still instantly summon up his voice in my mind any time night or day.      (Photo below: Visiting Brendan at his permanent residence in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, Oct. 2016; photo by Dominick Murray.)

Maureen Owen & Barbara Henning on the Road (Terence Winch)

 

Watch out, Mobile, Austin, San Diego, and any number of other cities in the U.S.: Maureen Owen and Barbara Henning are on the road and heading your way, armed with the power of poetry and good will. Transformations may take place, mirth may ensue, and who knows what else may happen.

These two illustrious writers are an inspiration to septuagenarians everywhere. They have over-loaded a 2007 Civic (with “only” a 130K miles on it, says Barbara) with pots and pans, sleeping bags, bags of books, food, yoga paraphernalia, and suitcases filled with anvils, and headed out into the poetry-starved American landscape for an 8-week road trip/reading tour.

I had the pleasure of reading with them on their second stop---Washington’s DC Arts Center---on Sunday (January 20, 2019), and of hanging out with them for the weekend. I asked each of them to read a poem, which they graciously did. (I apologize for the slightly distorted audio quality, but you will still get the idea.)

 

Maureen and Barbara are publishing an on-going blog that documents their odyssey. And you can check their agenda to see if they’re coming soon to a spot near you.

 

 

Here’s Maureen Owen reading “balmy tomorrow/saturday more snow predicted/the lilacs are in turmoil”  from Poets on the Road:

And Barbara Henning reading “Here We Are” from A Day Like Today:

 

 

Doug Lang reading "Pandaemonium Sonnet" (Terence Winch)

Last Thursday (8 Nov 2018), while visiting my friend Doug Lang, the great Welsh/American poet, at his studio apartment in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, the subject of movies about poets came up.  We discussed Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath in Sylvia; Bright Star, the film about John Keats; Patterson, Jim Jarmusch's excellent 2016 film about a (fictional) poet that used real poems by Ron Padgett; and other movies as well. Doug reminded me that he has a poem on this very subject in his 2012 collection dérangé.  He agree to read it for the cameras:

[click to enlarge text]

 

Tom Clark: Try to look upon death as a friend (Terence Winch)

No one who knew Tom Clark would ever deny that he was irascible, brilliant, generous, difficult, funny, erudite.  He was also immensely prolific—even in old age, he published his blog, Beyond the Pale, on a daily basis. BTP was a relentless illustrated catalogue—with scores of photos spanning the globe—usually revealing world’s woes and conflicts, often complemented with various texts he admired. He also wrote and published dozens of books of poetry and prose. His illustrious literary career is outlined here.

I felt really shaken by the news of his death yesterday: he was hit by a car near his house in Berkeley and died several hours later in the hospital.

We had met in person only once, back in April of 1978, when he came to DC to read in Doug Lang’s Folio Bookstore reading series. I have a distinct memory of taking him somewhere on the DC Metro.

We got to know each much better in recent years, mostly through emails. He liked my work and posted poems of mine from time to time in Beyond the Pale.  We had many exchanges about poetry, music, our shared Irish heritage, etc.  I am haunted today by his occasional references to the perilous streets of his neighborhood, where pedestrians had to risk their lives to take a walk. Indeed, he had been injured in an earlier accident some years ago. 

Here is what he wrote me in June on this very subject:

“Admire your getaroundability. Could never ride on any airplanes nevermore no!! Cannot lift right leg off ground. Get on bus impossible. Cross street a prayer every time, plus plenty straight out hate speech outa me, unheard by robo drivers on software cruise control. They never talk back. I set up in shooter stance w metal cane pointed like assault weapon, they smile and laugh and roar past w/o stopping @alleged pedestrian crosswalk!

Little known fact you probably won't believe or care why should you, but the stop lights here are "smart" - that is, have sensors to detect approaching vehicle, stay green for same, but green goes to yellow in 2 seconds (literally), if you're a ped, and if there is a more unliveable country on earth, defining living as having a soul, I want to go there, just to comparison shop - but I've never owned a credit card or a cell phone, have no i.d. and indeed no idea how to shop, so there might be a problem there, but no worries.”                    email from Tom Clark, June 2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tom will be missed and mourned by his many friends and colleagues. My deepest condolences to Angelica Clark, his wife of 50 years.

Here are two recent poems of Tom’s that I especially like:

Nocturnal Resolutions

Be opaque

Have no memory

Make no attempt to be understood

Stop suffering fools

Be kind to animals no matter what

Listen to the angel

Try to look upon death as a friend

Accept pain as the condition

Be more patient

Don’t turn on the light

 

The Edge of the Forest

Poems ought to have memories.

They should remember other poems.

At this moment the noisy city

has fallen quiet, and the edge

of the forest is abuzz with voices,

the voices of poems beneath the old trees

talking quietly about the poems that were

once here but are not here any longer,

remembering each other.

 

both poems from Truth Game (BlazeVOX, 2013)

 

Mother's Day [by Terence Winch]

Mother’s Day

 

My mother did not live to be a hundred
like the old nuns in the Sacred Heart
convent, sheltered from life. She was
fifty-five when she died. I was the baby
of the family. It does not seem so long
ago to me that I snuck into bed
between her and my father, no greater
antidote to fear than that. Life is not
a slow read. We speed through it,
pages flipping. After her funeral,
I hated the smell of flowers.

She used to make my brother take me
to the movies to help me breathe
in the cool dark of the air-conditioned Elsmere.
Now all I want to do is watch movies in bed,
central air humming through the house. I cried
so much when she died that it still embarrasses me.

 

She used to visit me in my dreams,
even sometimes speaking to me from
the beyond. But I haven’t seen
or heard from her in years.

My own heart thumps
wildly in my chest sometimes,
when I think about the story ending.

My arms are swollen from allergy shots,
my son examining bumblebees
in the backyard. I inhale as deeply as I can.
Flowers don’t bother me anymore.

 

[This poem was written, I think, ca. 2000. The photo shows me, checking the time, and my best friend, Dennis O'Toole, sitting on my mother's lap in 1948 in Rockaway Beach, NYC. My mother was Bridie Flynn from Co. Galway, Ireland.]

Visiting Raftery the Poet in the Cemetery of the Poets [by Terence Winch]

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.”  When we were last in 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.

As Wikipedia informs us, Raftery (30 March 1779–25 December 1835), who composed in Irish, is often called the last of the wandering bards.  He lived almost exactly a century later than the great Turlough O' Carolan, the itinerant harper who composed hundreds of gorgeous musical pieces that are still widely played today, just as Raftery's poems, which were never written down in his lifetime, are taught today in Irish schools.  Raftery also played the fiddle, and I have a special affection for musician-poets. Both men were blind, a misfortune that had no apparent negative effect on their creative abilities.

I thought I had taken a photo of the signage regarding the other poets buried in the Reilig na Bhfilí, but if I did I can’t find it. One Internet source gives their names as Marcus and Peatsaí Ó Callanáin. I believe the signage stated that they were brothers and both rivals of Raftery. I don’t know if any of their poems are extant. [Please see the comment below by my old friend Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, who provides some invaluable information on Peatsaí Ó Callanáin.]  In any case, Raftery is without question the top dog in this beautiful, serene little graveyard. (photo of Terence Winch, Oct. 2016, by Jesse Winch)

There we were in this place to which the paths of glory but lead, caught up in its eerie, decaying beauty, when my cousin Martin gathers us to show us something. He holds up a white envelope sealed in a plastic cover. “Someone has left me a check!” he jokes. We all laugh. We debate the propriety of opening this mystery letter, but really there is no other choice but to do so. This place is nearly abandoned, with no office or staff or any other visitors. So Martin opens the envelope. Inside is a card showing a photo of children playing with a homemade little plane, with a real plane in the background, ca. 1940, and a caption reading, “ YOU WILL NOT DO INCREDIBLE THINGS WITHOUT AN INCREDIBLE DREAM.”  There’s also an indecipherable message in longhand. But here’s the kicker: folded in the card is a 20 Euro bill. Money, after all. Graveyard money!  We spent it all on caffeine and cake in a coffee shop in Galway City. Thank you, Mr. Raftery. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo of Martin Flynn by Dominick Murray; photo of Raftery's grave by T. Winch)

Here is his poem, with an English translation:

Mise Raifteirí, an file, lán dóchais is grá le súile gan solas, ciúineas gan crá Dul siar ar m'aistear, le solas mo chroí Fann agus tuirseach, go deireadh mo shlí Feach anois mé mo dhroim le balla, Ag seinm ceoil do phocaí folamh.

I am Raftery, the poet,    full of hope and love    With eyes without light,    silence without torment.    Going back on my journey,    with the light of my heart    Weak and tired,    until the end of my way.    Look at me now    my back to the wall,    playing music    to empty pockets.

And, finally, Raftery's work continues to make its way into the world, as this lovely song inspired by his poem---and performed here by Eleanor Shanley and John McCartin---attests. (I'm not sure at this point if they are the composers).

 

What if poetry were something else entirely? Remembering John Ashbery (Terence Winch)

I met John Asbery 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 at once 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 epic of the imagination that I regard as one of the most significant works of literature in English (“It’s my Sonata of Experience, and I wrote it for you”).  I count another 14 books after that (not including his essays, translations, and art criticism), an astonishing late-life output that continued up to 2016’s Commotion of the Birds.  It seemed like every 18 months or so, a new Ashbery book would show up. I waited for, bought, and read each one, hoping they would keep coming forever. John’s death yesterday, 3 September 2017, at age 90 brings that streak to an end. Though I hope a few more posthumous books will appear to help all his friends and readers adjust to a world that no longer includes him.

My deepest condolences to David Kermani, John’s spouse, friend, collaborator, and companion for the past 40 years or so.

This evening I read though Flow Chart. Here are a few excerpts that called out to me:

 

Words, however, are not the culprit. They are at worst a placebo,

leading nowhere (though nowhere, it must be added, can sometimes be a    cozy

place, preferable in many cases to somewhere)...        

◙

 

  

 

...Still, life is reasonably absorbing

and there’s lots of nice people around. Most are well fed

and relaxing, and one can improve one’s mind a little

by going out to a film or having a chat with that special friend; and before

you know it it’s time to brush your teeth and go to bed.”   

◙

So what’s

to feel nervous about? We all know that we have to live for a certain time and then

unfortunately we must die, and after that no one is sure what happens. Accounts vary.  

◙

...I have the feeling my voice is just for me,

that no one else has ever heard it, yet I keep mumbling the litany

of all that has ever happened to me, childish pranks included, and when the voluminous

sun sets, its bag full, one can question these and other endeavors silently:

how far wrong did I go?    

◙

I’m the experimental model of which mankind is still dreaming, though to myself

I’m full of unworked-out bugs and stagefright...     

◙

Any day now you must start to dwell in it,

the poetry, and for this, grave preparations must be made, the walks of sand

raked, the rubble wall picked clean of dead vine stems, but what

if poetry were something else entirely, not this purple weather

with the eye of a god attached, that sees

inward and outward? What if it were only a small, other way of living,

like being in the wind?    

◙

I must ask you now to leave. It seems we are fresh out of turnips.   

 

Remembering Liam Rector on the 10th Anniversary of His Death (Terence Winch)

It's difficult for me to accept that 10 years have passed since my old friend Liam Rector took his own life. We had known each other since my early days in Washington, DC, where we were both part of the Mass Transit open poetry reading group started by Michael Lally in the early 1970s. We became better friends in the '80s and after, and I still miss his often outrageous, but always smart and funny perspective on life and poetry. I wrote about him here a year after his death. And Wikipedia offers this short bio. [photo at left by Parrish Dobson]

I learned of his death very quickly after it occurred from his longitme friend and protege David Fenza. I was shocked, but in some ways not surprised. Liam had hinted very clearly that suicide was something he regarded as a real option for him. It was over-the-top, dramatic, arresting, absolute---an act, in other words, that fit his personality perfectly. I respect his right to take his own life. I don't know what he was contending with that pushed him to this extreme, but I suspect it was a combination of medical problems and spiritual despair. He left behind his wife, Tree Swenson, herself a significant figure in the New York literary world back then; his daughter Virginia from his second marriage; and a multitude of friends, colleagues, and students.

He is a hard person to forget, and I miss him still. Here is a message he left on my answering machine sometime not too long before his death. I offer it not because of its flattering praise of my work, but to give a sense of the kind of friend he could be---full of appreciation and support for the people he cared about:

Liam Rector phone message

Here are two of my favorite poems of Liam's:

OLD COAT

Dressed in an old coat I lumber
Down a street in the East Village, time itself
Whistling up my ass and looking to punish me
For all the undone business I have walked away from,
And I think I might have stayed
In that last tower by the ocean,
The one I built with my hands and furnished
Using funds which came to me at nightfall, in a windfall....
Just ahead of me, under the telephone wires
On this long lane of troubles, I notice a gathering
Of viciously insane criminals I'll have to pass
Getting to the end of this long block in eternity.
There's nothing between us. Good
I look so dangerous in this coat.

 

MENTAL MOMMY

Home from school at six years old, first grade,
And uncle there to tell me Mommy
Gone, Mommy not be coming back any
Time soon, Liam, Mommy had to go to
Mental hospital. Nervous breakdown.
Years later Mommy, when she gets out
Of mental, often says, "If you're
A bad boy for me Liam you're
Going to send me back, back
Into mental hospital, like you did
First time." At 13
I find out Mom had been doing years
In a federal prison all that time,
For stealing, so no mental hospital for
Mommy. Breakdown ours alone.
I was on my own.

---Liam Rector

_______________________________________

Finally, here is the New York Times obituary (I have no doubt Liam would have been thrilled to know he merited a Times obit):

 

 

 

Everything Must Go: Selling the Past, with Regrets (Terence Winch)

 

I found the poem below recently in a pile of papers from around 2008. I had no memory of having written it, but I’m sure many writers have the same kind of experience. Forgetfulness enshrouding us all. What intrigued me is that the poem seems to predict what happened a year or two after I wrote it. In late 2010, I sold a precious piece of my past—an Irish button accordion I got when I was around 8 years old. I can still dimly remember going to Manhattan with my father and his best friend P.J. Conway to buy this instrument, which I think cost about $200, a fortune for my family in those days. It was beautiful but hard to play—the keyboard action was high and stiff.

The Black Box, painting by Susan Campbell

When I retired from the Smithsonian in 2009, I needed to look for some extra money, and that’s when selling the old box occurred to me. I’d hardly touched it since 1980-81, when I replaced it with a succession of instruments that are easier to play.  I don’t think it was a bad decision to sell it. My father had a kind of Zen-like non-attachment to material things, and I think he would have blessed the de-accessioning of the box.  It was bought by a Dublin accordion-player of impressive ability named Ray Dempsey (pictured below). He in turn sold it to a Frenchman named Laurent Jarry, who presides over an accordion emporium in the Paris suburb of Montreuil that I would love to visit one day.     

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

Black Box

 

My father took me downtown

and bought me the most amazing

black box. A beauty, with flags,

harps, and flowers,

all in rhinestone. My name

affixed to it, in big block

letters, also of rhinestone.

To me, they were white diamonds.

 

The box was very heavy.

As I got older, it grew

even heavier. Because only

an expert could open it,

I never put anything into it.

After my father died, I put

the black box into a bigger

box and didn’t think

about it for many years.

 

Until a few weeks ago, when

I was overcome with a sense

of the past, which has a distinct

smell, like that of someone eating

Doritos in the Metro, and I looked

everywhere for the box. But it’s

gone, and all those ancient

attachments, so glittery

and fragile, gone with it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Laurent Jarry's Accordion shop

Ray DiPalma’s Obedient Laughter (Terence Winch)

 

Ray DiPalma’s new book, Obedient Laughter (Los Angeles, Otis Books /Seismicity Editions) is made up of six sections, all of which showcase DiPalma’s lifelong exploration of the uses of language “without a fixed destination, as a matter of form,/bargaining notations, mnemonic targets, omertà.”

The longest and most engaging section of the new book is called “Equivoques,” which consists of forty-five pages of mostly two-line pieces that seem to be part fortune cookie, part fractured syllogism, with puns, mondegreens, and other odd, playful, wise, and inventive uses of language throughout. Here are some of my favorites:

AS THOUGHT OCCURS

Microcurrents are detectable in the finger muscles.

 

WHEN I DIE

That’ll be the day.

 

JUNKYARD DOGS

Now living in the penthouse by the reservoir.

 

A WHITE SPORT COAT           

And a pink potato.

 

OUT OF EGYPT           

Into the frying pan.

 

DOGS FOR THE DEAD

’Scuse me, you misunderstood, it’s dogs for the deaf.

 

SACRED AND UNDENIABLE

No, Tom, let’s go with self-evident.

 

BUT DON’T GET ME WRONG

I wish they all could be hallelujah girls.

 

THE DEAD MARX BROTHER

Groupo.

 

HE’S A GREAT IRISH MUSICIAN AND POET

But how many more times can he get beat up?

 

CORRUPTION DEMON WORSHIP AND SORCERY

Further reasons the pump don’t work.

 

COPLAND’S APPALACHIAN SPRING OR BARBER’S MEDEA SUITE

Neither one.

 

WRITING SLOWLY ENOUGH

For the ink to flow through the letters.

 

HOW HAVE YOU CONDUCTED YOURSELF IN THIS LIFE

Because now awaiting you on the other side are 72 vegans.

 

Yo, Dude: Shelley & Milton Meet Doug Lang [Terence Winch]

 

 

In honor of  Percy Bysshe Shelley's recent birthday and John Milton's perpetual relevance, here are two pieces from Doug Lang’s funny, dazzling, and supremely inventive sonnet collection, dérangé (which full disclosure requires me to acknowledge that I happily helped bring to publication):  

 

Paradise Dude sonnet

 

Of Mans First Disobedience, dude, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, dude, whose mortal taste

Brought Death into the World, dude, OMG, and all our woe,

With loss of EDEN, dude, till one greater Dude, dude,

Restore us, dude, and regain the blissful Seat, dude,

Sing Heav'nly Muse, OMG, that on the secret top

Of OREB, dude, or of SINAI, dude, didst inspire

That Shepherd, dude, who first taught the chosen Seed, dude.

In the Beginning, dude, how the Heav'ns and Earth, dude,

Rose out of CHAOS, OMG: Or if SION Hill, OMG

Delight thee more, dude, and SILOA'S Brook that flow'd, dude,

Fast by the Oracle of God, dude, WTF; I thence

Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song, dude,

That OMG with no middle flight intends to soar, dude, just sayin’

 

 

 ___________________________________________________________________

Yo, Yo, Oz sonnet

 

Yo, yo, I met a traveler from an antique land, yo,

Who said: Yo, Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert, yo. Near them, on the sand, yo,

Half sunk, yo, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, yo, and sneer of cold command, yo,

Tell that its sculptor, yo, well those passions read, yo,

Which yet survive, yo, stamped on these lifeless things, yo,

The hand that mocked them, yo, and the heart that fed, yo;

And on the pedestal, yo,  these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, yo, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair, yo!”

Nothing beside remains, yo. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, yo, boundless and bare, yo,

The lone and level sands, yo, stretch far away, yo.

 

Contentment Is Wealth: The Top Ten Ways to Ultimate Success & Happiness in Life [Terence Winch]

Last week, on 17 May 2014,  in the Theater at Madison Square Garden, I gave the graduate commencement address and received an honorary doctorate from my alma mater, Iona College.  A number of friends have suggested I post the text of the speech, and so here it is.

____________________________________________________________________

 

Thank you, Iona faculty & staff, friends & family.  It’s an honor to have this opportunity to speak to you, my fellow Gaels,  this afternoon here at Madison Square Garden.  I’m still recovering from a recent vocal cord surgical procedure, so please excuse my fragile voice.

Like all of us vulnerable humans who finally finish with formal schooling, at least for now, you are about pursue a post-student life of fear, doubt, ambition, and self-delusion.  To assist you as you confront the universe as newly credentialed, highly educated persons, I offer you my address today, which is called   

Contentment Is Wealth: The Top Ten Ways to Ultimate Success & Happiness in Life

 10. Self-Forgiveness—Learn to forgive yourself, for you know not what you do much of the time, at least if you’re like me. It’s harder than one might think to engage in self-forgiveness.  Sometimes it’s actually easier to go with guilt, depression, anxiety, anger, self-loathing— these and other well-established choices are always available to our needy psyches. But shun them. Life is too short, something those of us who are getting up there know better than anyone. And while you’re at it, try even to forgive others. See also: self-acceptance.

9. Anger management—Do not press “send” when you’re pissed off without first having someone you trust read the crazy diatribe you’ve just written.  I have learned the wisdom of this directive through ugly & painful firsthand experience.

8.  Hygiene—Get your teeth cleaned professionally twice a year.  Believe me, you’ll save a lot of money and grief in the end.

7. Accomplishment—If there’s something meaningful you want to accomplish, don’t get overwhelmed. Achievement is most often the result of an accumulation of many minor incremental steps that are really no big deal.  Alcoholics Anonymous encourages recovering drinkers to take it one day at a time.  The truth in that advice applies to many of life’s struggles.  The great novelist & short-story writer Flannery O’Connor wrote in one of her letters, “If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you’ll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.” Scholars talk of how African-Americans—over centuries of spirit-crushing slavery and its long aftermath—practiced the art of Making a Way Out of No Way, of transcending suffering as much as possible through resilience and creativity. And through that fierce commitment to make a way out of no way, came incredibly rich traditions in music, literature, and other areas of accomplishment, not the least of which were sheer survival and endurance.  Never give up.

 [left: Flannery O'Connor]

 6. Finances—Don’t lend money to poets or fiddle players. Although I must make clear that poets and fiddlers occupy a place of high status in my own worldview.  I am also very fond of button-accordion players, to whose ranks I belong.  I started playing music as a kid, but I never really had much by way of instruction, so I wound up a musical illiterate, which sometimes drives my son Michael, who is a very accomplished musician, a little crazy. I like to say that I’m self-taught, and that I had a really bad teacher. But here, let me say something about perfection:  perfection is another thing to shy away from.  During my years at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in DC, I helped produce many publications, and among the first of them was a book on Navajo blankets. I learned that it was and is the practice of Navajo master weavers to always introduce something they call “the spirit line,” a little flaw woven into the pattern of the rug, so as not to compete with, and thus offend, the Creator, the Great Spirit.  Imperfection, in any case, makes life more interesting.  Oh, and let me retract what I said at the start of this number:  If you want to be favorably immortalized by poets or have musicians compose a tune in your honor, always lend them money, or, even better, save yourself the trouble & just give them the damn cash.

 5. Have Mercy—I love the sound of the word mercy. A one-word poem. I want some mercy. For me. For everybody. Forgiveness implies a wrong erased, but mercy is more the simple  bestowing of benevolence. Visit people in the hospital or the nursing home even though you, along with the rest of us, hate hospitals and nursing homes. Significant intangible power is generated when mercy is released into the atmosphere.

 4. Critical Thinking—Don’t respect your elders or people in authority unless they have actually earned that respect. Let me here recommend a piece of writing that I first read as an undergraduate at Iona & that has stayed with me since, and that is George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language,” written in 1946.  Orwell [photo left], who once memorably assailed what he called “all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls,”  was a prophetic writer, as his novels 1984 and Animal Farm clearly show.  Orwell will help you de-construct all the intellectual malware infecting our political discourse.  For me, critical thinking involves inventing your own definitions by thinking about what any concept really means to you. People today often say, for example, they are “spiritual” but not necessarily religious, and I felt I needed to define spirituality for myself, which I decided means having an inner life, interior life, the life of the mind, the examined life. It means to go deeper into yourself. Likewise I define “critical thinking” as intellectual wakefulness, mindful attentiveness to whatever you encounter. Not always easy to do.   Let me also salute William Blake [right], the great visionary & eccentric 19th-century English poet, who said: “Without Contraries Is No progression,” and “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind. “    Those are among a number of Blake’s proverbs I memorized when I was an Iona undergraduate & they’ve stayed with me all my life.  And they seem as true to me today as they did in the 1960s.

 3.  Fake It—Sometimes you will have to fake it, you will have to make it up out of nothing, you will have to just go on your nerve, as the great poet Frank O’Hara once prescribed, and those are often the times when you break through to a sense of clarity & insight about yourself.    O’Hara also wrote, in one of his poems, that

            the only thing to do is simply continue
            is that simple
            yes, it is simple because it is the only  thing to do
            can you do it
            yes, you can because it is the only thing to do

I have always found great comfort in those lines, in their wonderful assertion of spirit & tenacity.  And speaking of faking it, don’t forget the Imposter Syndrome, that sense we have that we’re all just pretending to be something we’re not. It’s okay, it’s all part of faking it. Let it go. Live with it. We are all imposters. Forgive yourself (see #10).

 2.  Risk Taking—Never get the extended warranty. And always buy the raffle ticket—I’ve won the raffle at least 3 times in my life; if you want to be an opera singer, or work with chimpanzees, or start your own detective agency, don’t wait till you’re an old person. On the other hand, don’t drive blindfolded.   

 1.  The last & most important of the top 10 ways to ultimate success & happiness in life—The  Moll Niland Principle.  My mother was a farmgirl named Bridie Flynn from Loughrea in county Galway in Ireland. She was one of 11 children, and she died in 1962 when I was 16 and still in high school, and I still miss her, 52 years later. Out of those 11 in her family, only 3, my mother and 2 of her brothers, came to the U.S. So I have many relatives back in Ireland, including cousins in Ballyvaughan, county Clare, on my father’s side. And in 1980 I went over there with my band—the one, true, authentic Celtic Thunder (not to be confused with that slick PBS tv program that, shall we say, borrowed my group’s name)—and asked my then-girlfriend Susan, whom I married the following year, to come with us.      

During that trip, we had many adventures, but the highlight for me was when I took Susan to meet my Auntie Moll, the eldest of my mother’s siblings, amazingly still alive & going strong in 1980 at age 96.                                                              

 [photo: My mother, Bridie Winch [nee Flynn],wearing the dress with the big bow, with friends & relations, Galway, 1930.]

She lived in a very humble, thatched-roof cottage in the countryside, where she still cooked on an open hearth turf fire. She had these beautiful, big eyes and a benevolent aura about her. Recalling her now, remembering the richness of her spirit, brings to my mind the title of a well-known traditional Irish tune called “Contentment Is Wealth.” Susan and I sat next to each other, Auntie Moll facing us. We chatted for a bit, but then at one point she took hold of our hands, grabbed them firmly, and looked us both in the eye and said, “Are ye enjoying life?”   We thought for a moment because it felt like the most important question we’d ever been asked, & then said yes we were. She squeezed our hands happily and said, “That’s good. Enjoy life.”  I know—it’s not a complex or arcane idea, but coming from this extraordinary old woman who had lived so long & knew so much, it felt to us like the most profound and profoundly simple & necessary lesson of human existence:

ENJOY LIFE.                                 

Thank you, and congratulations to all of you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Terence & Jesse Winch with Auntie Moll (Niland), Ireland, 1980

_________________________________________________________________________________

You might also like:

 

 

 

 

Three Moon Travel on New Year’s Eve [Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Moon Travel   

 

We were driving through New Jersey

when the snow began to fall

the Turnpike looked so beautiful

when your memory I recalled

 

Then I saw your face in my mind's eye

I saw your lovely smile

I tried so hard to remember you

gone forever and a while

 

bridge

Whispers from afar:

`I never knew who you are'

The last free fall when we tried to part as friends

and keep the end from breaking us    still haunts me

so I sadly ...

 

Stood beside the Christmas tree

and waited for a sign

that you and me would make it through

one step at a time

 

But the plans we made were not to be

our luck ran out too soon

On New Year's Eve I watched you leave

by a cold December moon

 

Now I talk to you when I'm alone

as though you're by my side

and I think I see you all the time

in the corner of my eye

 

Will I never hear your voice again

Will you never hold me tight

Will your laughter never break my heart

the way it did that night?

© 1994  Terence Winch & Regan Wick/ Celtic Thunder Music

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This song, written almost 20 years ago by me (lyrics) and Regan Wick (music), appeared on our (i.e., the original Celtic Thunder's) 1995 album, Hard New York Days, with Laura Murphy on vocals, Regan Wick on piano, and guest musician Ralph Gordon on cello.  TO LISTEN:

Three Moon Travel

Unanswered Prayers: Remembering 22 November 1963 [Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JFK in Ireland

Like many people my age, I have never shaken off the horrible shock of JFK’s murder fifty years ago. His abrupt removal from American life—in so bloody and surreal a fashion—was a loss felt with special intensity by Irish Catholics. Hard to process, as we say today. The photo below was taken on 22 November 1963. In suit jacket and skinny tie, I am exiting the chapel on the campus of Iona College in New Rochelle, NY.  Students were streaming in and out of the chapel that day in a frenzy of stunned bereavement. I was in my first semester of college and it was brutally clear to me that life in these United States would never be the same. I pick at the what-ifs in my mind all the time, as I’m sure is true of many others who remember that day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Admonition

I have been three kinds of dog: Border

Collie, Wolfhound, Black Mouth Cur. I remain

talented at herding and hunting. I have also been

an owl, a raccoon, a rat, and a monkey.

 

There’s so much history inside my head it’s hard

to keep it straight. The Barbarians at the Gate,

the False Popes, Hammurabi’s Code,

the Potato Famine,  the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. 

I even saw Victor Mature kill a lion barehanded.

 

These days I travel mostly by time machine, though

I have a really bad sense of direction.  I crash into

the past, careen into the future. It’s so confusing.

I tried to warn President John Fitzgerald Kennedy

not to go to Dallas on November 22nd, 1963.

 

But I got off at the wrong exit.  Not that he would

have listened. I saw him once, in Manhattan, in 1962.

It was the Columbus Day Parade and he drove by

in a convertible, beautiful, tan, godlike. “Don’t go

to Dallas next year on November 22nd!” I shouted.

But he just waved, smiled, and drove on.

[from Malpais Review, Spring 2013]

 

Jamie MacInnis: Extravagant Talent [Terence Winch]

In February 1977, the alluring and gifted Jamie MacInnis came to Washington DC from New York to read with Doug Lang in one of the earliest of the legendary readings at Folio Books in Dupont Circle. This reading series was, in fact, organized by Doug.  But when I called him recently to check on Jamie’s historic, though brief, visit to DC, he thought she had read with me, not with him.  Neither of us has any convincing memory of the event.

It would be hard, however, not to remember Jamie herself.  She was about 35 at the time. Her one and only full-length book of poems, Practicing (Tombouctou, 1980), was still a few years in the future, but Hand Shadows, published by Larry Fagin’s Adventures in Poetry press, came out in the mid-1970s, filled with her characteristic witty, unpretentious work:

Jazz to Spare

A voice tells me there’s

jazz to spare. I don’t

know, it must be my own

voice.

“There’s jazz to spare,”

it says, but when I listen

to the music I worry that

there’s not enough to go

around.

  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In December 1978, Fagin, who had a long-time on-and-off relationship with MacInnis, also published an edition of his magazine Un Poco Loco devoted to Jamie’s poems.  The writing in Hand Shadows and Un Poco Loco make up most of what wound up in Practicing.  Jamie and I connected, shall we say, during her visit to DC and wrote to each other for about a year. I have a dozen or so wonderfully smart, funny, unguarded letters from her.  One of them included a poem (“for Terry, obviously/from Jamie, obviously/ 6/77”) that later appeared in Practicing:

 

Irish Musician

The train starts by accident

leaving Washington D.C.

A flowered kimono lies wrinkled in my canvas bag.

The rays go dim as I travel east

out of your frequency.

You are like me

You admire people who like you.

I read your book

The Beautiful Indifference

looking for clues.

 

The train starts by accident

stopping in Newark.

Here, there’s a neighborhood,

Down Neck,

where people have grape arbors in their yards

next to ivy-walled factories.

Old Newark.

A man with a banjo sits in a chair.

 

The train starts by accident.

Big flowers.

A businessman tells me his story.

The train tells its story of people

having a drink at 80 miles per hour.

The factories go by telling their stories

in billboards and a hundred tiny windows

talking at once.

 

The letters stopped in early 1978, and I don’t believe I ever again heard from her.  So when she came to mind a few weeks ago, I did what we all do now—I went to Google in search of any information about her.  Two findings surprised me: one, that there was so little trace of her, not even a photo; and two, the one source I did find that mentions her at length (a book entitled Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian) reveals her vivid and dramatic role, previously unknown to me, as a 20-year-old beauty in Jack Spicer’s circle in the early 1960s:

“The daughter of a legendary trial lawyer, MacInnis was a woman of deep poise,  moving with ease between the worlds of the upper class and the bohemian Beat.  Among the habitués of Gino & Carlo’s, she stood out:  her shining young health,  beautiful bone structure, precise speech, and fine skin were a reproach to the pasty male drinkers she mixed with. She was stylish,  outspoken, and lovely.  ...She was extravagantly talented as a poet.”  

My favorite anecdote from this book involves an encounter she had with one of her detractors among Spicer’s set who said to her, “How would you like it if we took you out in the alley and gang-raped you?”  Jamie’s response: “Oh, dear, do you really consider yourselves a gang?”  That come-back would take some poise.

Larry Fagin alerted me to an uncaptioned photo of Jamie from a 1964 book called Our San Francisco, which appears above in this post; in addition, he sent me a scan of this ca.1970 fresco of Jamie by the late George Schneeman:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some sleuthing by Arlo Quint of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project suggests that Jamie, now around 71, may be living in San Francisco.

Jamie MacInnis was also an addict. In the poem "Science," she writes: “Heroin gives you its dreams/and takes yours away...”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Update, Jan. 19, 2014: I made a PDF of Practicing, which Charles Bernstein has added to the Electronic Poetry Center .  See this link. Some of the poems were slightly truncated in the scanning process, which I didn’t realize until too late. Apologies.]

William McPherson’s "Testing the Current" Takes an Encore [Terence Winch]

It was something of a surprise to the literary world when William McPherson published his first novel, Testing the Current, in 1984. Not that Bill was exactly an unknown—a former book editor at Morrow in NYC,  founding editor of The Washington Post’s Book World section (and later a Post columnist), and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism in 1977, Bill seemed to know everyone on the East Coast who had ever written a noteworthy paragraph. At Book World, he opened the doors to coverage of contemporary poetry and even recruited people like me, Michael Lally, and Doug Lang as frequent reviewers. His creative and generous spirit really set him apart from other members of the literary establishment. Though he’d published some poems in The New Yorker and elsewhere, Testing the Current was to be a turning point in his life. He would, eventually, permanently leave the reviewing stand for the stage itself. (above: William McPherson, 1987. Photo (c) Nancy Crampton)

Maybe if the book had bombed, Bill would have remained primarily a journalist, but Testing the Current was met with the kind of reception writers fantasize about. In my copy of the original, I stuck three of the reviews that  greeted the novel’s appearance. Russell Banks, in the NY Times, opens his piece with this: “William McPherson’s first novel is an extraordinarily intelligent, powerful and, I believe, permanent contribution to the literature of family, childhood and memory.”  People proclaims that Testing the Current  is “a beautiful first novel that provides a sharp, glowing portrait of a Midwestern town on the eve of World War II. McPherson’s loving attention to detail and the ... funny, moving point of view keep the writing constantly fresh and involving.” USA Today says the novel  “...is brilliant. In places it is absolutely breathtaking.”  Testing the Current tells the story of a boy of around eight years old named Tommy MacAllister. Bill followed up on Tommy’s story three years later with To the Sargasso Sea, also well-received.

Ever the adventurer, Bill headed to Europe in 1989 to witness firsthand the fall of the Communist empire, winding up on and off for most of the next six years in Rumania, where he became something of a national celebrity. While that intriguing and amazing sharp turn resulted in some first-rate reporting for several journals, it left his readers still awaiting the third novel in the MacAllister saga. What’s more, the first two novels had long been out of print. (right: Michael Dirda & William McPherson, Politics & Prose Bookstore, DC, 26 Jan 2012)

But, now, thanks to New York Review Books and D.T. Max (who wrote the Afterword), Testing the Current, originally published by Simon & Schuster, is back in print.  And last night at Politics & Prose Bookstore in D.C., a multitude of Bill’s friends and fans turned out for a Q&A between Bill and the eminent writer and critic Michael Dirda, all to mark this significant comeback of an American classic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bill McPherson signs a book for DC artist Susan Campbell, Politics & Prose, 26 Jan 2012.

Going Out Talking---Remembering John McCarthy (Terence Winch)

Left: Doug Lang, Myron Bretholz, John McCarthy, Terence Winch, Beth Rake, Bernard Welt, Becky Levenson, Susan Campbell, late 1970s, 1920 S St NW, DC

 

 

 

 

Nine years ago this month, 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. 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 Out Talking

I’m not gonna get better, barring a miracle,
which I don’t close the door on. But at the same time,
I can only deal with what’s on the table.  It’s strange
enough to die, but it don’t even seem odd to me anymore.
It just seems to be my time.

My appetite hasn’t left me, but neither has
my appetite and need for spiritual nourishment.
I like the Pope personally.  I have no problem with him.
However, there is the fact that he’ll meet with terrorists
before he’ll meet with gays.

Doctors all say the same things. 
“Roll over” is one of their big ones.

Today I feel fine.  Yesterday I o.d.’ed on codeine.  It was terrible.
I called them up and told the nurse, “You know these Tylenols with codeine?
If I had the strength, I’d throw them out the window.  I’ll never take another
one again.”  I said to her, “I want morphine.”  Which I don’t have a severe
reaction to.  They brought me morphine, man.  There’s enough here
to start a business. I got morphine in the fridge, and some here by my bookcase
in case I have a problem during the night.  So far, I haven’t had much pain.
I got a new pain the other day: the inside of my liver feels like there’s a finger
pointing in it, which I began to refer to as “The Finger of Doom.”

It’s all about death.  It’s all about time, and making you comfortable,
and dying at home. That’s the deal: the doctors are out, the pain management
people are in, the nurses come to monitor the progress.  The cards are stacked
for a peaceful death. I have stuff for aggravation—if I get aggravated,
I have stuff I put on my tongue. Maybe I could get some for you. 
You could keep it in your desk at work.

The nurses were saying, “This must be terrible pain.”  I immediately
and deliberately told them—I repeated it three times, so I hope they got it—
“This is okay.” I keep saying to them, “It’s okay, it’s okay, don’t you understand? 
It’s really okay.”

I’ve become part of you.  You’ll remember things we did together. 
Things will come to you.  Stories.  In a mysterious, spiritual way.
You’ll say something that’s a McCarthyism.  You want me to haunt you? 
I’ve even thought jokingly of threatening people if I didn’t get my way
on what I was demanding on my deathbed: “I swear I’ll haunt you.”

I like the idea of flying.  I’m beginning to really like the idea
of joining my mother and father and meeting God.

Pressure’s coming from all angles.  Got a tumor coming down from the top,
liver cancer from the side.  After a short time sitting down,
I get nauseous and dizzy. A few times I ran from the table to vomit.
I can probably still run faster than you. 

I’m built low, dark, and blocky.  That’s what the woman said to me in Ireland:
“You’re like all the McCarthys—they’re built low, dark, and blocky.” 
Kerry people are odd.  They look at you suspiciously. But I got along well
with them.  She took me to the stone with an old plaque that said,
“Here’s lies Sean O’Connell, the Seanachie [the Irish word for “storyteller”].
His stories will live forever.”   I read the plaque, I was looking at the stone,
and she said: “Your grandmother and the Seanachie were first cousins.”
I didn’t feel like a tourist there anymore.

They took me to a ruin that’s so beautiful, and so obscure, and so lovely,
and the man says, “This house was built as a present to your grandmother
and grandfather. And if you took it, we’d be grateful. 
We’re certainly never going to sell it to the Germans.”   

Turning a dollar was never one of my talents. 
Turning away money I’m pretty good at.

I reached a new station. I call it a station on the downtown train.
I’m not hungry, but I have hunger.  Everything is reduced to halves,
and I’m sometimes not even interested in the halves. 
It’s not gonna go any other way.  Meanwhile, I’m here. 
Just like my plan: that the last thing that will give out is my voice.

My life is full of blessings. 

You know what it is?  You get tired of this.  Tired of this routine.
This medicine I drink is rough—they never had anything like it in O’Grady’s.
Even just taking the pills becomes hard.  I don’t want to take no more pills.
All these constant throughout-the-night visits to the bathroom. I just get tired.
After a while, more distance is created.  You’re further away from life.
Further away from life’s concerns.  You drop the reins. 
You get to the point where you’re dead, and people say: “How serene.”

We’re here on this big rock traveling around a ball of fire, and you’re talking
about security.  You’re talking 401Ks.  We’re out in space, hurtling around
a ball of fire.  All my life, I really believed that, but when the time comes,
it’s startling.  I didn’t think I had cancer.  Never mind to such an extent.
But I’ve been okay since the second day in the hospital, and I’m okay today. 
These days count. I woke up the next day in the hospital in a good mood—
I can’t understand it.  There’s only one thing to do: you got to live till you die.

I got what I wanted: to talk my way out.

I found a funeral card that says, “Grieve Not.”  I like that.
It says what I want to say.

----John McCarthy in the fall of 2003

 below: John McCarthy on the roof, W. 16th St., NYC, 1970s; photo by Jesse Winch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sonnet in Memory of John McCarthy

You are smiling at us for eternity
but we don’t see what’s so funny.
You are up there on the roof, chest bare,
and you will not come down again, not ever.
We have a cup of tea on 16^th Street in your name.
Once when you were drunk, you almost broke
my thumb. Failure was your great success.
You hated authority and hypocrisy, loved dogs,
cats, Irish songs. You were a hundred percent excess.
Fearless, ballsy, brilliant. Around you, I felt brave. 
You made fun of me, I made fun of you.
No one ever died with such grace and humor
as you, my dear. You told us not to grieve.
I can hear you joke, “I thought he’d never leave.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John McCarthy & Terence Winch, mid-80s, DC; photo by Jesse Winch