The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by A CLOSER LOOK: Terence Winch
Winch's creative work has been honored repeatedly by the literary and musical communities. His first poetry collection, Irish Musicians/American Friends (Coffee House Press, 1985), won an American Book Award. Another collection, The Great Indoors (Story Line Press, 1994) won the Columbia Book Award. His work has elicited praise like this from poet Eamon Grennan: Winch's serio-comic imagination renews the world with panache, letting ordinary matters take on a glow at once enigmatic and everyday. In this technically impressive collection, the poems offer a witty, intrepid, unsentimental response to pleasures of the flesh as well as to pain and soreness of spirit . . . . Winch has a beautifully tuned ear, whether working in formal mode or in supple lines of free verse. In all their zany, plainspoken ways, these poems sing. And this from poet Meg Kearney: Here is a new look at the Irish diaspora, where the sound of glasses clinking is as familiar as the smell of incense at a Catholic Mass, where Terence Winch prays, "If the spirit has its own life, let the noises /it makes be as silent as the multiplication / and subtraction of time, and not / the rattle of a cough in the dark." Boy Drinkers looks with sober eyes at the people, tragedies, and traditions that shaped any of us who grew up in a community where alcohol and God were equally able to bring us to our knees. With his musician's ear and Irishman's humor, Terence Winch pokes fun at the Holy, makes sacred the mundane, and redefines the meaning of "grace." Another collection of his poems, The Drift of Things, was published in 2001 by The Figures. Other titles include Contenders (Story Line Press, 1989), a book of short stories, and That Special Place: New World Irish Stories (Hanging Loose Press, 2004), which draws on his experiences as a founding member, with his brother Jesse, of the acclaimed Irish band Celtic Thunder. Many of the songs he wrote for Celtic Thunder recount the story of New York's Irish community, including such songs as "When New York Was Irish," "Saints (Hard New York Days)," and "The Irish Riviera." Celtic Thunder's second album, The Light of Other Days, won the prestigious INDIE award for Best Celtic Album in 1988. Terence Winch's most recent music project is a CD that collects his best-known Irish compositions on one disk: When New York Was Irish: Songs & Tunes by Terence Winch. His poetry is included in The Oxford Book of American Poetry, three Best American Poetry collections, and has been featured on Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac" and NPR's "All Things Considered." His poems have appeared widely in such journals as Verse, Paris Review, and New American Writing. Winch has been a grant recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and the Maryland State Arts Council. He has been one of Washington DC's "Mass Transit" poets and a writer connected with the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in lower Manhattan. His website is www.terencewinch.com. A selection of poems by Terence Winch: PROCLAMATION FOR MY FATHER IN 1965 Whereas time has caught up with me and the boiler broken down again, and day after day it snows and snows and there I am, with my shovel, in the dark cold night waiting for day, and wishing I was in New Jersey with Ethel and P.J. & Marion having a drink and taking in a play. Maybe later eating oysters at the Oyster Bar and dancing until four at the United Irish Counties Ball Whereas I am now sixty years old and don't feel so good much of the time, like right now, while fat Father Hammer just turned fifty and I know is getting set to fire me but I've been here for fifteen years and am ready to go my own way, into the secret America I never knew before. The banjo-playing lesbians, the depressed school teachers who tell me Paddy, Paddy, Paddy, you're our man Whereas I feel it all coming apart, the hard years in this country, the loves gained and lost, the tough jobs the gigs, the booze, the dearly departed friends the wife whose absence never ends while I never mend, always sensing the ghosts so near. The thing you most fear in life all boils down to your own invisibility, there for all to see. Therefore be it resolved that tomorrow will be eighty degrees and sunny. My children will visit me. My grandchildren will sing me songs. The Bronx will float on the clean, sweet air of paradise. I will feed a basement full of cats. The future sprawls out like a drunk on a bed. first published in Inertia (on line) SIC TRANSIT GLORIA Guy asks me for $1.80 on the subway. White guy, bald, shirt and tie. Says they towed his car with his wallet in it. He is sitting in front of me. All the men in the car have been stealthily eyeing an astonishingly beautiful young woman in a very short skirt, who has been drawing in a big sketchbook. She is luminous. Summer is almost over. I can't concentrate on reading because I have to sneak looks at the gorgeous artist. The day is flying past in the fading sunlight. Big bald oval head right in my face. I'll pay you back, he says. That's okay, I say. I give him two dollars. He says thanks and turns around. We all resume studying the woman. Two young black guys sit across from me. One of them keeps snapping his gum so loud it's like a cap gun going off. An enormous fat guy says to the beauty as he heads for the door: I don't know how you can draw with the train bumping around. She smiles at him. We are all overcome with the radiant brilliance of her smile. I think about music, I think about my godson smashing nine windows in New Jersey yesterday. We are always trying to break out. Sex is better than religion. She gets up at Metro Center. The doors slide open for her and she's gone. It's back to real time. The Yankees are one and a half games out of first. Someone's cell phone rings and he squawks: Can't hear you. I'm on the subway. What? The bald guy rises up. I know he will turn around before exiting and thank me again, give a further gesture of appreciation. It's the right thing to do. Two bucks is not nothing between strangers. I'm sure he'll give me that bonus nod. first published in Smartish Pace JENNIFER CONNELLY SESTINA The boy returns home with blue hair. The dog understands everything we say. He is wearing an lampshade around his neck. His left hind leg is stapled closed. The veterinarian says there is no reason for God because the universe is just a dog'' dream. We can all agree that Jennifer Connelly is a dream. Almost naked, in a thong, cloaked in her long black hair, her every move is proof for the existence of God. The boy with blue hair is not willing to say why his lips are sealed, his mind made up, his door closed. I am not wearing a lampshade around my neck. My wife once owned a jacket with "Great Neck" printed on the back. Before we met I had a dream about her name. I waited until the restaurant closed to tell her she had dazzling movie-star hair. In fact, she is just as beautiful as, let us say, the astonishing Jennifer Connelly, so help me God. The boy and the dog are friends with God. They claim they feel his hot breath on their necks. Unfortunately, they don't like what He has to say I'd like to take this occasion to daydream briefly once again about Jennifer Connelly's hair and the rest of her: extraordinary. That's it. Case closed. When I got to the church at midnight, it was closed tighter than the eyes and ears of our good friend God. Frankly, in that proverbial foxhole, I'd take Madalyn O'Hair over the Pope. The boy's upstairs playing bottleneck guitar. The dog is drunk on pain-killers, dreaming that if he could talk, he'd know just what he would say. O, Jennifer, there is still so much left to say but my time is up, it's late, everything is closed. I want to crawl into bed, past the dog, and dream of the sex palaces of Heaven, where everyone is the God of love, and you and me and my wife are racing neck and neck with the erotic angels of Paradise, but I win by a hair! New Orleans, like you, is now a dream. Maybe I'll call this "The Hair of the Dog," who, by the way, has become an incredible pain in the neck. What more can I say, except that in Waking the Dead, you played God. URBAN TURTLES Small green couch in the living room. I come home at night and sit in it."Law & Order" is on TV. I have a glass of cheap cabernet and make eggs for dinner. It gets later and later. I hit the mute button and listen to the old clock on the piano tick, then tock. I wash my dishes. I choose tomorrow's work clothes. I said to my barber, "Give me a haircut that looks exactly like Frank Sinatra's wig," and he did. My barber is a very nice, gay Egyptian. I take a hot bath and listen to right-wing talk radio, which I find very relaxing. I keep wondering where everyone went. The dog was just here, I'm positive. I can smell dog. There's another strange odor in the bathroom. Perfumey. Or maybe it's Lysol or 409. The toothpaste is cinnamon flavored. I spray a "Fresh Outdoors" scent throughout the house. Maybe I am all alone. Which is not what I really want. I want a party going on in every room. I want guests in the guest room. I want people taking baths in the bathroom. I consult Each Day a New Beginning for today: "We have judged our world and all the situations and people in it in terms of how their existence affects our own." I remember a conversation I had this afternoon with a colleague about urban turtles. Could they really survive in the fast-paced city? Sure, he said.
I don't really care. A friend of mine died in November and I think about himall the time. I stopped calling him because he never initiated contact with me and I didn't like that. But a week or so before he died, he said to me: "I always loved seeing you. I loved being in your presence." Now he is always talking to me from the beyond, as he had threatened to. It's his voice, then the tick tock of the clock, then his voice again. first published in Crowd magazine SOCIAL SECURITY No one is safe. The streets are unsafe. Even in the safety zones, it's not safe. Even safe sex is not safe. Even things you lock in a safe are not safe. Never deposit anything in a safety deposit box, because it won't be safe there. Nobody is safe at home during baseball games anymore. At night I go around in the dark locking everything, returning a few minutes later to make sure I locked everything. It's not safe here. It's not safe and they know it. People get hurt using safety pins. It was not always this way. Long ago, everyone felt safe. Aristotle never felt danger. Herodotus felt danger only when Xerxes was around. Young women were afraid of winged dragons, but felt relaxed otherwise. Timotheus, however, was terrified of storms until he played one on the flute. After that, everyone was more afraid of him than of the violent west wind, which was fine with Timotheus. Euclid, full of music himself, believed only that there was safety in numbers. from The Drift of Things (The Figures, 2001) first published in the Paris Review, then in Poetry 180 MY WORK In my work, at any given point, the great issues of identity politics and dialectical absolutism assume a tight coherence, a profoundly threatening total awareness by which I seek to mediate the conflict between meaning and the extremes of deconstruction. I never strike a false note. I believe in savvy artistic incandescence as a constitutive enhancement of racy sexuality, all as a way to examine the necessity of self-love. It's always dangerous to underestimate my work. I insult the intellectual dignity of the French. They arrive in my brightly colored landscape right after quitting time only to discover an empty stage set in which all the clueless actors have wandered off to an installation of obsolete Marxist sloganeering. Yeats was deeply immersed in mythology and so am I. T. S. Eliot preferred Dante to Shakespeare, but I don't. Charles Bernstein loves the way my sentences decompose. John Ashbery will read my work only while naked. Everything I do is the pure output of brains, speed, and skill. A couple of weeks ago, I digested Aristotle. I found him to be electrifyingly ahistorical, and he now has been subsumed into my work. I have open-ended stratagems when it comes to the Germans, particularly Goethe and Kant. They live now in my imagination. I go way beyond alienation into a new synthesis of desire and content. My work stands for something invisible, something inner. I attempt to explain the risk of appearing. Foucault would know how well my work succeeds in revealing the discourse between power and structure. When you read my work, you may think "simile" or "metaphor," but what you really get is the storm, the dark mansion, the servant girl standing alone in Columbus Circle. Triumph and loss permeate my work. People should try to pick up on that. My technical virtuosity is unrivaled. Don't talk to me about subject matter. My work takes "narrative" and turns it into what never happened. In my work, "story" becomes language contemplating its own articulation in a field of gesture. There is a higher reality at play in my work. Sacred memories resonate with perceptual knowledge of the body as primal text. Yet my work is never subservient to the dominant ideology. It circulates warmly and freely through all available channels. My work is like the furniture you so much want to sink into, but must wait as it wends its way from distant points in a giant moving truck screeching across the country to your new home. from The Drift of Things
first published in New American Writing, then in Best American Poetry 2003 SLEEP WALTZ for mcw Get old enough so you won't have much to fear. By then, the music plays inside your head and everything beautiful must be learned by ear. In the bathroom mirror I behold my wear and tear. In our bedroom I try to levitate in bed. Get old enough so you won't have much to fear. Meanwhile, my son at six wants to keep me near and we sing together every night head to head. So everything beautiful must be learned by ear. His father's tunes, though, will one day disappear beyond today's routines and daily bread. But get old enough so you won't have much to fear. Remembering my mother was my first career and the songs surrounding her on which I fed, knowing everything beautiful must be learned by ear. We may waltz in the kitchen now, my dear, or dance out of time in our sleep instead. Get old enough so you have nothing left to fear. Everything beautiful must be learned by ear. from The Drift of Things
first published in The Paris Review NOISE UNDER GLASS An old man arrived at my door with light bulbs. I opened the door a crack and asked what he wanted. He said he wanted to tell me that when a man dies, his body is placed in the middle of the men's lavatory, with two urinals side by side. I had never heard this before, and was happy to get the word. I stood in the hallway with him, hoping my friends couldn't hear him. Finally, he departed. The old man crept through the mysterious grass of the bush and put the coffee right here on this table. We sat on French chairs in the middle of the hut while the bodyguards walked around the body sprinkling milk and murmuring "I'll have some coffee too, I'll have some coffee too." Nobody said anything about the funeral. I am restless, now that the old man is gone. My entourage yeses me to death. I am bored. As the soul of my mother was taken into that greater territory of the self, I lay on the bed watching "Entertainment Tonight" with the sound off, trying to remember something, anything, about her. from The Drift of Things first published in The World, also in The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present (Notre Dame, 2007) COMFORT Father Ray Byrne quickly became a star. He played sports, danced, sang, told jokes. He was a man of the people, and we loved him for that. He came to our apartments and brought us comfort. He even came to a high school graduation party one night. I was a little drunk. Father Byrne came up to me and asked "Are you thinking about it?" I panicked. What did he mean? Sex? Booze? Basketball? Could he read my mind? Then I realized his tone wasn't accusatory, so I said, "Yeah, I'm thinking about it," not having any idea what he was talking about. "That's great," he said, "I can always tell when a young man is thinking about it. Just let me know if I can be of any help." Now I was positive he wasn't talking about sex or money or any of the things I actually did have on my mind. Father Byrne thought I might have a vocation. But I wasn't considering the priesthood. I didn't even think professional basketball was a possibility any more. God had walked out the door about a year before, when I was sixteen, and never looked back, even though I begged him not to leave me, alone and weeping in this valley of tears. from Boy Drinkers (Hanging Loose, 2007)
first published in The World MYSTERIES All last night I kept speaking in this archaic language, because I had been reading Poe and thinking about him. I read "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" which is supposedly the first detective story. Who dun it? I wondered. It turns out an orangutan was the murderer. Its looks to me like the detective story genre got off to a pretty ridiculous start. I used to visit Poe's house in the Bronx. I used to think, God, Poe must have been a midget. Everything was so small. Poe died in Baltimore and I can see why. In Baltimore, all the people are very big and sincere. During dinner last night, I told Doug and Susan about "Murders in the Rue Morgue." I said I hadn't finished it yet, but it looked like the murderer was going to turn out to be an orangutan, unless the plot took a surprising new twist. Then Doug suggested that he and I collaborate on a series of detective stories in which the murderer is always an orangutan. from The Great Indoors (Story Line, 1995) included in The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006) GHOSTS In the rain falling on her. In wide open space I think of. I wake up without you, smoking a cigarette, without a moment. I have no name. The street without looking. I am awake. I get done in a day. I try to remember your faults. The ghosts are covered with footsteps, without memory, that open like editions of Vogue in the small room without you where you see everything without her, without emptiness without turning to someone in bed. from The Great Indoors included in Out of This World: An Anthology of the St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1966-1991 (Crown, 1991) CIVILIZED ATMOSPHERES The bar is filled with a foul odor, something to do with the sewage system. People don't mind one bit. They smoke, talk, make time, drink, dance. We don't mind either. We like to see people having fun. We think there should be more fun in all our lives. And more sex and money. We want everyone to have more power, as much power as they would like, because we know how important power is to people. We want everyone we know to be the boss on the job and at home too. We want them to get what they want because when they do, they're happy and we're happy. We want them to have bigger and better houses and apartments. More beautiful lovers. We want them to have lean, hard bodies and perfect cardiovascular health. We want their health clubs to be radiant and spotless. We'd like to see their children turn out radiant too. It is threatening to rain. We hate rain. We hate even more the heavy oppressive atmosphere that precedes rain. We hate the bad smell in the bar and we don't like the people in the bar because they seem so pompous. Their breath is horrible and they have pot bellies and their clothing stinks of cigarettes. It is getting dark two hours before it should. That really makes us mad and depresses us too. Darkness. We hate darkness because it is so scary. Nobody calls us anymore, so we call them because we don't want to be left alone up here in the dark with no one to talk to. But there's no answer, or we get the answering machine and leave a message, or they are there but they just can't talk to us right now because they're too busy, or even worse, they're expecting a more important call than ours. It's pouring now. Thunderous skies are opening up. Everything is wet. We hate to get wet. We closed the windows just in time, but now it's airless in here and we can't breathe. We don't like work. The coming and going, the politics, the give and take. We can live without it. The mindless routine day after day: the bus, the coffee break, the paperwork. We don't want anyone to have to go to work with those disgusting bad-smelling people who think they're so important. Don't they know that no one is indispensable? What about when you die? Do they ever think of that? We don't want to have to come home from work in the scary wet darkness and then have to leave again for the smelly bar where those absolutely horrible people drink their drinks. We don't want anyone we know to have to do it either. We'd like everyone to stay home where it's dry and peaceful, where they can watch movies and eat whatever they want, sleeping in a chair, listening to the sound of a car horn, the scary wet darkness enveloping them in its dream. from The Great Indoors
first published in The Washington Review SEX ELEGY My lovers have vanished. I used to have many. One moved to Boston and married a Japanese photographer. Another became a famous actress. Another one, who for a long time I mistakenly believed to be dead, now lives in Manhattan. We used to know each other so intimately, sucking and munching on each other, inserting, penetrating, exploding. Becoming as one. Funky smell of sweaty bodies. Clothes strewn on floor and bed. Candles burning. Smoke of cigarettes and joints curling up the bedroom atmosphere. Now we never touch, barely talk. Some I have lost all contact with. But memories of our pleasure together, my dears, still play in my mind. My body can still feel your touch. My tongue still remembers your taste. Everything else I seem to have forgotten. The present is the life insurance premium automatically deducted from your paycheck, while the past burns out of control in a vacant lot on the outskirts of town. first published in Verse
included in Best American Poetry 2006 IN RETALIATION AGAINST The molecule bore a remarkable resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor in a bikini shaving her legs. I thought I was in Paris and behaved accordingly, analyzing unnatural music videos from 1985. My release mechanism cannot be compared to Madonna Tina Turner, Hulk Hogan, or Willem de Kooning. They swim about, lashing their tails in the aquamarine pools of a mythic past that mocks the Beach Boys where they live. "We are bored and lonely," they chant. "Bored and lonely." In return, men's inner lives emit incomprehensible signals. from the (unpublished) collection Lit from Below first published in Hotel Amerika IT TAKES ALL KINDS we lived one flight up in our apartment building and whenever someone would ring the downstairs bell my mother would tell us to stay put she would say "if they want to see us bad enough they can walk up the flight" my brother Kevin used to tell me to never answer the phone if I was eating my father always told us not to worry too much about money he would say "money won't buy you happiness" my mother would occasionally remark "it takes all kinds" from Irish Musicians / American Friends (Coffee House, 1985) Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |
