kagablog

This poem is for you Irwin Altman
And for Ed “Foots” Lipman too
For every poet who ever paced the cell blocks

Of San Quentin, Folsom, Attica, and Neil Island

Or gave his life in the people’s struggle

Of Chile, Cuba or Nicaragua

This poem is for those who walk the

Dream of freedom with guerilla visions

In their hearts and eyes

This poem is for those who gave their life blood

To wash the streets free of oppression

For those who rest in heroic and not so heroic graves

In the struggle for human dignity

Poet of blue denim jacket

Mechanic of whispering trees

Walking the execution yard

Over the sleepy tresses of rain

The imaginary and not so imaginary

Shattering of the skull

I sit here one day from turning seventy-two

In this prison of a zoo

Thinking of long unwritten poems

Thinking of young boys who have fought the real war

Of grieving mothers and widows

Thinking of young girls with color book eyes

Young women in black suspender belts

And knee high leather boots

With revolutionary roots

Thinking of how the words come to late

And never say enough

Knowing that in the Buddha Temple of life

All things must die

Knowing there is no survival

No tarot cards horoscopes or incantations

To being back the dead

I walk the midnight supermarket of death

Thinking of Lorca and that long dirt road

Thinking of the execution wall the hangman’s noose

Ethnic cleansing ovens and genocide

Hearing the gypsy ballad that sings to the heavens

Knowing there is a strange code to this language

We are addicted too

As Gene Fowler pointed out to me
”Evil spelled backwards is live.”

Being made into a State automated robit is evil

But dying is not evil

For it’s in its whole the disintegration the

Bacaterial feeding which in turn

Is a live process

And so the fight goes on and must go on

Until every street has been cleared of assassins

Until every new born is encircled in a poem

A thousand Bush’s a thousand Cheney’s

Can not kill the spirit

The vision remains even as we retreat

Into the depths of our being

Listening to the blood beat solid against the hands

Knowing there are secrets in the bones

That cannot be denied or sold out

To the whims of others

Sleep well my brother

Only the flesh is gone

Your strength lives on in those who dared

To reach out and kiss the sun

interview by dough holder

This is an interview with poet A. D. Winans concerning the new memoir he penned dealing with his relationship with the “dirty old man” poet himself, Charles Bukowski.

In poet A. D. Winans’ new memoir, “The Holy Grail: Charles Bukowski and the Second Coming Revolution,” the author tells the fascinating story of a personal and literary friendship with none other than the ner-do-well, Bohemian bard,Charles Bukowski. Winans takes us back to the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s and gives the “out of school” report about this prolific, hard drinking, and womanizing writer who changed the face of the small press. Bukowski, best known for writing the screenplay ” Bar Fly” featuring Mickey Rourke,was also a staple of the famed Black Sparrow Press. Winans defines his friendship with the poet through their poetry, letters, and “bad elbows.” The book also explores Winans’ acclaimed literary magazine, “Second Coming,” and the fecund literary milieu it occupied in the San Francisco and the world small press movement during the 70’s, and 80’s. I conducted an interview with Winans via the internet, from his home in San Francisco.

DH: What do you feel is Bukowski’s single most important contribution to Literature and or Poetry?

ADW: I think Bukowski himself answered that in an article he wrote for Second Coming. He said, ” My contribution was to loosen and simplify poetry, to make it more humane. I made it easy for them to follow. I taught them that you can write a poem the same way you can write a letter, and that there need not be anything necessarily holy about it.”

Hemingway did much the same thing with prose, and then along came Bukowski to do the same thing with poetry. And I’d add that Bukowski’s letters were often poetic gems. The art of letter writing has all but disappeared, lost in email transmissions that too often are cold and impersonal.

DH: Your own entry into Poetry was fueled by the injustice witnessed while you were in the service in Panama. Would it be fair to say that politics and social injustice was your first muse rather than a poet or a specific body of work?

ADW: My first influence came from musicians and not poets. When I was in high school, I would sit in my room for hours listening to Hank Williams, Senior sing his haunting songs. When I came home from Panama, my mother said: ” You are not the same person. What did they do to you?” What they did was to take away my innocence. The things I saw there burned themself into my social conscience. It took me over thirty years to put my experiences down on paper. It’s all there in ” This Land Is Not My Land.” Green Bean Press published some of the poems in a small chapbook, and Harold Norse encouraged me to expand the book, which I have done. I just haven’t gotten around to sending it out to a publisher yet.

DH: What similarities do you see between yourself and Charles Bukowski, both as a man and a writer?

ADW: We both went to city college, we were both heavy drinkers, we were both womanizers, we both ( to a large degree) wrote for the same audience, we were both in trouble with the law, we both came up through the small press, we both saw the futility of writing workshops, and we both realized a writer could either spend his time writing in relative isolation, or he could hang around with other poets in cafes. We both chose the former over the latter.

DH: Can you describe the milieu of North Beach in the 50’s and 60’s, that was your spawning ground as a poet. Was this area of San Francisco as significant as Greenwich Village in NYC?

ADW: North Beach was the West Coast equivalent of Greenwich Village, and many of the poets ( Ginsberg, Corso, Micheline, Kaufman) frequently spent time shuttling from one place to the other. The ” Cedar Tavern” was a focal point for NY poets. In San Francisco it was “The Place” (presided over by Jack Spicer) and ” The Co-Existence Bagel Shop”, where Bob Kaufman made his home.Gino and Carlo’s was another favorite hangout, and you would often find Spicer and Richard Brautigan there. I didn’t visit NY and the Village until the 60’s, and it of course had completely changed by then.

DH:If it wasn’t for little magazines and small presses, do you think guys like you and the BUK would have a platform or a venue for your work?

ADW: No, I don’t think we would have. Other than Hank having an early story of his published in STORY magazine, the great body of his work appeared in the “Littles” He was published in Penguin Poetry Anthology, but those were isolated incidents. Early on, I had poems accepted by Poetry Australia and even sold some short stories to the Berkeley Barb and Easyrider( a biker mag.), but it wasn’t till much later that APR ( American Poetry Review), City Lights Journal, and a few academic journals began to publish my work. Later Gale Research paid me a thousand dollars for a 10,000 word autobiography and Brown University bought my archives. In the last few years I have been included in some important anthologies, like Thunder Mouth’s Press’ THE OUTLAW BIBLE OF AMERICAN POETRY. I don’t think much of this would have been posssible had I not been first published in the small presses.

DH: You started an acclaimed literary magazine in the early 70’s, SECOND COMING. What was the mission statement of this magazine? You had a special Bukowski issue, how was that received?

ADW: I don’t know if you could say that there was a statement; it was much more of a personal mission. I felt at the time that a lot of crap was being published and I wanted to start a magazine that would return to the spirit of the 50’s and 60’s. The Bukowski issue was a success in that Bukowski himself said it was the best unbiased issue ever done on him. The special Bukowski issue, my own North Beach Poems, and the California Bicentennial Poets Anthology were the only Second Coming issues and books that turned a profit. It’s sad but true that too few poets support the magazines that publish them

DH: So many artists and writers are afflicted or choose to afflict themselves with drugs and alcohol. Writers, especially young writers tend to romanticize this lifestyle. You and Bukowski had serious problems with these demons. Does this lifestyle help the writer in terms of his creativity? Why do so many turn to it. Is there something about the sensiblity of an artist that makes it attractive or even necessary?

ADW: That’s a lot of questions rolled into one. Poets and writers do seem to be drawn to heavy drinking, and a good number of them are drawn to drugs. Alcohol was my drug of choice. I started drinking in my junior year in high school and became a heavy drinker in Panama. There was nothing romantic about it. I was more or less a social alcoholic. Put me in a bar and I’d drink myself into a stupor. Unlike Bukowski, I never drank and wrote at the same time. I tried a few times, but what came from it were poorly written poems. I can’t speak for other writers as to whether it would help their creativity or not. It obviously helped Buk, but I don’t think it helped me, in the least, and I never drank the day after a night of heavy drinking. I hated those hangovers. It was when the hangovers began to last two days that I knew I had to stop heavy drinking. I limit myself to two drinks these days and seldom go to bars.

DH: You write in the book that Bukowski was far from a saint. He could be brutal with his friends, unfaithful to his women, treacherous in his business dealings, etc… Yet you loved him. Why?

ADW: I admired his persistence and grit. His drive to make it to the big time. He developed a persona to achieve that goal. I also admired his giving up the security of the post office to write full time, and at an age it would not have been easy for him to find another job. I admire his honesty with the written word, although his honesty did not always show itself. None of us are saints, there are things in my past I am far from proud of, but I can honestly say I never set out to deliberately hurt anyone. In my book ( The Holy Grail), I tried to treat everyone fairly. With Buk, he had this thing about not wanting to get too close to people and when that would happen, he cast them aside, or ridiculed them in poems and short stories, and even bragged about it. But in all fairness, he stopped doing this, after he became a success. So I guess I loved the best in him and tried to overlook his weaknesses.

I might add that the Buk said to me, ” To live with the Gods, you first have to forgive the drunks.” Early Bukowski, when he was drunk, was not a nice person. When he was sober, he could be shy, and quite likeable. In the end, however, his art prevailed over his persona.

DH: Bukowski is sometimes mistaken for a “Beat” writer. How would you classify him?

ADW: I hate putting anyone in a category. Bukowski told me he was never a Beat. Let me quote you from a letter he wrote me, ” I never liked the Beats. They were too self-promotional, and the drugs gave them all wooden dicks or turned them into cunts. I’m from the old school. I believe in working and living in isolation. Crowds weaken your intent and originality.”

Well Bukowski remained true to the latter part of this statement, but one could certainly question his comment about the Beats being too self-promotional. I mean Ginsberg certainly was a master at self-promotion and Ferlinghetti isn’t far behind, but Bukowski promoted himself pretty well too. If I were pressed I would say Bukowski was a Bohemian, as was Jack Micheline, although Jack used the Beat handle to his advantage when it was benefical to him.

DH: Do you see any new Bukowskis on the horizon?

ADW: No I don’t.

DH: Do you think the small presses today are as effective as in your salad days, in terms of getting the “word”out?

ADW: The small presses have always had problems with distribution. They simply lack the money or power to gain the attention of the established media, and most small press publishers lack promotion skills, as well. There are of course exceptions, but they are few and far between. Second Coming was never a money maker, but I got the word out well enough. I left copies of the mag in doctor and dentist offices, where you had a captive audience. There were also bookfairs and library conferences where we participated, and COSMEP ( Committee of Small Magazine editors and Publishers) helped promote
and distribute books to some extent. The most important thing to come out of COSMEP was to provide a kinship among small press editors and publishers. Those were fun times. We were thumbing our noses (in the 1970’s) at the collective masses, and having fun doing it. That doesn’t exist today.

I know there will be people out there who say the internet and the web have provided a background where more people can see a poet’s work, but there is no evidence whatsoever that this has resulted in any significant sales. In fact, if you can read the work free, why would you want to pay to read the same poem in print format? Well some of us still feel strongly about the print world, but I don’t know about its future-twenty-thirty years from now.

DH: Do you think Bukowski’s corpus of work will be used in courses at colleges around the country as part of the literary canon?

ADW: I don’t suspect that this will be the case. The academics have not seen fit to give him the proper recognition that his work deserves. But who knows? Bukowski may be required reading fifty years from now, or he could be forgotten. Either way, Bukowski would be laughing his ass off.

( This interview originally appeared in SPARE CHANGE NEWS.)

* Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press. Send your books for review to: Doug Holder 25 School St. Somerville, Ma. 02143 To purchase A. D. Winans memoir go to: http://www.dustbooks.com dougholder.post.harvard.edu

this article previously published on authorsden.com

Dear AD,
I put off reading Akbar’s interview with you until I could safely squirrel away some time to really read it. I knew it would be worthwhile and as I suspected the answers blew away the questions. You always exceed my expectations of you.

Lots of excuses for setting aside pure and thoughtful enjoyment such as perusing words from a poet and human being I admire and respect. A member of the family wasted away and died - just a cat to anyone who thinks being owned by a feline, silly, stupid or just plain weird, but Kubby was the closest thing I had left to a family.

I haven’t heard from one brother since he was, after much petitioning brought handcuffed by plain clothed guards, from some penitentiary or another, to Mom’s funeral some decades past. Long ago we had stopped getting along when we were just getting along and not relating. The other brother? We are too close. Life was never easy with him and I’m sure his appraisal of me would be the same. Still I love him and would do anything for him but our life together seems increasingly a series of threats and demands by him and negotiations or silence from me. I am too old to quarrel and find it a waste of time so the silences between us grow longer.

Last month I turned 74 and he, like you, is 71 - born three years and two days apart we celebrate our birthdays on the day between . . . so on April 28th we turned 150.

Losing Kubby only amplified my sense of aloneness, not solitude, I covet solitude and can never get enough of it. I know you feel the same about the productivity and solace of being alone, your poetry, approach to it and your forty year fight to have time alone to write ring clear.

Other excuses; deadlines not met, promises not kept, mail unanswered, as always saying yes to every project offered and only fulfilling a portion of them. Making endless lists, feeling guilty about not cleaning up my room . ..let alone my life. And, on and on and on. (What guts to complain about every flat surface in my room being taken up with stuff when your rooms and world have recently burned down.)

I hope you have waded through all this AD because it’s a preamble to what I want to say about the kinship I found in your words. Having your poetry to rely on is something, but overhearing your conversation with an interviewer starts to make a presumptive friendship with you important.

It’s after 4:00 am here, as it is up north with you, and I haven’t yet gotten to the meat and spuds of what I want to address, I’m rambling and growing tired — though I know it will be another sleepless night. Even changing the trusty right hand to the left, thus attempting to entice and surprise my dick, doesn’t seem to work any more but I’ll get through this night and morning as I do the rest.

Wanted you to know in the meantime that I’m thinking of you and that your words are spinning in my ears. With a clearer head & maybe no scotch I’ll continue, maybe even before cleaning my room.

Please remember that poets go on forever, whatever that is and the best that can be said for academians is that they had a nut named after them. All of us are out there in the same leaky boat and we should be bailing instead of throwing mud at one another.

Luv and all that goes with it,
Rod

Neeli and I visit the ancient warrior
Praised by William Carlos Williams
And other literary giants
90 years old
early stages of dementia setting in
playing hide and seek inside
his solitary room
Now an old man trapped
In death’s shadow
He reads us a poem from
His collected works
His voice still loud and clear
Like Sunday Church Bells

He puts down the book becoming
Frail and vulnerable again
This rock of ages with peaked hat
Walking slowly with us to the
Cafe across the street
Complaining about the loud music
As Neeli orders him a cup of coffee

“Make mine black,” he says then
wants to know why I didn’t put
milk in it
This forgotten warrior
Walking back to the care facility
Neeli shielding him with an umbrella
to ward off the cold rain
“That’s my hotel the
Beat Hotel”
He says—
Hotel Nirvana racing inside
His blood

He stops says,
“I can’t go on”
out of breath
as if the next step
might be his last

He is like a bird
his eyes nesting
in my soul
feeding on poetry the
sum total of his life

It’s been over two months since the fire at my apartment, which has forced me to temporarily relocate in Marin County, at my sister’s home, I am feeling stir-crazy today, and the nice weather tells me I should return to San Francisco for a day in the sun. I slip into a sport shirt and a pair of jeans and drive across Golden Gate Bridge to the home of my birth. It’s a thirty-minute drive to Diamond Heights where I stop to pickup my mail from my postal box. The same box I have maintained since l974. I put the mail in the trunk of my car and head down Clipper Street to my old apartment building. I park the car outside, slip my key into the door lock, and, enter the building, walking up the three flights of stairs to Apartment Eight. I slip the second key into the lock and open the door. The apartment has been cleared of the rubble and the walls and ceilings torn down. I am staring at a room on beams. There is no evidence that any other work has begun. I close the door and lock up after me, deciding to make the most of the day, as I head for Martha’s Coffee Shop, three blocks down the street.

I order a cop of decaf coffee and sit at one of the outside tables, sharing part of my blueberry muffin with an overly aggressive sparrow. I open the newspaper and turn to the sports page, touting a rare 2007 Giant’s baseball team victory.

I finish my modest breakfast and return to my car, opening the seldom used sunroof, and drive off with no particular destination in mind. First stop is Aquatic Park, where in the declining days of the Beat Generation, I drank wine with the late poet Bob Kaufman. Finding the concession stand closed, I drive to
North Beach, stopping off for a beer at Gino and Carlo’s bar, where I first met the poets Richard Brautigan and Jack Spicer. I glance at the photographs on the wall, behind the bar, and am taken in by the handsome Irish features of the late San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Charles McCabe, and, remember how he held court there and was always generous with his words.

I finish my beer and head out to Golden Gate Park, traveling the back roads of my youth. I drive down Kennedy Drive, with few cars on the road, this early in the day. Two miles down, towards Ocean Beach, I spot a mounted policeman and wave out the window at him. I think maybe all police should be on horses or visa versa.

I stop off at the Polo Grounds and think how odd it is that I never visited there when I was a young boy growing up in his native city, never having watched a polo match and having no desire too. The bison are still there, grazing in a fenced in area. Once nearly extinct, they are now a living testament to man’s need to seek out and destroy. The horses at the riding stable are still there too although they look a bit bored, if not tired.

II drive back the opposite way, heading for Stow Lake, and remember how as a member of the Poly High Track Team, I had run around the lake in effortless ease. I park the car and walk down to the concessions stand, and order an Eskimo Pie, my first one since I was twelve years old. I sit down on one of the hard wooden benches and watch the ducks compete with the seagulls for scraps of food tossed to them by a small group of Japanese tourists.

Fifteen minutes later I drive to the Japanese Tea Gardens for a cup of steeped tea, remembering how Dolores (the Landlord’s daughter) and I were banished from the gardens after we were discovered wading into the wishing well pond to remove coins tossed their by tourists.

On to the Golden Gate Park Bandstand where a friend and I had ranted our poetry and gibberish to a bewildered bench-seated audience, so long ago that it now seems like a dream. Growing restless I return to my car, put on a pair of sunglasses, and drive to Big Rec, where in my teens I had played baseball, dreaming of one day playing for the home town Triple “A” San Francisco Seals. A dream that ended in Panama when I I tore-up my right knee playing baseball. I don’t know that being a poet is a fair trade.

On to Irving Street where my best high school buddy and I drank our first beer, and later puked our guts out, while watching a stag movie at his Aunt’s Home. I decide to have one last drink at the old Wishing Well Bar, recalling the number of women I had met there and slept with, and wondering what had become of them.

I stop by what had once been my high school, long ago demolished and replaced by row upon row of tacky houses. You know you’re growing old when your high school has been torn down.

Back to my old apartment house neighborhood to have lunch at Eric’s, voted the best Chinese Restaurant in town. Sitting there looking out the window at the passing cars, I day dream about when I will be able to return to my apartment; walk up those three flights of stairs, sink my ass down on the sofa, turn on an old Billie Holiday record, and return to a life that now seems like a surreal dream.

The sun beats down on me through the sunroof as I drive back across the Golden Gate Bridge on my way back to Marin County.

No betrayals
No poets
No jive
A great time
To just be alive

You march to a drummer. You don’t know who the drummer is, only that you are not the drummer. The sound isn’t one you hear unless it’s inside your head, and then it sometimes never stops. Perhaps the ringing in my ear that began a few years ago accompanies the unseen drummer. I haven’t figured this out yet. All I know is that the ringing comes and goes. It too marches to its own drummer. But I’m getting away from the central thought entrenched in my brain. The words are just not coming. It’s as if they too were burned in my apartment fire, turned to ash, picked over in the rubble by firemen with hatchets and hoses. Left out in the street for the scavenger truck to pick up and discard at the city dump. In the meantime my vocabulary needs a tune-up and the old dictionary will not speak to me.

People keep writing and tell me that some good will come from this, but that’s like telling a grieving parent that the loss of their child was God’s will. Did Clark Kent feel better when he turned into Superman? I’m sure he did, but when he came down from the sky and changed clothes, he was still Clark Kent. Change can be good for you or it can be bad for you. Like there’s small change and spare change which has nothing to do with mental and physical change. It’s an abstract dilemia. I have already used up six minutes of my l5 minutes of fame when my song poem was performed three years ago at Tully Hall in New Yori City. Maybe I need to see a brain doctor. I could put myself on a list for a brain transplant if the procedure is perfected before I make the transition into the finality that awaits us all. For now, for the immediate, I fumble in my pockets and come out with enough loose change to buy a cup of coffee at Tully’s Coffee shop. Perhaps the young woman behind the counter will give me a change of heart.

so many hospitals with
so many names of so many
saints
it makes the heart want
to bleed
Saint Francis
Saint Mary’s
Saint Joseph
Saint Luke
Saint this one and that one
so many people lined-up
waiting on death
hacking and coughing
spitting up their insides
so many nurses with
dollar-bill eyes
strutting their stuff into the
parking lot
too tired for love
too tired to laugh
overcome with failure
and fatigue
so many doctors
so sad they can’t be God
hiding their disappointment
in cocktail glasses
or between the legs of the
angels of mercy
so many doctors beaten-down
by death
so frustrated they take out
their anger on the golf courses
of America
in the bedrooms of loved ones
so many cardiac arrests
so many dead on arrivals
so many John Doe’s
so many Jane Doe’s
how many only the
business office knows
and the security guards
and the housekeeping staff
and the accountants
and the gray-haired lady volunteers
with eyes worn as an Indian Head penny
and the young nurses with bodies
like orange blossoms
who walk it on by your door
and my door
worn down stepped on
they eat and sleep
they make love
they masturbate with hands
and vibrators
some none to cleverly
some like Van Gogh
returning each day to walk the
halls like vampires
with pained fingernails
that slice the flesh
to the bone
the doctors the nurses
the orderlies in white the
priests the patients and
loved ones
all seeking a private audience
with God
here behind these sterile walls
where death stalks the halls
with hot panting breath
licking the crevice of the soul
death the noble savage
death the avenging sadist
leaving behind her scars
playing out the game
to the bitter end
a giant hearse among
a sea of compact cars

—a. d. winans

she was harpo marx without a harp
she was sally rand without
her burlesque fan
she was a slow funeral train
making its way down the track
looking for the last hunchback
she was clint eastwood
out to make your day
with a loaded gun aimed
at your groin
she was a school yard bully
with a pairing knife
threatening to whittle
you down to size

baby I can’t do the last dance
not even to get into your pants
I don’t want a ride on your rowboat
to the Bermuda Triangle
or to sit in the back seat
of your leaky canoe
listening to your play love songs
on your kazoo

and why do you insist on checking out
of the motel
when we haven’t yet checked in
you have the desk clerk confused
and I’m losing all interest in the muse
not since I ran the 440 in high school
have I been this out of breath

the range master has issued me a summons
to report to the firing range
he wants to remove the bulls-eye from my heart
you’ll have to find someone else
for target practice

No need to go out to a movie
More than enough action
Right here at home
Sirens wailing in the night
Police helicopter circling high above
Searchlight igniting the sky

Shadow like figure leaps over fence
Like a skilled track hurdler
Dogs barking neighbors leaning
Out the windows
Hugging the night air
Like a skilled lover shivering
In anticipation

Intruder frozen in spotlight
Drops to the ground
Looking like a dead man
Laid out beneath a sea of stars

you can find them in the back room
poised for a quick exit
they’re the first poets to read
and the first to leave
they always carry
a loose leaf notebook with them
they always have a pretty young girl
hanging on to their arm

there is always one who claims
to have known Kerouac or Ginsberg
to have slept with one or both

two or three live with the Gods
another two or three claim
to be God

two ex-junkies one homosexual
one drag queen with too much mascara
two sad eyed women rubbing their hands
when they’d prefer to be rubbing something else

always a drop out from the Beat Generation
a hold over from the Hippie days
a woman with short hair
a nervous poet with a tic
a refugee from the drug set
a failed poet who drops names
faster than an auctioneer

one poet who reviews poetry
one poet who is an editor
one poet who wants to be an editor
one Messiah
and one visiting out of town star

Some of you apparently did not get the generic message I sent out. Basically a fire broke out in kitchen 10 days ago and heat in walls was so intense that it pretty much toasted my apartment and I will not be able to move back in for estimated 3/4 months. Spent a week with brother and now next 3 weeks with sister. Will begin next week looking into trying to find short term rental situation. Not easy, as my rent control payment was $970 a month and non rent control housing here in the city is outrageous, and most places will not rent month to month. I will eventually find something. I have asked PEN for emergency assistance. They next meet on March l5, I believe.

I can’t begin to tell you how amazed I am at the support I have received. There have been offers to hold benefit readings, offers of clothes, staying with people for several days or so, and a few cash contributions people sent me. And some publishers have said they will send me copies of books that I lost in the mail. It was devasting to lose so many of my books, mags with my work in them, my entire art collection, and five years of correspondence that was going to my Brown archives this spring. Stuff that can not be replaced.

I will have access to email while at my sister’s home, but may be slow in responding. There is so much to do and my back is acting up from all the lifting and carrying of what I could salvage to store in my garage.

Thanks to all of you for your support and kind thoughts and wishes during this trying time in my life.

A.D. Winans (aka: Al

Too tired to go into details just now on progress after fire to my apartment, but it isn’t good news as will not be able to move back in again until maybe 4 months. Still sifting thru mess the fire department made and loss of archive material as well as furniture. I will be off computer for a few days and need to use other outside sources for months, so please bear with me if I do not respond to you.

I do appreciate all of you who responded with sympathy and offers of help. Much appreciated. I will somehow get thru this.

a.d. winans

The following obituary was published in the Sunday February 11 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle.

John Bryan, a mainstay of the alternative press in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the 1960s and later, died at his San Francisco residence after a long illness. He was 72 when he died Feb. 1.

In his last years, Mr. Bryan supported himself by working part time in a Mission District bookstore, but in his heyday he was a noted writer, editor, publisher and author for several alternative newspapers and underground magazines.

He was a hands-on editor and publisher, performing most of the work, including the production, himself.

“He was a one-man band, and the printing press was his musical instrument,” said Paul Krassner, founder and editor of the Realist, one of the most famous of the counterculture magazines.

“He was an activist who believed strongly in justice for all,” said A.D. Winans, publisher of the Second Coming Press in San Francisco. “He was a strong union man and very political.”

In Mr. Bryan’s view, the government of the U.S. needed to be changed. He despised injustice and felt the mainstream press was full of reporters and editors who censored themselves to present an establishment view of the world.

“He felt…that America needed an underground press with real teeth, wildness and fearlessness both in language and in content,” said author Gerald Nicosia.

The results were underground newspapers and magazines written, edited or published by Mr. Bryan. They all featured bold content and a strong political slant. Mr. Bryan was the first person to publish the prose of underground poet Charles Bukowski.

Bukowski’s weekly column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” ran for years in Open City, a paper Mr. Bryan ran in Los Angeles.

Mr. Bryan believed in leftist politics and a free life and his writers and his papers had few taboos. He was fined $1,000 by a Los Angeles judge in 1968 for “preparing and distributing obscene matter.” It was a picture of a nude woman that appeared in an ad.

He was also arrested on other obscenity charges about the same time, but charges were dropped when noted writers and poets came to his defense.

John Bryan was born in 1934 in Cleveland. He was trained as a conventional journalist and worked at the San Diego Tribune, the Los Angeles Mirror, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the Houston Chronicle, and both the San Francisco Examiner and the Chronicle.

He quit the Chronicle in 1964 and started Open City Press, San Francisco’s first alternative paper. In all, Mr. Bryan put out three literary journals and four newspapers in San Francisco, was managing editor of the Los Angles Free Press, and founded Open City, another Los Angeles weekly.

In 1981, the Chronicle called him “The King of the Underground Press,” a title he thought inapt, considering his views on royalty.

Mr. Bryan was a one-man newspaperman, “ Warren Hinckle wrote in the Chronicle in 1981. Hinckle described how Mr. Bryan lived and worked in a basement apartment surrounded by printing equipment.

“His living room was crammed with paste-up boards,” Hinckle wrote. “The dining room was full of IBM typesetting equipment. Bryan never slept…He couldn’t pay his witers, so he managed to get them drunk instead.

Hinckle called him “the Peter Zenger of the underground press…unconquered and ungovernable by the puny laws of Journalism.”

Mr. Bryan was a conventional author as well. His biography of Joseph Ramiro, a Vietnam War Vet who joined the radical Symbionese Liberation Army, was well received. He also wrote a book about Timothy Leary, the counterculture guru, and sold it on the streets outside halls where Leary lectured.

Mr. Bryan never made any money from his various enterprises: he paid his own salary out of the quarters he got from his newspaper sales. Most of his publications were economic failures. One of his last was called Appeal to Reason, a title used by Thomas Paine, a great patriot of the American Revolution.

“He was a man in the tradition of Tom Paine and LF Stone, “ Krassner said.

His final newspaper effort was called Peace News, which he published with the late Allen Cohen, the publisher of the Oracle. It came out not long after the events of September 11, 2001, and was distributed at anti-war rallies.

The Peace News was a one-issue paper; Mr. Bryan, who by then had health problems, had finally run out of steam.

“In his last years,” Nicosia said, “he worked the sales desk at the Abandoned Planet bookstore, where I’d sometimes drop in and see him and chat about old times. I used to tell him, “You’re the forgotten warrior,” and always get a big smile from him.”

Mr. Bryan was married, but he and his wife separated and she died some years ago. He is survived by five children – Shauna, Eve, Lisa, Jason and James – and several grandchildren.

A memorial service is pending.

priests dressed in robes of splendor the
Vatican with its own bank
one hundred poor boys in the drunk tank
tv evangelists shacking up with male escorts
priests molesting young boys
tossed into the dung heap
like cheap kindling wood
a blanket of human bones
to keep the church fires burning

Sitting Bull
poet of earth and water
you fought the white man’s army
to a stand-still
only to be sentenced
to kill Custer over and over again
to the cheers of wild west crowds
from horses and buffalo
to black exhaust fumes
blue coated cavalry in the
mirror of you mind
forever branded with the
white man’s scars

the executioners wore hoods
in the days of public hangings
the public was invited to watch
and the man who drops the pellet
in the gas chamber is faceless
hiding behind a partition
as is the executioner
who pulls the lever

deserters are blindfolded
when facing a firing squad
and in Utah it’s optional

they offered Lorca a blindfold
but he chose to look them
in the face the
bullets tearing into his flesh
the day the dirt turned red
in Spain

she came to him dressed
in white
part-time virgin
part-time wife
as time passed she was like
a pawn shop
opening for business only

after the children arrived
he treated her like a used car
an oil and lube job 4 times a year
and when he needed a tuneup
he always went out of town

I have been notified that I have been selected to receive the Josephine Miles Literary Achievement Award for my book of Panama Poems, This Land Is Not My Land.

The award will be presented at the Oakland Main :Library on the third of December.   I will mail  you the address and time as the date draws nearer. I hope some of  you in the Bay area will be able to attend.

In respect for your privacy, I am sending this notice out by means of Bcc.

I will also be lining up some readings for next year, reading from both this book and my forthcoming Selected Poems book.  I do have readings set up for February, May and June and hope to add others to the list.

a.d. winans

old black bill sitting
on his home made shoeshine box
slapping tapping brushing business
men’s shoes
with pure rhythm
and blues
knows no color except
rainbow hues

A.D. Winans
Texte publié dans le #5 de Microbe (mai 2001)

POÈME DE LA 5ème ET DE MARKET STREET

bill le vieux noir assis
sur sa boîte de cireur qu’il a fabriquée lui-même
frappant tapotant brossant les chaussures
d’hommes d’affaires
sur un rythme pur
et bluesy
ne connaît aucune couleur sauf
les nuances de l’arc-en-ciel

Traduction : Éric Dejaeger

Je regarde ta photo
accrochée au mur
pense aux conversations
que nous n’avons jamais eues
la façon dont tu étais assis là et
regardais par la fenêtre
cette dernière année
aucune quantité de boisson
ne peut effacer ces souvenirs
alors que je m’enfile un verre après
l’autre jusqu’au tissu d’un foie
jadis tendre
en essayant d’éviter
le regard vide
dans tes yeux
des morceaux de mon cerveau
agrafés à
l’abat-jour de la lampe.

Traduction : Éric Dejaeger

daughter that
I never had
tugging at my arm sleeve
from death’s still sleep
hanging heavy as an anchor
rooted to my heart
your vision riding high
in the retina of my third eye

I toss and turn in half-sleep
a tugboat captain throwing
you a life line
towing you gently though
my dreams.

A.D. Winans
Texte publié dans le #23 de Microbe (mai 2004)

POÈME POUR UNE FILLE IMAGINAIRE

fille que
je n’ai jamais eue
tirant sur ma manche
depuis le calme sommeil de la mort
pendue lourde comme une ancre
enracinée à mon cœur
la vision de toi voguant là-haut
dans la rétine de mon troisième œil

Je me retourne sans cesse dans mon demi-sommeil
capitaine de remorqueur te lançant
un filin de sauvetage
te halant doucement au travers
de mes rêves.

Your memory returns
to haunt me
The way you looked at me
when undressing for bed
The way the moon light peeked
through the window shades
the first time we made love
leaving me feeling like a voyeur
resting in God’s favorite easy chair

A.D. Winans
Texte publié dans le #36 de Microbe (juillet 2006)

Pour Anne

Ton souvenir revient
me hanter
La façon dont tu me regardais
en te déshabillant pour aller au lit
La manière dont le clair de lune risquait
un coup d’œil à travers les volets
la première fois que nous avons fait l’amour
me laissant me sentir tel un voyeur
se reposant dans le fauteuil préféré de Dieu

Traduction : Éric Dejaeger

288 pages. Paperback. $l6.50
Ibbetson Street Press. Somerville, Massachusetts

Review by A. D. Winans

I reluctantly agreed to review this book because Hugh Fox is a friend of mine, and perhaps more importantly because I’m mentioned in the book.

One of the back page blurbs says that Whitman in “Song of Myself only grazes the surfaces that Fox penetrates,” and goes on to say that Henry Miller “is demure compared to Fox.” Fox is no Whitman or Henry Miller. He is Fox, and that in it self should be enough without exaggerated hype.

I have known Fox for over thirty years and there is no denying that he has a certain charm and zaniness about him, which will no doubt appeal to many readers of the book. The book more or less begins with Fox (who was then a Professor of bonehead English at Michigan State University) discovering the works of Charles Bukowski (Hank) and learning that one can say in direct and clear language what academics clothe in words that all too often demand a trip to a dictionary. Fox pays Hank a visit and later writes a critical book on his work. Fox leaves the reader with the impression that Hank felt a certain kinship towards him. I knew and exchanged letters with Hank for eighteen years. Here is what Hank said in a letter to me about his meeting with Fox.

“Hugh Fox, as usual uses opportunity to advertise himself. That’s all right, if you have the talent to back up your words. Fox has traveled from universities in South America to here in the U.S. I went to his place one night. He taught at Loyola. “A Jew teaching at Loyola.” He took the money and hardly looked like he’d been living on tootsie rolls. If he ever took a physical beating, it must have been from his wife in the bedroom. Fox is a dreamer. He’s never known a physical beating. I looked at his face. He still hasn’t had one. I can tell by the way he writes.”

Pretty harsh stuff, but that was Hank. The book is filled with portraits (frequently unflattering) of friends, lovers and spouses of close friends Fox has met during his extensive travels. Some of the recollections are gems and others quite comical. We also get glimpses of the other side of Fox (Connie) who dresses up in black latex and walks the streets of San Francisco as a drag queen. Fox has said that he tells it like it is, but I know (or knew) many of the people in the book, and there are stories in the book that are reported as factual, which in fact are fiction.

A novelist can say what he or she wants to about a person while concealing there true identify under a pseudo name, but this is a memoir, and there are certain literary rules that apply to a memoir. The question that arises is a question of what is a memoir? It is by definition a means of expressing one’s memories. It is also an expression of one’s feelings. Its origin goes as far back as St. Augustine’s Confessions (note: should be in Italics). Real life of course occurs on the streets and not on the pages of a book, which becomes the recalling of events in the author’s life. It is to be expected that not every event in the author’s life will be recalled with 100 % accuracy, but what is demanded of the author is that he not invent occurrences that did not happen, or embellish on them in such a way as to make the reporting of events more fiction than fact.

Playing fast and loose with the truth is borderline dishonesty. The author also has an obligation to research his material.

On Page 37 Fox says this about Len Randolph: “Somehow he got to be head of CCLM (Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines), the National Endowment of the Arts’ agency for funding little magazines and small presses.” In fact, Randolph was the Literature Director of the NEA, and had no direct ties to CCLM.

Getting back to an author’s obligation to tell the truth. Let’s look at page 165, where Fox reports on a meeting with me at Vesuvio’s Bar in North Beach sometime in the late eighties or early nineties: “He walks in with a cane.” (I have never used a cane). He goes on to report that he asked me what happened to me, and I supposedly replied, “I was an orderly for years in this mental hospital. And finally one of the kooks got me. My back, you know.” The truth is that I have never worked at a mental hospital, was never an orderly, and do not have back problems. The only truth to the recollection is that I met him and Richard Morris at Vesuvio’s Bar. You begin to see where Fox plays fast and loose with events that took place during his travels. Then there is the “imaginary” ride across the Brooklyn Bridge where several COSMEP friends (including me) are engaged in what can only be described as a “juvenile” conversation over the merits of Hank’s writing. This fictional event never happened. Perhaps perfect subject matter for a novel, but not a memoir.

In another section of the book, he relates an incident that allegedly took place at a mutual friend’s home. I asked the person about this, and she wrote back and said she has no recollection of the event. If this were the only instance in the book, I might write it off as a lapse of memory, but there are too many other instances.

Fox devotes a long section in the book to Harry Smith, a poet friend, and one of the original founders of COSMEP. He talks in detail about Harry’s former wife (Marion) who at the time was dying from brain cancer. She later winds up in a nursing home with Harry described as taking up with a “controlling” woman who can’t get enough sex. Harry later marries the woman (Zerlina) whom Fox goes on to describe in extremely negative terms. Fox subsequently returns later to further slam Zerlina, with more unflattering words about Harry, who was at the time Fox’s closest friend. I believe these slams were made because Fox blames Zerlina for his (Fox) no longer being the number one person in Harry’s life. Fox sees himself as Mother Universe, with the rest of us a cast of characters revolving around him.

And here is where the problem lies. Putting aside the inaccurate portrayals of many events, we have to ask why Fox finds it necessary to demean people he calls his friends. Not only is he cruel to Harry Smith and his wife, but also to Blythe Ayne, who allowed Hugh to dress up and play the role of Connie at her San Francisco apartment. Fox’s own wife recently warned Fox not to visit Blyhe on his planned 2006 visit to the West Coast after what Fox’s wife termed the “horrible things” he said about Blythe in his book.
\

Fox sees himself as being on the “outside” while revealing the “inside” of every person he comes into contact with. I admire his stamina and prolific output over the years, and I do believe he wants to be close to the people he claims he loves, but he has a strange way of showing it.

The book also suffers from loose editing, and is often disjointed and repetitive. A writer is responsible for sending out his best work and can’t rely on others to edit it for him. I found myself all too often grazing over passages as I headed towards the end of the book. Fox’s true talent (at least in this book) lies in his being “a character” and not a prose writer. He nails down the subject matter, but fails to put it all together in a coherent manner.

The book is aimed more towards the small press poet and writer who knew the old days Fox writes about. Days long gone! New readers not familiar with the time period fox writes about, and, not familiar with COSMEP, might find it of some interest.

le cri aigu de Lorca
résonne à travers la nuit
des notes de jazz fortes comme le tonnerre
crèvent les tympans
comme un tir d’artillerie
les quatre murs se refermant
comme une souricière de police

les poètes sont comme des papillons
qui déploient leurs ailes
qui remodèlent les étoiles
l’univers
la matière cosmique attendant
de renaître.