Book Reviews

DROWNING LIKE LI PO IN A RIVER OF RED WINE by A D Winans is a book to be proud of. It's a pick-it-up-random poem book that gets right to it, with selected poems organized chronologically from past publications, 1970-2010. One might think that 364 pages of verse (and colophon page) would be a lot to take in, but it is not. Everything is all right, like the years went by, exactly right, bringing it all back home. San Francisco was home to us all. She opened her doors to everyone, alone, weary, and timeless... from Jack Black to Jack Micheline. Everyone got a taste of that home, but Winans is the only one I've met who was born there. He must share her coiffed comeliness and spiritual highs, splashing her nacreous pearls from deep black water splayed into the fog of love, the mist from her eddies pressing back the lusty egalitarian thrust until it obeys. It always seemed a small town because it's vertical, on different planes, each neighborhood seething with scenes. During my limited tenure, it seemed I lived on every street, if not neighborhood, or knew someone who was in this or that scene. And floating through those different planes were layers to its natural beauty that gave off the essence of love but could also sink down darkly and cruel as hell. Through Winans's eyes one can live those streets again, like a Bob Kaufman looking out the window of a Muni bus in silent study of all action passing on her streets to the last window-framed panorama. <-t the book too, is exactly right, as a book should be made. The poems aren't tucked in as a filler to the pretentious pages of slick magazines; they are presented in the best selection of typeface, the poems placed correctly on the page. Li Po would have approved. It has the right feel, the right dimension, and the right geography to go back to and turn the pages like wrapping dreams.
     Winans and I are about the same age, and we both discovered the beats in the late 1950s. We heard the McCarthy hearings in real time. we developed a similar political philosophy somewhere between Li Po and Upton Sinclair. Like most poets in the bay area grown into the sixties there was politics in our poetry. He served time in the service. Mine in the ROTC... a Clinton/Bush deferment. I arrived in his old middle class neighborhood, the Haight, as the decade of the sixties began, before the kids took over the streets from little Russian ladies. He knew poets I did and the bars they read in, and the magazines they published in. San Francisco was constantly changing, sometimes overnight.
     I didn't know Winans in San Francisco but (met him later at an independent publishing event, "Small Press." We took part in some of their organizations. We learned how the game was played and over the years watched it change into the "politburo of poetry" as all things government do with friends rewarding friends. Over the years, we've corresponded and shared our views on poetry, political scams and rewards. We spot the phonies and neither of us much cares for labels. We've seen "revolutionary" poets & middle class kids get permission to protest. We've seen famous poets howl against Moloch and the government only to receive several thousands of government money and keep the beatnik flack, not black, flying at the landmark tourist bookstore in North Beach. We've seen hypocrisy in all flavors in all the poets the city spawned. I've often wondered how he sees the invasion on his home turf. My biggest regret is that 1 wasn't with him when the great jazz clubs flourished in the days of Billie Holliday that he remembers in his poems, or the great blues legends like John Lee Hooker. Yes, the times were always changing there. By the time Pam and I went to Mike's Pool Hall with Ferlinghetti (Pam was underage), the GoGo girls were dancing in every joint. I got to see Sonny Rollins at an embarrassing two- drink minimum gig in North Beach when he was either too sick or too broken to wail. Yes, the city was built on Rock n' Roll, Fillmore and the, Avalon et al. But the poets knew that it was really re-built, again and again. It all comes back as subtle and real as Bo Diddley's words at the Avalon, a thriving line-in the street psychedelic hall bringing us the new sounds and lights. His words haunt me when he came to play to a handful, this "unknown" who said "and here I am now playing for you. Mercy Mercy Mercy." I think I know what he meant. You will get the full history with Winans's poems. They tell it real. San Francisco was always home to the outcasts from any origin. They became family. The moon on the water beckoning for all comers. The sun over the hills and bridges all bringing commerce, ships going to war. Friends and families living and dying. A changing city like the long nights and sunny days. My sister died in that Chinese Lantern of the Western Moon.
    Jack Micheline came by to rally me to read and bring the "word" to the people. 1 had a good job on the docks and was starting a family. Besides, 1 said to him, how would you compete with the fame of sensational book trial no matter the poet and poet storeowner were (out of town) and let the Japanese-American clerk who sold the book stand trial, just in case it backfired. The days of Life and Time are over. They just want the tourist version. Micheline left dejected, but hopefully to Gino and Carlos bar to have a drink with Winans and revitalize the words again. Or the Anxious Asp to hear poets insult the poets from Cleveland in their hippy drag. It was like that. It could be a tough town. We didn't walk to the docks with Longshoreman hooks in our belts for nothing. The town was built on many layers of compassion and destruction, giver and taker, almost religiously. I wonder sometimes how a poet would live all his life there. Probably by writing lines to William Wantling, an example of the many poets who walked ihe streets of his town: "Looking into the cracked lips of sorrow/ 1 walk the harsh streets of tomorrow." (Pg. 297) Pick it up and open it anywhere. But to really find out how the poet down South who wrote about the poet up North and what happens with the poets from the East who come to the West and drink at the bars in Winans's home town, you'll just have to open the book in a river of red wine on pg.183. <>

Matthew Paris

LIGHT YEARS
Edited by Carol Bergé
Awareing Press, 551 W. Cordova Rd.,
#369, Santa Fe, NM 87505, 2010, 525 pp.,
$40.00.

In the last twenty years of her life, running an antique shop in Santa Fe, the writer Carol Berge asked for and put together a capacious set of sundry memoirs of people she had known in New York, writers of talent who lived mostly on the Lower East Side in the late 50s and early 60s. This collection is now available in print thanks to her friend Carl Ginsburg and the editorial work other brilliant protégé, James Beach, its advent coming four years after her death in 2006.
   Carol clearly aimed in her introduction to make the anthology an anatomy of the world of her youth. The quantity of geniuses living in the Lower East Side at that time would have made such a task impossible even for a centegenarian encyclopedist. Instead, one has in these 625 pages a generous grab bag of reminiscence, letters, and pieces about the past by one of the most interesting generations of writers in American cultural history.
   LIGHT YEARS records a silent twilight of the gods, honoring an age that thrived in a few big cities before the intellectual axioms of a more popular and low culture were set in place in the late 60s, helped along by the Andy Warhol-James Rosenquist set. the intrepid folk in this anthology were not attempting to appeal to everybody; they were seeking to maintain their hermetic integrity as they explored the tomato can sections for monads of the concrete, ordinary and trivial. They could get abstruse and paid a dole for it. Looking at the origins of this, both Steve Kowit and Ron Tavel are quite funny. Tavel is dryly so, in his arch reminiscences of this dewy time. Steve is very brilliantly satirical about the priestly afflatus of high Art rife in that day.
   A book like this one is going to have one set of attractions for people who were there, now mostly perished, and another for younger folk looking for the models in mausoleums who, after a while given the proven if measured utility of the dead, have become genuine icons.
   Since there is no center to this book besides Carol's friendships and the once general physical proximity of all the characters to the point of living in a walking man's neighborhood, the reader of LIGHT YEARS is going to enjoy some reminiscences more than others. My own choice of bon-bons reflects only one way of seeing what ultimately is a low level enigma. After all, the real miracle in life isn't that some resourceful and cunning geniuses realize themselves, at least for a while, but that all human beings don't.
   The subjects of this anthology were all extraordinary people. The wildest of the contributors , like Ron Tavel or Jackson MacLow, tended to be the most discreet about their lives. Others, like Kirby Congdon, are, in print, what they were over a beer in real life.
   All the writers in LIGHT YEARS were an attractively fecund bunch of explosively diverse singularities. When people do get weary of "the banalities of their day, as youth commonly does, they couldn't do better than to look to this anthology as a classic model and magic touchstone for taking up their own immortal journeys into the wilderness. <>

Jared Smith

FOR ENID WITH LOVE - A FESTSCHRIFT
Edited by Barry Wallenstein
NYQ Books, P.O. Box 2015, New York, NY
10113 2010, paper, 180 pp., $16.95.

Probably hundreds of people have by now asked what difference the life of one man can make in our modem class-and-materialism-driven world. I'm not sure myself, but certainly one woman can make a huge difference. Enid Dame has done so, as here witnessed by the memories, musings, and divinations of Alicia Ostriker, Karen Swenson, Harry Smith, David Gershator. Martin Tucker, and more than a dozen other bright lights that grappled with the ideas and visions that would keep America alive and connected with humanity as we entered the 21^st century.
   FOR ENID WITH LOVE provides not just a celebration of a remarkable life lived among the students of unrest, but an awakening of the further reaches of that life as other writers wrap their own thoughts about the concepts she grappled with and embrace her work within their own. As Maxine Susman notes, "Enid saw poetry not as an escape from public life, as political statement, a commentary on the world as each person experiences it." And, as all who knew Enid have discovered, that political statement was never confined to politics in terms of one party or another or even of one segment of life or anotherÑbut to the vast unwinding of all the times and places and struggles we have known. Enid dealt with them all, from her individual human desire to escape public focus by retreating to her country hideaway in the Hudson Valley, to her passionate, non violent affiliation with the SDS and those intellectuals who rose as phoenixes from the ashes of the 60s bonfires, to her midrashic studies that cut across all time from the Old Testament forward through envisioning of demons, prophets, and prophecies brought into our own time down urban alleyways and the lights of all-night coffee shops and the subway cars that never stop.
   I remember Enid from my early days in the Village in the 1980s. How she would sit with her back to the wall and listen while others talked. And then how she would spring into action with first a quick flash in the eyes and then the slow unrolling of experience and observation that would give voice and motion to addressing whatever social issues were then on the table or floating in the cigarette smoke of the room. Even before she moved her body, she would become the vortex of thought. That was early still in her development, I see, as I review the depth of essays and poems she published after I left the city, but it was evident even then how much she would come to encompass.
   The book lays it out and puts it on the line. Here, En id's words at their strongest are placed before us. And here our finest writers of her time lay their words about her and warm her, bringing a life that goes on beyond the edges and endings we are all familiar with. As she herself wrote, "If a midrash is a way of filling in gaps left in a text, then much of my art is indeed midrashic. For there must be many gaps in my...education."
   Enid, there were not so many gaps in your education. And the edges of these gaps were themselves the definition of education... of learning from what is about to and what we share with others. This book is a partial testimony to that which you have shared with us. and I strongly endorse its messages, its poetry. its essays, and its intensive all-the-way-through envisioning of life and its meanings. <>

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