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).