This is for all JV football players: Your game today has been canceled. JV cheerleading practice has also been canceled.
"That was actually a short poem - you could type that up and call it 'Football Announcement,' " said Terence Winch as he listened to a voice come over the loudspeaker during his talk on poetry at Centennial High School on Wednesday.
Winch - a writer and poet who is also well-known to fans from his days as the button accordionist of Irish folk band Celtic Thunder - wasn't joking.
The poet-in-residence at the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society had told one of Kelli McDonough's ninth-grade English classes that a poem can be about something as mundane as emptying the garbage.
He played a recording in which he recites an ode to the "garbage gods" who demand sacrifices from everyone, pointing out that "any family whose bag is missing on garbage day always disappears."
As the youngest of five children of Irish immigrants, he frequently was elected to take the garbage down a scary set of stairs to the basement of their New York apartment building, he said.
"I just thought it was a weird ritual and might make a good poem," said Winch, who now lives in Silver Spring.
The end result was a reading involving family members who take turns scraping the remains of "glistening fat, bones red with meat, and stumps of asparagus" into a garbage bag.
Winch, 63, described his writing style as avant garde, and the body of his work is not an example of the rhyming verse some believe defines a poem.
His visit to Centennial was the fourth stop on a tour of all 13 county high schools, an annual event that HoCoPoLitSo has sponsored with different writers for more than 30 years.
"I was so impressed with the idea that this program allows students to meet an actual poet, since most of the ones they study are dead," said Virginia Pausch, a retired 34-year high school English teacher who volunteers as the organization's liaison with the county public school system.
"It takes a lot of work to put this program together, but it's all worth it," she said. McDonough, a third-year teacher who joined Centennial's staff last year, agreed.
"The students have been questioning me about the meaning of Mr. Winch's poems, and I tell them the only person who knows for certain is the writer," said McDonough.
"Most of us never get the opportunity to ask an author about his work, so this was their chance to get clear answers instead of foggy interpretations," she said.
