Lit from Below

The writing of the poems in Lit from Below began in the early '90s when Ray DiPalma, then often associated with the Language poetry movement, invited Terence Winch to contribute a chapbook to a series DiPalma was then publishing. Winch wrote ten ten-line poems, liked writing them, and kept at it long after the publication came out. Since then, many of the subsequent poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals. These poems, which are mostly uncharacteristic of Winch's work, became an on-going writing project.

Winch says that "the confines of a ten-line block make the poems feel like little word-houses in which many different approaches—from narrative, to surreal, to autotelic—may reside, alone or together. The structure also encouraged a definite economy, a terseness, which I think makes them more compact and faster than my four-door, luxury model poems."

Terence Winch has published five earlier books of poems—Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor, Boy Drinkers, The Drift of Things, Irish Musicians/American Friends, which won an American Book Award, and The Great Indoors, which won the Columbia Book Award. He has also published a book of short stories called Contenders and numerous chapbooks. His work has appeared in more than 30 anthologies, including The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006).