Hugh Fox on the Other Side of the
A.D. Winans -- an Overview
When we read a book like Winans' Carmel Clowns (Atom Mind Publications,
1970), we have to remember that it was already twelve years since Winans had
been discharged from the military in February of 1958.
Let me draw a little here from Winans' autobiographical essay in Volume 28
of the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series:
In February 1958 I was discharged from the military
and returned home to discover the Beat generation. I found a
part-time night job working at the post office and attended day
classes at City College of San Francisco (CCSF). I began reading
the works of Steinbeck, Hesse, and Camus and became interested
in poetry after discovering Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and other Beat
poets and writers. The GI Bill and the part-time job at the post
office allowed me to pursue college prep courses. I graduated from
CCSF in 1960, and received a B.A. degree in sociology from
San Francisco State College in 1962.
While attending college, I spent my nights in North Beach,
spending long hours at City Lights Bookstore browsing through
underground magazines. It was here that I discovered Ferlinghetti’s
Coney Island of the Mind, Patchen’s Love Poems, Corso’s Gasoline,
Ginsberg’s Howl and other poets and poems that would influence
me.
I drank at Vesuvio’s Bar and hung out at Mike’s Pool Hall
and several watering holes on upper Grant. My favorite hangout
was The Place, where Jack Spicer presided over "Blabbermouth
Night," an occasion for poets and philosophers to get up and speak
on any topic that came to their minds. I frequently saw Bob
Kaufman sitting at one of the tables talking, drinking wine, and
smoking grass.
He got to know Kaufman, Micheline, hung around with small press editors
like Kell Robertson, Ben Hiatt and John Bennett and in 1972, about four years
after I had first met him, he started publishing his own little mag, Second
Coming.
But when he wrote Carmel Clowns he still hadn’t met Bukowski, who later
would become a big influence.
Get the picture, though. Winans, the San Franciscan, goes off to the Air
Force, he still isn’t that fascinated by writing, comes back and finds
himself in the midst of the Beat Revolt.
I know myself, I was in Los Angeles between 1958 and 1968 and,
ironically, it was my students who introduced me to Kerouac and Ginsberg and
the other Beat, which tremendously changed my whole way of looking at
poetry...and writing in general.
It was in 1967-68 that in a bookstore out in Hollywood I found Bukowski’s
Crucifix in a Deathhand, read it, wrote the publishers (Loujon Press) down in
New Orleans, told them I wanted to meet Bukowski, how could I get in touch
with him, and they told me, "He’s in Hollywood. He’s in the L.A. phonebook,"
I called him up, went out to meet him and that’s how my book about Bukowski
came to be written.
And, brother, did he change my whole poetic style.
The Meat School.
Which Winans describes in the same autobiographial essay in Contemporary
Authors that I quoted above: "The Meat poets were so named because they wrote
about the meat-and-potato issues of the day. Everything on planet earth
constituted poetry: fucking, cursing, drugs, race, prison." (p.308)
1970. Winans didn’t really need Bukowski, did he? Not in San Francisco,
surrounded by the likes of the Beats, Micheline, Kaufman and all the rest.
North Beach as I remember it in those days was a permanent High...just in
itself without any help from drugs. The place, the people, the books, the
"atmosphere" all said CREATE, EXPERIENCE, GET IT DOWN ON PAPER, BE!
Now let’s jump back some 30 years again, back to Carmel Clowns and
look at Winans in his own juice, surrounded by the
Beat-Hippy Mystique, flower children and old beats, long hair, lots of grass,
lots of juice, flowing, allowing himself to fall under the influence of
everything that surrounded him, seduced by a kind of miraculous, flowering
Here and Now: "Flower Dreams /In Golden Gate Park /In San Francisco /I
leaned over /To pick a flower /And found myself /Staring in the face /Of a
part time policeman /Part time gardener." (p.7)
Exactly the opposite, the polar opposite, of what you’d expect, n’est-ce pas?
You’d expect him to be all hippy dreams, up and flying through hippy
clouds. But it’s more like "I saw the best minds of my generation, starving
hysterical-naked...looking for an angry fix," Ginsberg’s, Howl instead of a
soaring into existential bliss.
Sick, ghastly irony.
And it’s not just the Here and Now that gets lambasted, but Winans
manages to extend this funny-man ghastliness out into the cosmic too.
Look at what he has to say about God:"Ode To God/ God /is a/
Sundastrip/Character/Little Abner/going down on /Daisy Mae /and tasting the
/lipstick kisses /between her legs...."
How far Winans is here from being The Recorder of Reality, the
Poetic Mirror of everything that’s going on around him.
No visiting bars and writing down what he sees, no walking down the
street and sketching street-reality, but totally original, totally unexpected
images like seeing God as Little Abner sucking off Daisy Mae.
It’s almost hallucinogenic.
And demonic hallucinations at that!
An interesting clue here in "A Poem for Grandfather," that shows another
Winans, under the official Navel Intelligence image, the S.F. State image,
Mr. IN. It’s not just the world that’s swirling around him in 1970 San
Francisco, but influences swirling out of his childhood.
Crazy childhood, parents that didn’t get along, never quite fitting in
anywhere (in San Francisco).....grandmother anemic who had to eat raw liver
for her condition, father’s health failing from his two packs of cigarettes a
day, his mother forced to take in children to help make ends meet.
Demons inside his head.
Very strange....I’m reading through Winans’ autobiographical essay in
Contemporary Authors, Autobiographical Series, Vol.28, and Winans says that
it was his grandmother who first encouraged him to become a writer, bought
him his first typewriter. Followed by a poem for his grandmother. And as
you’re reading it N.D. the "devil demons" imagery, an image that occurs
again in a poem in Carmel Clowns about his grandfather. Grandparents =Devil
Demons.
Winans in San Francisco with parents always on the edge of divorce: "My
mother wanted a divorce, but stayed married for the sake of my sister and
me." (Contemporary Authors, p.302). Unhappy in grammar school, trouble with
the Catholic kids in his neighborhood who always would taunt him saying that
Protestants didn’t go to heaven but just limbo. Giving up god for baseball.
Changing schools, getting a teacher who gave him an A for a piece he did on a
picture of an old man staring out at the sea. Starting to read Jack London,
getting the idea he wanted to be a writer, but still all very vague about
what kind of writer.
A kind of craziness that comes out very strongly in the earliest poetry.
I don’t want to say it, but here’s what I’m thinking, that the early
craziness produced Winans’ most imaginative, wild poetry, that his later
influences from "writers" Out There in a sense "cured! him, made him more
"normal." But I’m maybe happiest with Winans’ craziest, earliest poetry,
when the demons were still dictating the poetry and --maybe -- he was still
writing on the typewriter that his grandmother had given him....before she’d
been eaten by dinosaurs.
Later on he gets deeper, more profound, more "literary," but the madman
dancing on the roof.....
Everything is wild here, the images fly out of Winans’ mind, nothing to
do with "real" reality, comic-strip-like, fantasy-films, on the edge of
comic surrealism.
Wow! Let me just push the Down button for a moment, and get back to
Reality again!
The poetry is filled with mad genies filling the sky with images of
purple jungles and wild animals, innocent kids cast out by closed-fisted
warriors and the Universe devouring insect souls lost in wild patterns of
rainbow-sunset light, rainbow dots slipping through the hands of madmen and
rolling across the ocean floor away from reality......"where the true
patterns/of simplicity hide behind fallen clouds" that drift off forever
escaping from the outstretched arms of Buddhist monks coming home after a
night on the town.
Wow II!
What does this experimental, free-flow, stream-of-consciousness work have
to do with an older Winans walking around the San Francisco streets looking
at the bums and whores? Very little. Here it’s a whole other kind of wild
free-flow reality right out of the subconsciousness. Id-poetry.
And when I asked him about the difference, here’s what he came up with,
with special emphasis on the God-as-Little-Abner:
I was getting down on religion at the time, down on the very
concept of god and how the all mighty creator could allow all
the evil that has gone on in the world and created a vision of
him as a comic strip character himself created from fictional
folk lore and nothing holy about him at all.
(e-mail letter, 3/12/03)
And then, when I asked him who he was reading at the time, he came up
with a very revealing statement: "Poems like the god one were not influenced
by any poet, but from my own mind." (same letter).
I went on to tell him how my own writing had changed when I’d read
Brautigan and Kerouac, when I’d written my novel Countdown on an Empty
Streetcar, and how reading the wildest Beats was like giving me a passport
into experimentation, letting my own inner voices speak, instead of trying to
be "rational" and "sensible." The Id/Collective Unconsciousness instead of
the Super-Ego, if I may get Freudian-Jungian again for a moment.
Winans’ reaction?
Well, there you have it, the inner voice...what I refer to as my
demons. Me the caretaker, putting down what the voices say
and dictate to me.
(Same letter)
And what they say, dictate to him, at times, in Carmel Clowns, makes him
sound like he just got back from a trip to the Andes with my half-Peruvian
daughter and her gang from Ann Arbor, sampling a little San Pedro cactus and
other inner-mind releasers.Old movie stars mixed in with modern singers,
Chinese dwarfs, White House cellars, "classic" American writers like Eliot
and Fitzgerald, Japanese made glass linked to "mushroom force" (echoes of
Hiroshima?), sexless, black-booted models selling lavender underwear.....it’s
a stew right out of the ocean of Winans’ own cumulative experience,
everything he ever touched or that touched him pouring out on to the page.
But there still is a political message there, isn’t there, a sense of
futility, the American Dream turned into a rather somber nightmare that isn’t
going anywhere at all, the Bob Dylan dreams ending up with ass-scratching and
sexual suppression that turns sex into futility itself. A very zero-ish
experience. The inner voices are speaking, yes, and what they’re saying is
"Go back to sleep, pal, there’s nothing out there to wake up about!"
A lot of Winans’ world here comes right out of comic strips and films.
You start reading and all of a sudden you feel like you’ve walked into a
comic strip or have suddenly become part and parcel of a film
Comic strips and films, yes, but upside down and inside out, heroes
transformed into pervs, detectives dummies, monster apes turned into
cop-haters....always ending in a statement that slips out of fantasy into a
negativity made out of solid marble: "God Damn Man/How can I ever hope/To
believe in you again."
And he won’t let God alone, glories in a kind of religious debunking that
keeps him totally in the negative Here and Now.
It was time for Winans to deny all the dogmatic realities he’d grown
up with and to emerge into his own personal godless, spinning, twirling,
insane world.
A bit of psychedelic help here? And what about the
socio-economic-political realities lurking behind the hippy world that
surrounded him while he was writing these poems? Maybe the portrayal of
Winans as poetic "reporter"/"mirror" holds true for him even back
when what he was reporting was hippy mind-gaming in a context of
assasinations and war.
When I asked him about mind-frames when he was writing Carmel Clowns
here’s what he had to say:
.....a lot of these poems were written in the Haight Ashbury Hippie
era days and I was hanging around with a lot of crazy people (not
all
poets and writers) in North Beach and experimenting a bit with
drugs.
I think reality set in with the assasination of the Kennedys and
King and
the Vietnam war. I don’t know if normal is the right word. A
realist,
maybe, but I still had some of that crazy in me, as with the Crazy
John
poems....
(e-mail letter 3/14/03)
So Winans in Carmel Clowns is at his psychedelic, experimental highest,
and his whole life flows into the poems, everything that surrounds him,
films, comic books, Brautigan, his whole education, his family life.
The poems here are full of ghost-images, hermits in trees beating on
ancient drums.
It’s the Spirit of the Times, isn’t it? A massive opening of the
subconscious into the light, reporting the psychedelic reality around him in
San Francisco where everyone was in the same process of release, long hair
and Hindu skirts, wild makeup and sandal-straps twisted up the legs, I
remember hippies sleeping in the parks, people up in trees, everything was
beauty, opening up.
Keep in mind Winans’ own words -- this is before "reality" clamps down
on the psychedelic dream, before the assasinations of the Kennedys and Martin
Luther King, the Vietnam War. And Winans strides right into the midst of it,
still a bit cynical, a bit angry, a bit the bitter self that really emerges
later, but mainly under the influence of the love-people mystique filling the
world around him.
© Copyright Hugh Fox 2003