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A. D. is a one time military man turned beat-poet. Among those who call him friend are/were Bob Kaufman, Jack Micheline, Charles Bukowski and although I’ve never met him, me…

Alan: Welcome to our poetry Journal A D, I hope you don’t mind the presumptive word ‘friend’… but I feel, because of our continued correspondence, an affinity with your work, and also with yourself as a human being… I want to talk about your own poetry of course but the readers will never forgive me if I don’t ask you first about the beat scene when Bukowski and co were going strong; can you give us a flavour of what it was like then and what it’s like now?

A. D.: First off I’d like to clarify that I was never a military man in the real sense of this word. Unlike the voluntary military we see today, the draft existed, and you had the choice of either volunteering for the service of your choice, or face being drafted, and taking the chance of winding up in the infantry. It’s ironic that I chose the Air Force to keep out of the infantry, and found myself assigned to an elite Air Base Defence Unit, where I wound up undergoing the equivalent of Marine combat training.

And no, I don’t mind your calling me a friend Alan. Many of my friendships were developed through the mail without my having ever met the person. I never met the late poet William Wantling, but we both developed a close relationship based not only on our own writing, but on the human traits we shared.

The second part of your question implies that Bukowski was part of the “Beat” scene, but Bukowski never considered himself a Beat, nor do I. I don’t like being pigeon-holed, Bohemian is what I would prefer to be called, and I ‘m sure Bukowski felt the same way. I think John Pyros put it in perspective when he said “To state that Kerouac and Ginsberg, et al began the Beat movement is like saying that Rosa Parks started the Civil Rights movement. In fact, the land was fertile and awaited the seed, only the spark to be kindled.” Diane DiPrima, after reading “Howl,” was quoted as saying; “I sensed Ginsberg was only, could only be the vanguard of a much larger thing. All the people who like me, had hidden and skulked... All these would now step forward and say their piece. Not many would hear them, but they would finally hear each other. I was about to meet my brothers.”

Alan: And how did this happen initially?

A. D.: I met my brothers on my first trip to North Beach in 1958 after returning home from the military. The first bar I visited was the old Coffee Gallery where I was astonished at what I saw. The women were basically dressed in black. The men wore sandals, berets, sunglasses and sported beards or goatees. It was as if they were sending out a message that they were hip and not part of the success-orientated general population. I wandered down to the Anxious Asp, a jazz establishment, and was equally amazed at seeing black men openly mingling with white women. San Francisco has a reputation for being the most liberal city in the world, but the open mixing of races was not a popular thing back then.

I frequented North Beach from 1958 until late 1989. It was here that I met poets like Jack Micheline, Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Spicer, Richard Brautigan, Howard Hart, Jack Hirschman, and others. It would take me a chapter to tell you about those times. When people think of the Beat generation, they think back to the fifties: Ginsberg, Kerouac and Neil Cassady. But there was a second period of creativity spanning from around 1962 to 1967, and a third and longer post-Beat period from 1967 until around 1979. North Beach had a run of three decades of creativity unlike any other literary movement, and it’s doubtful that we will ever see another period like it. It was during these years that Bukowski and the small press scene flourished.

Alan: I find that interesting; we seem to presume, at least most of my poetry friends do, that the small press was always with us but of course it must have had a beginning…

A. D.: The small press scene in the 60’s and 70’s provided an environment in which a person could experience literature firsthand; not academic pretension, but real life. I found myself in the company of people who not only had a commitment to literature, but were equally committed to social justice and political causes. It didn’t take me long to become a small press junkie. The academic press took few chances, preferring to publish safe and boring poetry, even as it does today. It was left to the alternative presses to publish innovative and revolutionary literature. The prestigious literary journals ignored the small press, which published under such outrageous names as Fuck You, Meatball, and The Willie, edited by a poet who called himself Willie Gobble Cunt, while Peter Pussy Dog dressed in outrageous costumes, prancing about on the stage like a court jester, perhaps the original grand slam performer..

The Meat Poets, so named because they wrote about the meat-and-potato issues of the day, began with Bukowski, William Wantling, and Douglas Blazek (Ole Magazine), and quickly spread in popularity, thanks to the mimeo revolution. Nothing was sacred to the Meat poets. Everything constituted poetry: fucking, cursing, drugs, race, prison. It was all the same. Anything and everything was considered poetry. Led by Bukowski, the intent of the Meat poets was to “loosen” the language of poetry. Form was secondary to content. Rhythm and meter, as we know it, was scorned and discarded. Bukowski was the leader of the pack.

These were exciting times for me, and in 1971, I began my own magazine Second Coming. Bukowski was a regular contributor to the magazine, and we became friends for seventeen years. For a number of reasons I quit publishing in 1989, after the magic of North Beach had become nothing but ghostly memories. If you want to know more about Bukowski, and his relationship with Second Coming, I’d refer you to my memoir, The Holy grail: Charles Bukowski And The Second Coming Revolution. It’s still available through Len Fulton’s Dustbooks. Where else these days can you buy a 196 page hardback with a dustjacket and a middle photo section for just $15.

Alan: There’s so much there A D, I hardly know where to begin. Maybe it’s actually best for me to just let what you’ve said stand on its own and ask you a direct question about your own work; You refer to content being more important than structure and rhythm and the accepted poetic forms; I tend to agree. Does that inevitably mean that the content become in many ways ‘politicised’? I mean politicised in the broadest sense? Let me throw a quote at you from Emma Goldman to see how it fits. Emma said: “In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.” You are ‘at home’ with your poetry… are you ‘at home’ with your country?

A. D.: Let me start off by saying that I don’t put structure and rhythm down. Meter, inner-rhyme and all the rest of it are important elements in poetry. What I was trying to say is that you can be technically competent and still fail if you don’t “feel” what you’re putting down on the page. The language poets are constantly seeking the perfect “line,” the perfect poem, but what they write comes off as sterile, and wouldn’t move a bird off a tree branch. So what I’m saying is that no matter how technically competent you are with the English language, it doesn’t mean squat if you can’t make the reader feel what you’re putting down on the page. I have no quarrel with what Emma Goldman is quoted as saying.

Yes I am at home with my poetry. Am I at home with my country? No, I am not! Apparently a lot of other people are not comfortable with America either. I read my America poem last Sunday at a Gallery Six 50th Anniversary Celebration, and close to 400 people were in attendance. I had no idea how they might react on hearing the poem. I mean I knew the majority of the crowd would identify with it, but I was a bit surprised at the rousing ovation it received. I would like to make it clear that I think America is still the greatest country in the world. There are many places I would not have been allowed to read a poem like this, and some countries where I might even be arrested and jailed for my political beliefs. With this said, 9/11 has been used by the Bush regime as an excuse to wage war on anyone it classifies a terrorist. I am appalled at the direction this country has taken since Bush became President.

The American public is willingly surrendering civil liberties in the guise of being protected against another terrorist attack. Hurricane Katrina clearly showed this country is not prepared to meet a disaster of major proportions. If we can’t respond to an attack by mother nature, how can we hope to respond to a serious terrorist attack. I am encouraged that recent polls show Bush slipping in popularity on all fronts, and not just the fight against terrorism. On the other hand, I am dismayed that the Democratic party has become a spine-less opposition party, not much better than the party it seeks to replace. I belong to no political party these days, seeing both major parties as self-serving greedy impostors who take care of the wealthy and throw crumbs to the poor. I see little if any chance of this changing in my life time. All I have is my words for a sword, and that all too often is like preaching to the choir.

Alan: One other thing and then we’ll get to presenting your poetry. You write poetry which sometimes comprises simple and uncomplicated portraits. 3300 CLUB for example, I’m almost haunted by the character in this brief poem, so precisely and compassionately drawn; ‘…sitting alone drinking staring/ no one caring/ her eyes fixed on the bar room/ mirror looking like a pallbearer/ back from a funeral.’ It’s so concise, so concentrated and again; almost political… clearly this person is ‘real’ and you understand her isolation. Tell me A D; is a poet’s life necessarily lonely?

A. D.: Let’s address this ‘simple and uncomplicated’ statement of yours first. One of your own country men (Colin Wilson) said this of my writing style: ‘He seems to have an ability which ought to be common but which is in fact very rare to somehow allow his own extremely pleasant personality to flow direct into the page. I feel there are far too few writers like this around today.’

The key word here for me is ‘direct.’  My poems speak directly to the people, almost at times as if I were having a conversation with them. I write real subject matter for real people, and if I didn’t identify with them or the subject matter then there would be no use in my writing them.

Alan: Wilson was a boyhood ‘essential read’ for me; The Outsider, Beyond the Outsider, Strength to Dream, he was a writer that explored individuality,and isolation…

A. D.: Yes, so you ask me if a poet’s life is necessarily lonely? I can only speak for myself. I know many poets who in person seem anything but lonely, but how they feel inside when they are alone in their homes is something I have no way of knowing. I have lived alone for the greater part of my life, and I’m considered by many to be a recluse, but that is by my own choosing. Loneliness is something we all feel at certain times in our life, some more than others. I do know that when I was in a relationship with women that my creative periods were less pronounced. Isolation seems to feed my creative juices. Just me, the word processor, and my favorite jazz music, as the poem waits to be born. Some poems may die during the creative process, but they are never alone.

Alan: That’s oddly satisfying A D, a good image to end with; you and your word processor surrounded by dying poems with Jazz music playing in the background. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and time with erbacce readers, all that remains for me now is the extremely pleasurable task of selecting my favourite A D Winans poems, the ones that lived…