Review of A D Winans' Marking Time
From the Spring 2009 issue of Bay Area Poets Seasonal Review
Ordering information:
www.erbacce-press.com
Review by Jannie M. Dresser
A D Winans moves swiftly between sardonic and droll, the beat and the impassioned voices. He is a master of the clean one-liner, not needing punctuation to interfere with statements that shock by their candor and grace. Few writers can excuse themselves from respecting the rules of English writing, needing those little glyphs of punctuation and capitalization to guide us, but Winans wins his right to be a more stripped-down, somewhat prosaic poetry because of the clarity he creates in his choice of words. Here's
"Letting Go", short but emotionally punchy and imagistically complex:
LETTING GO
The last desperate thread of love
A shoe print in the mud
Next to the public phone booth
Her talking to her new beau
Not noticing the love beads
I bought her in Mendocino
Left behind in the circle
Of my footprint
Like a tribal elder offering
A small piece of his heart
Love and lost opportunities for love, sex and missed chances are frequently themes in this book, along with the foibles of others who grab for attention such as poseur poets, music and musicians who give more than they take, friendship, aging and the vagaries of American culture are recurrent subjects in possession of Winans' imagination.
"Poem for Allen Ginsberg" updates
"Howl" with idiosyncratic parallelisms:
POEM FOR ALLEN GINSBERG
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by greed
Naked under their fashion designer clothes
Driving themselves through congested city streets
Looking for non-existent parking spaces
Aging hormone driven biological clock mothers offering
In public their purple veined near perfect breasts
To baby sucking zombies
Who stock market driven sipped Starbuck's coffee
While chatting aimlessly on their cell phones...
Yes, but tell me how you really feel? Winans' grasps the contradictions in our compulsive do-it-till-you-drop and never-reflect-or-apologize dominant culture. But just when you start feeling a bit overwhelmed by negativity, he turns to humour:
Holy is the sock
Holy is Swiss cheese
Holy is the ATM machine
Holy is Cable Television
Holy is the condom
Holy is the U.N.
Holy is pop culture
Holy is Bank of America
Ka-ching
As with Zawinski, Winans also describes a poetry reading, but focuses on the performing poet's perspective rather than the response of the audience, as his narrator/poet/self requires a mother's-little-helper to venture to the podium, then takes full command:
For thirty minutes
They sit quietly
Like birds in a nest
Their eyes devouring the silence
Before the poem
The first poem cuts into them
Like a machete
Winans is a poet tackling the aging process head on, and he doesn't find much about it that is pretty (aging's not for sissies). Yet, his characters are more than the sum of their parts, as in
"The Old Italians of Aquatic Park":
Have the smell of garlic and pasta imbedded
in their skin, Italy beating in their heart
The old men of Aquatic Park are dying off
With grace and dignity and a love for the old ways
There is something sad about being Americanized
There is something sad about growing old
The bocce ball rolls slowly along the grass
Coming to rest like a hearse parked at an open grave
In fact, the young do not escape life any better in the view of Winans' somewhat jaundiced eye, as in
"Un Titled" where an old man/ young man point/ counterpoint structure elucidates:
Old man hobbling on cane
Young man feeling no pain
Old man singing the blues
Young man in spanking white shoes
Old man with no teeth
Young man balling under the sheets
Old man in Palm Beach
Young man out of reach
Old man with young dreams
Young man unraveling at the seams
Threaded in and around poems of upstart poets and aging Beats, are poems where life's meaning is found in music, companionship, the richness of memory, and the anticipation of poems yet to be written. As Winans' sums up in
"Rainy Day Thoughts":
Every cloud does not have a silver lining
A dead man casts no shadow
The man who has the last laugh
Is the first to be laughed at
Sticks and stones will break fragile bones
Names numb and kill the brain
Here today gone tomorrow
One part joy
One part sorrow
