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A. D. Winans On
A. D. Winans
I was born in San
Francisco, and have lived here almost my entire life. I was born
at home, premature. My mother said the doctor told her I would
not live a long life. Here I am, 71 and the doctor is long dead.
My father was
seventeen years older than my mother, and they fought
constantly... When my mother wasn’t yelling at my father, she
was yelling at me. This left deep scars which is reflected in my
book Scar Tissue.
My mother was born
in Canada and was smuggled illegally into the U.S. when she was
three years old. When she later tried to become a U.S. citizen,
she was told by immigration officials that there were no records
of her entry into the country, and was advised not to pursue the
matter or she might face deportation. She died a woman without a
country.
My father had a
difficult time expressing himself. It was my mother who took me
for walks in the park and to the movies. My father didn’t like
his job as a grip man on the Municipal Railway and frequently
called in sick. The fondest memories I have of my childhood were
the times we gathered in the living room to listen to our
favorite radio shows. (The Green Hornet and The Lone
Ranger) and the occasional weekend trips to Alum Park and the
Russian River. However, the good times were few and far between,
in what can only be described as a dysfunctional family.
I was a misfit in
both grammar and high school. I was shy and largely kept to
myself. I spent time at the public library, where I discovered
the works of Jack London and day dreamed of shipping off to sea
and writing of my own adventures.
I joined the Air
Force in 1954 and was assigned to an Air Base Defense Unit,
which doubled in peacetime as an Air Police Unit. I spent three
years in Panama, where I saw the President of Panama
assassinated and a dictatorship supported by the the U.S.
There were three
classes in Panama: The rich people who frequented the gambling
casino at the Hilton Hotel; the middle class comprised mainly of
Chinese immigrants who owned the shops and small restaurants,
and the lower class who lived in squalor and poverty in the
downtown area.
It was while serving
in Panama that I became disillusioned with the American system.
Panamanian canal workers, who performed the same work as their
American counterparts, were paid less than half the going pay.
In the American controlled Canal Zone, the U.S. Governor refused
to allow the Panamanian flag to fly alongside the flag of the
United States. Elections were rigged and ballot boxes were found
floating in the canal.
The Joseph McCarthy
era, the struggle for civil rights, the treatment of the
American Indian, and the Vietnam War all became fodder for later
rebellion, which resulted in the many scathing political poems I
have written. I was honorably discharged from the military in
February 1958, and returned home to discover the Beat
generation.
I found a part-time
job working at the post office and attended day classes at City
College of San Francisco, graduating in 1962 from San Francisco
State College (now University).
I began reading the
works of Camus, Steinbeck, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and
later became interested in poetry after discovering Ginsberg,
Ferlinghetti, Corso and other Beat poets and writers.
While attending
college, I spent my nights in North Beach, spending long hours
at City Lights Bookstore browsing through underground magazines
and books by established and emerging Beat poets and writers. I
hung out at Mike’s Pool Hall and drank at the Coffee Gallery
(now the Lost and Found Bar) and Gino and Carlo’s Bar. My
favorite hangout was The Place, where “blabbermouth” night was
presided over by Jack Spicer; an evening event where poets and
philosophers could get up and speak their minds on any topic
that came to their head.
I met Richard
Brautigan at Gino and Carlo’s Bar and frequently saw Bob Kaufman
at the “Co-existence Bagel Shop,” where he held court. I
frequented the Anxious Asp, (a jazz establishment) and was the
first feature poet at the Coffee Gallery, receiving five dollars
and all the beer I could drink. Discovering North Beach opened
up a new way of life for me. It was the training ground for my
becoming a poet and writer.
In the sixties and
into the early seventies I worked at a variety of jobs, none of
which were to my liking. The lone exception was when I received
a coveted CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act)
position with the San Francisco Art Commission, Neighborhood
Arts program, where I worked from 1975 to 1980.
In the seventies, I started up Second Coming Magazine and Press,
which began in 1972 and ended in 1989. I served three terms on
the Board of Directors of COSMEP (Committee of Small Magazine
Editors and Publishers), which later became the International
Organization of Independent Publishers.
These were exciting
times, with annual conferences bringing together poets, writers,
editors and publishers from all across the country. Thanks to my
CETA position, I was able to organize poetry and music events
throughout the city, including the 1980 Poets and Music
Festival, a three county, seven day festival honoring the late
poet Josephine Miles and the late Blues musician, John Lee
Hooker.
I met a lot of poet
and musician friends and engaged in conversations that lasted
into the early morning hours, but the truth is that I find it
difficult talking about myself. I prefer to let my poems do the
talking for me. Too many poets perceive their craft as a “holy”
mission, seeing themselves as prophets. That’s a hard message to
sell to the homeless and downtrodden souls that walk the streets
of our inner cities, or the working-class men and women
struggling to make ends meet.
My poetry largely
addresses issues of concern to millions of Americans who spend
the majority of their lives struggling to survive in a society
bankrupt in spirit and moral fiber, where money is the only
common denominator.
Early in my life I
was influenced by the writings of T.S. Eliot and William Carlos
Williams, but my mentors were the late Jack Micheline and
Charles Bukowski, and to some extent, the Beat poet John Weiners,
whose book the Hotel Wentley Poems (1958) moved me
deeply.
I have never worn
the label of poet well. It’s not a word I’m comfortable with. It
carries a connotation that somehow the poet walks on a higher
ground than the average individual... The truth is that I would
not be a poet if it were not for these strange voices camped
inside my head; demon voices that confront me and demand that I
write down their thoughts... The finished poem often bears
little resemblance to whatever I initially had in mind.
The demons simply
invade my thought process and take over. In this, I share Jack
Spicer’s philosophy that “verse does not originate from within
the poet's expressive will as a spontaneous gesture unmediated
by formal constraints, but is a foreign agent, a parasite that
invades the poet’s language and expresses what it wants to say.”
I have been both
blessed and cursed by the inner voices (demons) that possess me.
I’ve never kept a notebook or used a tape recorder for future
reference and I seldom write in long hand, although this may be
in part due to my poor handwriting. Many people have called me a
“street” poet. I suppose this is because much of my subject
matter has dealt with life on the streets. I don’t think this is
an accurate label. I have been writing for over three decades
and my style continues to evolve. The subject matter is as
diverse as life itself. The form and technique I employ can and
has changed from time to time. The one constant is that people
remain my favorite subject matter. If John Weiners was a poet’s
poet, I’d like to be remembered as a poet of the people. My
poems and my life are one and the same. They simply can’t be
separated.
Being a native San
Francisco poet, I know the streets of this city like a gambler
knows when to hold and when to fold. Jack Micheline wrote in a
foreword for A Bastard Child With No Place To Go:
“A. D. Winans is a
man in search of his soul His compassion and love for his native
city San Francisco shows in his poems. A. D. takes us on a
journey of lost souls in the cruelty of a large city. He writes
of the people he loves: poets, musicians, and the ordinary souls
who have moved him. He knows the wars, the lost hookers, the
crazies, the victims, and the ones gone mad. The system and the
tragedy of America.”
There it is in a
nutshell. I’m not a guru. I don’t go to the mountains looking
for the Dalai Lama. I create largely in isolation. I write out
of a sense of loneliness and sadness and anger, but also with
love and humor, the latter for which I am indebted to the late
Bob Kaufman.
I write with the same observational intensity as Charles
Bukowski, yet entirely unlike him. Like Bukowski, you will never
have to search in a dictionary to understand my poems.
I try in the most
direct manner possible to say the things I have felt and
experienced in life, and hope that the reader will find the
voyage a memorable one. The noted writer Colin Wilson said:
“Everything I read
by A. D. Winans fills me with pleasure because of a beautiful
natural and easy use of language—he
seems to have an ability which should be common but which is in
fact very rare to somehow allow his own pleasant personality to
flow direct into the page.”
I believe this
statement to be true, but acknowledge too that my personality is
not always a pleasant one. Sometimes the anger cuts through and
severs an artery, but I believe this only serves to make the
poem stronger. In essence, I write about life, its ups and
downs. The laughter and the tears, the real and the imagined,
the good and the evil in man. I don’t pull any punches. I simply
try to tell it the way it is, from the 9/11 tragedy to the
homeless plight on the streets of America.
Poetry and writing
have kept me going all these years. They have been the wife and
children I’ve never had. I’ve had forty chapbooks and books of
poetry and prose published and have appeared in several hundred
literary magazines and anthologies. I’ve given countless
readings and made lifelong friends. None of this would have been
possible if I had not discovered the magic of poetry. I believe
that in the long run my poems and prose will tell you most about
who I am. As I said earlier there is no separating my poetry
from my life.
I get up in the
morning, have a cup of coffee and read the newspaper, spend a
couple of hours at the computer, pick up the mail at the post
office, take a forty five minute walk, return home, listen to my
jazz records, put in a few hours of writing, and then it’s time
to go to bed and get up in the morning and start all over again.
That’s what life is pretty much about. The growing up, the
learning, the wild years, the mellowing, the settling into a
routine, and then one day it’s over. I’m satisfied with my life
and the way I have lived. Writing poetry has helped keep lady
death from my door. The demons are still there inside me, but I
no longer let them control me.
I don’t think any
one man’s life is really that important, but what he does with
it and leaves behind is. I hope I have earned more good karma
than bad karma points. I hope in the end I can look death in the
face and say that I’ve played the game honestly and that I never
sold my integrity. In the end integrity is all a writer has.
Sell your integrity and you’ve sold your soul to the devil.
Six Poem
by A. D. Winans
I Saw The Best Minds Of My Generation II
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