Remembering James Liddy [by Terence Winch]

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Today, on the 16^th anniversary of his death, I am thinking of my dear 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 on 5 November 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).

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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 James Liddy’s universe. Nor is the language he has invented a close relation to that of the stately anthology pieces of the Yeatsian-Heaneyan Irish mainstream. Liddy is cruising along in a very different vessel, one full of leaks and misdirection, but often making for a more exciting ride.

One reason for this is that James Liddy is the most American of Irish poets, his work clearly freed from worry about his place in the limited-membership ranks of the Irish Literary Establishment. There is a liberating, off-handed abandon to his poems, much more Whitman than WBY. But he is also funny (“I Hear the Wife of the Governor of Wisconsin Singing”) and in this way is more like New York School (O’Hara, Ashbery, Ted Berrigan) than anything found in the self-mythologizing of Yeats, the sincere expansiveness of Whitman, or the authoritative meaningfulness of Heaney. In some ways, Liddy is a closer relative to Oscar Wilde (“I want to find the Wildeness of everything”) and Allen Ginsberg (“Ginsberg bestowed liberation”) than he is even to Jack Spicer or Paddy Kavanagh. Pleasure, most often an extract of sex or alcohol, is always near at hand in his poems. The language shortcuts to the action, whether sexual, aesthetic, or spiritual.

Many of his poems are letters to friends, as many of his letters to friends are poems. He can’t seem to help himself:

I am in the waves of drink and love and drowning:

I wish the first stayed in the ocean the second in Ireland

and the last in Arcadia. The last is driving me to the others,

not for so long in my recorded history has this weary indoors heart been

so massaged.

[letter dated December 19, 1978]

You’ll be glad to know that my soul is being

looked after. I have discovered a huge church, across

the river, in a neighborhood of small taverns and

stores. It’s Polish, it has Polish services, Polish

confession. But every Saturday at 9:30 it has Latin

Mass. But there’s always a problem for a Christian.

The Saturday bars close at 3:30 a.m. Not enough

Time for the Lord’s grace to enter and settle in me.

After the soul the body.

[letter, March 1978]

“Or there is a poetry,” Liddy writes in another letter (“Open Letter to the Young About Patrick Kavanagh”), “in which real ideas from living come at us. This kind can be a direct statement with a reference behind to the story of what happened to the poet. It relies on the mind staying alive, on the man making the statement keeping his emotional intelligence alive.”

Direct but mysterious statements that seem to contain a world of reference behind them: this quality pervades A Munster Song of Love and War, the extraordinary chapbook published by White Rabbit in 1971. I came upon it in a bookstore in Boston in 1973 and was transfixed:

He’d be alive today if he wasn’t pretty

He was gorgeous.

His beauty overcame his enemies and the

enemies of Ireland

and it was jealousy

of his prettiness

that has lain him

On the floor with his head open.

There are not enough mirrors in the bath

Rooms of Munster to shout how nice looking

he was and awkward

with a gun.

This was my first encounter with James’s work, and I was deeply impressed that an Irish poet could be using language in such uninhibited, erotic, and anti-academic ways. Earlier, he had exhorted Irish poets to “park the paraphernalia out in the sunlight/ Do not let it into the poem.”

I also like that in Liddy’s paraphernalia-free poems, “The characters keep weeping to the accordion.” “The accordion doesn’t lie,” we learn elsewhere. Finally, the box, that ascendant instrument in which so much Irish music finds surprising and subtle expression, has an advocate:

Praying that God becomes tender enough

to take up his gold squeeze box

and play a set with the new arrival

who has no need for purification

because tunes are receipts for existence

and an Irishman believes in anything

more than he believes in nothing.

James Liddy has accomplished what many only aspire to: he has created a remarkable language and voice unmistakably his own.

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