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A. D. Winans. San Francisco
Poems. Little Red Tree Publishing: CT.
7″ X 10″P aperback, 190 pages.
This book is available online at
www.littleredtree.com
- $19.95 ($4.00 shipping within the US. Overseas orders will be
invoiced separately with additional shipping costs) Michael
Linnard – Little Red Tree Publishing, LLC, 635 Ocean Avenue, New
London, CT 06320 – Tel: 860 444 0082 – Fax:860 440 2569 – Email:
michael.linnard at littleredtree.com – Website:
www.littleredtree.com
“A.
D. Winans is the poet heart of San Francisco. He tells it like
it was and is. This splendid collection of his nomadic movements
through the city through the decades is like no other. His eye,
sense of the observed detail, his empathy for the ruin and
resurrection, is unique. The melancholia of the old days contend
with sharp updated quick shots of the city on the move. A rich
offering.” — David Meltzer
“A. D. Winans set his poet’s eye on San Francisco, native
ground, with all the passion of a true elder in the art of
poetry. Here are the sounds and sites of a city of poets,
wonderfully knit. A reader will find the deep humors of San
Francisco alive and well in the hands of a master.” — Neeli
Cherkovski
“As a poet, A. D Winans is one of the best writing in the U.S.
today. His work is powerful, human, humane and deals with
primary issues.” — Hugh Fox
In his Introduction, Charles Plymell, writes:
Feminine force has sometimes been assigned to that beautiful
City by the Bay, so it’s natural it undergoes periodical
changes. It is sometimes forgotten that it’s a port, and, one it
seems for every stormy life that landed there. A. D. Winans is
the first person I know who was born in San Francisco. During my
love affair(s) there, it seemed I lived on all her streets,
climbed her hills and while high on top of Twin Peaks, marveled
at her jewel-like lights strung on streets below. She is almost
surrounded by water; a fact the poet Lew Welch often reminded me
of. Fog could intertwine in the breath of sailors sipping
martinis at the Top of the Mark, as I watched ships pass each
other as lovers in the night, a reminder of the old Barbary
Coast, or Mammy Pleasant building her neighborhoods through sex
slaves and transients, newer captives with each experience a
lifetime etched in memory. I certainly left my heart there, at
least the presentiment that makes the heart see quicker than the
eye. It demands an extraordinary vision to record this city. A.
D. Winans has brought its inhabitants to life again for another
look, however quick, however deep.
My sister, who died on the street there in front of an Indian
bar was a transient, I was a transient, certainly the people of
the tribes were transient as a Chinese lantern of the western
moon, but the city always gave up its special feeling of home
with all that implies. I met the Frisco Kid back east at a book
convention some years later. It took until this day to realize
he was a native to this city, and in his poems he identifies
places he went as a child that I was to know later and stake a
claim to the magical image that always changed yet remained
steady.
As presentiment is to heart, sensitivity is to creativity and
the transient nature of this most beautiful city became the
fiction that shed periodically like the snakeskin, the lines of
itself. Crooners claim to have indeed left their hearts there.
Soul singers and philosophers worked on the docks. Jazz claimed
it; Opera claimed it; Movies claimed it; Detective Novels
claimed it; Rock and Roll claimed it (even built on it)
Religious Vision claimed it; Madness claimed it; and yes Poetry
claimed it! Even the Police claimed it. A. D. Winans lived it.
“His mind destroyed by shock treatments
And one too many police batons.”
It
was always the large canvas artist forever recorded lines where
the real and unreal blurred and sometimes struck. Winans warns,
“Never place your hand over
your heart the
Marksman might think
you’re marking his target…”
There were/are many different kinds of poets who gravitated into
that feminine energy. Like fish they traveled in two, even in
schools, or more notably cliques. San Francisco was a natural
basin for poets and was even known for destroying itself at
times. When I arrived there, older poets I admired like Rexroth
and Patchen were closing shop. On arriving in the city, Dave
Haselwood, a fellow Kansan, gave me a copy of John Weiner’s
Hotel Wently Poems (which A. D. Winans says was an influence on
his own writing). It was during a short stay there that I had an
altercation with a sailor and Neal Cassady in Anne’s room and
would eat a rather naked lunch with Leary and Ginsberg below the
hotel at Foster’s Cafeteria in “Polk Gulch.” Events in that city
seemed linked, too, a fishnet never quite ending.
Rexroth organized the famous reading of Howl in the ’50s that
led to the famous obscenity trial where Ginsberg’s vision of
Marlon Brando, the Icon of the year, led to such hyperbole, even
the best minds of San Francisco became forever obsessed. To this
day, City Lights Bookstore enjoys the tourist trade from the
publicity of the trial. While the author certainly didn’t
“abandon” his moloch and had no reserve for taking thousands
from ” Moloch the stunned governments,” it changed lives with
such force as to create a Beatnik millionaire from a Navy
officer and graduate of the Sorbonne, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. A
similar institution arose in the Fillmore by another NYC city
cat Bill Graham who saw fame in the old Palladium and plunged
his vision to the depths of this city. To imagine being a poet
who was born in and grew up in this city is to see a history
that A. D. Winans records so accurately through his poetry.
While poets protested against money and government while
building religious and sexual constituencies in visionary
fervor, or became jaded, or “trippy” Winans kept his style. Jack
Spicer frequented and conversed with Winans at Gino & Carlos.
Jack Micheline, his friend, who had the chops, wanted to really
turn over those ash cans of millionaire dollars seen prudishly
by Ginsberg as “Filth! “Ugliness!” before the politically
correct safe, academic mainstream took over. Turf also didn’t
bother another of A. D. Winans’ friends, the late George
Tsongas. Tsongas wasn’t a political poet, but he talked politics
every day. I, like them, didn’t care for the labels. I could see
as much in a Wyeth as in a Blake. The scene shifted again
towards the Haight Ashbury (where A.D. Winans grew up a child).
The Go-Go clubs flourished while Sonny Rollins played at North
Beach dives for a two-drink minimum. At the old Avalon Ballroom
I saw a handful of hippies turn out to hear an “unknown” Bo
Diddley. Meanwhile, if one looked closer at Winans’ poetry,
there were constants.
“I have observed old women
fumble in broken down purses
for non existent dreams.”
In
the city where Winans was born, he grew up with those truths
that were etched in faces that changed as well, but probably not
what the tourists were seeing.
I don’t know if poets see differently than other folks. I have
certainly been in the presence of some who missed what I saw,
and I’ve certainly seen things I didn’t want to see. It’s
obvious some poets are compelled to write what they didn’t want
to see in the first place. That was the impression I had from
Bob Kaufman, one of Winans’ companions, who took a vow of
silence.
A. D. Winans (left) and Bob Kaufman (right)
In
San Francisco Poems Winans records a lifetime of the streets.
They are photographic in that they can see a line in a face
added by time, even the atavistic lines, that might cause one to
avert one’s eyes. For his is the city of many poets, and as
Robert Peters offered, “poetry munchkins.” So there is
definitely turf. But Winans reminds us
“…that every meat packer
And fisherman, every waitress
And construction worker, knows more
About life than your average poet.”
I
connect with Winans’ poetry in memories when I walked the
streets south of Market down to the docks always in pairs, if
not in groups, with our longshoreman hooks prominently displayed
in our belts, for it’s an area a tourist would go at his peril,
and poets, not that many. But Winans is one of them who did.
“You can see from the
Look in his eyes the
Scar on his face
That he’s someone
You don’t want to mess with
His eyes survey the scene
Like a periscope
He’s a two-bit thug
Looking for action
An old beat cop looking
For a head to bash
He’s Boston Blackie
And Al Capone rolled into one…”
In
these lines, Winans not only reveals the faces on the street,
but the tragedy therein, where a transient, like Jack Black
could find a home. Where the hoboes, hookers, “rounders,” and
finally hipster poets came to the tenderloin, walked on Turk
Street, and ate at Compton’s Cafeteria. Her history keeps
sucking up the changes, the tragedies of every phony, every
dreamer, every hero, and every loser. And Winans’ city is unique
with the many poets it has embraced. Hart Crane didn’t have that
situation in Akron. And within that change, that turf, that
carnival, that mainstream of visionary-cum-academic, there is an
importance to me that I claimed as my home, that space no matter
the physical changes, there was the emotion of that space, the
space Winans keeps occupied with his poems, that street where my
epiphany is his and the poets he knew. It’s the hometown he saw
both as a child and as a grown up, that very scene that must be
read by its inhabitants, its tourists who run into the
bookstore, or its poets who must live the boundless postcard,
however briefly.
“I have sat
One too many evenings watching
Old men and women
Eat their last meal
One eye on the desert the
Other on the obituary column"
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