A.D. Winans has been a regular on the Other Side ragged for most of its run and this book contains the sort of rasping yet sensitive poetry that we appreciate so much. Though he gets impatient with labels, he's regarded as a Next Generation Beat writer. This is partly because of his friendship with Bukowski, who himself was no Beat, in fact found the Beats a bit self-indulgent and slushy, but even before his death he tended to be included with the Kerouac/Ginsberg fraternity through a similarity in subject matter and a direct approach to the reader. There's also Bob Kaufman, a true jazz-oriented Beat if there was one, who was also a friend of Winans' and an influence on A.D.'s work.
Winans often finds himself going against the tide flushing through American life at any one time. Hence these poems about the insanity of prisons and the hierarchies that build and run them. He also touches, for example, on the 'justice' perpetrated on General Yamashita who (the poem implies) was made to swing for atrocities committed by the Japanese navy that was only under his command for a bare 48 hours. Yamashita is judged by 'a five general board of inquiry/ None of whom held law degrees...'
So what do we have? the system is a small, stylish, perfect-bound collection of poems. The format of the book is all black on white/white on black type with areas of grey, the pages done in scarred stripes and blocks of shadow like off-cuts from prints of photographic negatives. Some of the type is so close to the edge of the page that the letters are actually clipped, but the words are readable throughout, if rather on the small side. It makes a nice, handy book you can easily slip into your pocket.
He has a moving ode here, 'For William Wantling', another Beat-type poet, now dead, an alumnus of San Quentin, where A.D. Winans led poetry groups. The Wantling tribute clutches at the mystery of death, and how poetry can get beyond it, as well as etching the beauty of life and a new day with lines as harsh yet as honeylike as Wantling's own:
Here in the wakening of dawn
Where the mist smells sweetly
And one can hear the throats
Of birds singing like cannons...
Winans speaks up for the sacrificial victim in the same way that in the poem 'The System' he spares thought and sympathy for the blue collar retired who are 'So proud that they eat dog food/And find dessert in back alley/Garbage cans.'
The poems have a gutsy elegance and are pungent with the odour of ... truth.
This is a little volume well worth getting hold of. It's one you will want to keep.
Visit Centennial Press to order.