239
Wynsum Avenue
Merrick
,
New York
11566-4725
American
Poets-in-Russian-Translation Series #1
ISBN 0-89304-787-2
Review By: Charles P. Ries
This
review first appeared in the April 2005 Issue of Pedestal
Magazine (http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com)
If
you travel the hundreds of print and electronic magazines that
populate the small press, you will meet a handful of poets whose work
finds its way to just about every venue there is for publication –
A.D. Winans is one of them. These authors tend to be not only
prolific, seemingly able to generate hundreds and hundreds of poems
over a short period of time, but they are persistent. And if
reputation is as much a function of ability as it is of longevity and
persistence, then A.D. Winans has rightfully earned his high status as
a small press poet.
As
I read poems from The Wrong Side
of Town, I found most to be content rich and stylistically
flat or transparent. I asked Winans about this and why he didn’t use
more metaphor, simile, or as a friend of mine once called, the
secret-code-writing of poetry. He told me, “I think it was William
Carlos Williams who encouraged poets to write in every day language.
Poets I knew and hung out with like Jack Micheline and Charles
Bukowski took this message to heart and so have I. My poems
and my life are one and the same. They simply can't be
separated. There is no secret
code. I consider myself a blue collar poet writing
for the working class, in a language they speak.”
Winans
direct language works well in describing the downtrodden and
dispossessed who are often the subjects of his reflection, such as the
city scene in, “Saturday Night Happenings”: “The air has the
stale cigarette smell / Rancid as spoiled meat / The men in blue
working the crime scene / Laying down yellow tape and chalk lines /
That circle the corpse riddles with bullets / Swiss cheese street
justice.” And again in, “Outside A Boarded-Down Jazz Club”:
“an old man stands in the doorway /of an abandoned building
/shoulders stooped, Jesus beard / ragged clothes, hands outstretched /
begging for his supper / a tote of wine / his prayers unanswered /
spittle on his chin / holes in his shoes / Walt Whitman’s forgotten
child.”
Noting
how prolific Winans has been over his career and the often flat
one-and-done quality of his work. I asked him about his writing
routine. “I don't have a routine. I write whenever the
inspiration hits me. However, I write more in the day
hours than at night. I'm capable of producing large amounts
of work in a short period of time, and then writing little or
nothing for a relatively long period of time. I have only in the
last few years done any rewriting of note.” He focuses on this very
issue in his poem, “Choices”: “I know this academic poet / who
spends months editing / a single poem / wants each line to be as tight
/ as a young virgin’s ass / chop chop chop is his motto / although I
think / he borrowed that line / from Ezra Pound / Only trouble is / he
never gets invited to read / never has enough poems / Last I heard /
he got himself a job teaching /bonehead English / at a small
Midwestern college / assisting the football coach / specializing in
tight ends.”
In
describing his work stylistically and thematically he says, “Some
people have called me a street
poet or identify me as a meat
poet. I don't like labels. I have been writing for more than
forty years, and my style continues to evolve. The subject
matter ranges from social commentary to humor, haiku, and even
surrealism, but the form and technique I use is not always the
same.” A bit later, Winans noted that, “The late William Wantling
and Jack Micheline influenced me greatly. Wantling showed me that
some things in life can't be clothed in metaphor, simile, or
inner rhyme. The late Jack Micheline was the closest thing I had
to a mentor, and his love for the downtrodden and the dispossessed is
a common theme in my own work.”
The
Wrong Side of the Street was the first in
Cross-Cultural Communications, American- Poets-in-Russian-Translation
Series. Winans told me, “Jack Micheline's son, Vince Silvaer, wrote
and said that Aleksey Dayen wanted to translate some of Jack's work
into Russian and wanted to know if I had heard of Aleksey.
I subsequently wrote Aleksey, and sent him some of my own
poems, which he later translated into Russian, for publication in a few
Russian magazines. He later introduced me to Stanley Barkan,
the publisher of Cross-Cultural Communications, and the rest is
history.”
This
collection also focuses on personal loss, the end of love, and
Winan’s unhappy childhood as in, “Family Man”: “Conceived in
the womb of an indifferent marriage / I seemed to remind you of the
anger the failures / Until childhood became a
series of gothic nightmares / An 18-year sentence at the Alamo / All
eyes fixed bayonets the tongue a sharp dagger / That awful black
leather strap that chased me / Around the dinner table with its
sadistic whisper /Caressing the air and me a constant reminder / Of a
Depression Era marriage that took you / From your world of music into
a life you wore / Like ill-conceived clothes on a hunchback / No room
for me in your life no room for a pacifist/ I
tried writing blood-stained poems / To make you proud of me / Joined
the military became a government worker
/ Tried every trick there was / To erase the scars that you left /
Like a branding iron inside my heart.”
I
asked him about the reflective nature of this collection of poems,
“The themes I write about have always been important to me; however,
much of my past was not written until recent years. I
didn't have a happy childhood, and it took me thirty years after my
father's death and several years after my mother's death, before I was
able to sit down and write SCAR TISSUE. And a book I
have yet to send out for publication (This Land Is Not My Land) about
my military days in
Panama
took me over forty years to write, so painful were many of the
experiences.”
As
I read these poems a second and third time, I began to feel a deep
sense of compassion for this writer toward the subjects of his poetry.
And I realized that this is the talent of great writers – to
illuminate in words a moment so completely that it becomes
transcendent making the poetic observation not just owned by the
author, but everyone who reads his work. The
Wrong Side of Town is a wonderful collection of poems - a
complete and compelling picture of one of the small presses most
prolific, talented, and searching poets.
___________________________
Charles
P. Ries lives in
Milwaukee
,
Wisconsin
. His narrative poems, short stories and poetry reviews have appeared
in over ninety print and electronic publications. He has received
three Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing. Most recently he has
read his poetry on National Public Radio’s Theme
and Variations, a program broadcast over seventy NPR
affiliates. He is on the board of the Woodland Pattern Bookstore in
Milwaukee
,
Wisconsin
.
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