Haiku
nothing more than more
merging into more
of your not quiet dreams
A
Review
The Reagan
Psalms CD
Poetry by:
A.D. Winan
Narrated by: A. D. Winans
Musical
Accompaniment by:
Ave Jeanne Ventresca.
Produced by:
Sound Streettracks, 2008 ©
To be
honest, at first I didn’t grasp exactly what Winans was doing,
but then, after about fifteen minutes of listening to Winans
read the psalms, I realized (the old Irish Catholic in me
slowly reviving) that what Winans was doing was talking the
original Psalms of David and other biblical (New and Old
Testament) pieces and using them as a basis for deep
meditations on the nature of U.S. politics and the
ever-present Class Struggle:
In the beginning, Reagan
created Reaganomics
and reshaped the heavens and the earth
and life was without prosperity except for big business,
and industry saw that this was good and contributed to
Reagonomics in the form of political contributions,
and darkness was cast upon the poor and the elderly
and the spirit of the military moved upon all shores
and Reagan said let there be light and divided the
rich from the poor.....
It took me a while to remember, “
In the beginning was the Word: and the Word was with God and:
and the Word was God....” (The beginning of the Gospel
according to St. John).
2.
What makes Winan’s work so
devastatingly effective is that it invokes these old memories
inside us and somehow links his political commentary with
sacred texts so that they really penetrate and stick with us
on both conscious and memory/subconscious levels.
There’s a temptation to take
each poem here and trace it back to its biblical origins. I
found myself taking a bible out when Winans began talking
about the Reaganites, remembering biblical references to the
Amorites, and found myself going through Joshua and other
books trying to pinpoint the exact texts Winans was using (and
that still lingered on in my fading memory)...and never quite
finding them.
You could spend months
pinpointing the texts that Winans uses. Like the Beatitudes,
beginning in the Gospel of Saint Luke, Chapter 6, beginning
with verse 20:
Blessed are ye poor; for yours in the kingdom of God.
Blessed are ye that hunger now: for you shall be
filled.
Blessed are ye that weep now: for you shall
laugh....
Here’s how Winans transforms St.
Luke:
Blessed are the rich for they shall become richer,
Blessed are the poor for they shall help the rich
become richer,
Blessed are the meek for they shall become meeker,
Blessed are the oil companies for they shall inherit
the earth,
Blessed for they that hunger and thirst for
Reagonomics
was created for them....
What could be more powerful than
this?
In my (still unpublished) book about Winans, I begin by
placing Winans in his San Francisco ambience and talk about
the influences on his work:
Earlier he had been influenced
by the usual
writers, from Camus and Fitzgerald to Pound and
Eliot, then the Beats like Brautigan and the like,
but it seems to have been that personal contact
with Micheline and Kaufman that pushed him over
into writing his own poetry (A.D. Winans: An Overview).
But then I end the book with an
observation that nicely applies to The Reagan Psalms:
....if you want to get a
strong,
masterfully engineered sense of the U.S.
in the last half a century, Winans is a good
place to start...Winan’s work is a series of
masterful emotional etchings of the U.S. as it really,
truly, realistically IS (p.120).
I’m not saying that Obamaish is a
rebirth of Reaganism, but one thing for sure, the decaying
structure of U.S. economics, the increasing unemployment and
poverty, is very closely akin to Winan’s Reagan Psalms
vision.
What we have here is a real
classic-classic, moving beyond influences and schools into a
voice that is totally Winan’s own.
You may see the CD here: http://tinyurl.com/TheReaganPsalmsCD
Hugh Fox
