An Interview With A.D. Winans            By Terry Reis Kennedy            Page 1                                     Click Here for page 2
About Us Subscribe FAQ Guidelines Links Contact Us	Terry Reis Kennedy: You were born and raised in San Francisco, the city of St. Francis ofAssisi, who loved and sheltered the poor and the weak, not just animals as legend tells, but everyone from abandoned babies to winos and prostitutes. Have you any connection to the saint? Do you feel his spirit hovers over the city, influencing it in any way? A. D. Winans: I guess you could say that I feel his spirit in how my own poetry reflects the condition and circumstances of the "poor and the weak." San Francisco is a unique city. The Mayor and Board of Supervisors refuse to cooperate with Federal Law Enforcement agencies that have been conducting raids on suspected illegal immigrants here in the city. And, in keeping with the long established tradition of sanctuary, the churches here continue to offer them safe haven. And let's not forget those animals. Each year in San Francisco's North Beach, we have the blessing of the animals. Kennedy: Your work has always interested me, engaged me, because it feels so spontaneous, not in the least contrived. Do you, in fact, ever write in forms? Winans: First let me say that I have never said I was a poet. In my opinion the word "poet" has lost its meaning. Take a look at My Space and you'll find anyone and everyone claiming to be a poet. And you will find some God¬awful words there clothed in the label of poetry. And the Business Poets have cheapened the name even further. And then there are the poetry hustlers. The answer to your question is a resounding NO! I don't write in forms. When I sit down to write a poem, it is not with any conscious effort on my part to write in any particular format. My poems have always been spontaneous and written in a language accessible to the average Joe on the street. I write when the demons tell me to write. You might say I'm a caretaker of the strange mutterings that rattle around inside my head. Kennedy: In such a competitive contemporary poetry scene, "Po Biz," as the late Anne Sexton referred to it, how have you managed to retain so many good relationships with your colleagues? Winans: I don't really have any colleagues, not in the true sense of the word. I find most poets boring people to be around and worse yet are the ego monsters that walk around with an invisible capital "P" branded on their foreheads. I do have many friends who happen to be poets, but they are my friends for reasons other than being poets. Compared to most poets in the literary community, I am pretty much a recluse; but there are a good number of poets out there who I do like and respect. I also have a fair share of enemies who seem to attack me without having the slightest idea of who I am or where I'm coming from. I used to respond to their attacks but found I was only playing into their hands. This is what they want. Most of them can't write a decent poem, so they get their names in print by attacking others who have paid their dues. I recall Bukowski telling me, "I knew I was getting there when the attacks started to come." Kennedy: How would you describe your life quest? In other words, do you see yourself as a man on a journey toward something beyond the known reality? Winans: I live in the here and now, although I sometimes travel back in time, mainly to see what mistakes I have made and what I can learn from them. I haven't given much thought to anything beyond the immediate. I believe the ultimate search is the search within yourself, within your own being. Poets need to search for their personal vision and then write that vision down in a language other people can understand. My goal has always been to be honest and not sell out as so many others in the arts have done. Integrity is all a poet has in the end. Kennedy: You're one of the U.S. poets who have had a chance to look back over a long period of poetry history. What significant changes have you witnessed? ________________________________	Winans: I don't really concern myself with things like this. I was never really into Shelley or Byron, but early on I was able to identify with Eliot and Pound. It was Robert Lowell who made a breakthrough for me with his emotional experiences laid openly out on the page. I took another step forward with the poetry of Anne Sexton who was able to write about her £ experiences as a woman suffering from a nervous breakdown, poems which were very emotional, but also written with a dedication to craftsmanship. Her poems freed me to write a book about my dysfunctional family, Scar Tissue, and Wilfred Owen freed me to write about my military experiences in Panama. Later, I traveled a road leading me to poets like Jack Micheline and Charles Bukowski, with both of whom I shared a lot in common, which went beyond the subject matter of their poems. The only changes I am interested in are the changes I have undergone in both my life and my poetry. In truth, my life and my poetry are one and the same. Kennedy: These dysfunctional family experiences that you were able to share after reading Sexton: are you saying that, like her, you were abused? Winans: Abuse comes in many different forms. My family argued constantly every day of my waking childhood life. I still vividly recall two incidents that have stayed with me my entire life. The first was as a young boy when I saw my parents arguing in the hallway, and in a heated moment, my mother slapped my father across the face. I saw the look of anger on my father's face as he raised his hand to slap her back, but he saw me out of the corner of his eye and held back. Another time my mother broke a dish over my father's head, while my adopted brother and I watched in horror. As I grew into my teens, I took to having arguments with my mother, and once she reacted by throwing a coat hanger at me, which hit me in the face. This was the only physical abuse I personally experienced, but the psychological scars made me a nervous wreck long into my adulthood. Kennedy: And what about the military experiences? Were they in any way like those the young men and women engaged in the baq War are going through? Winans: It would take me a separate interview to go into those experiences that began in basic training and continued on through my years with the 5700th Support Squadron in Panama. Early on, I witnessed a sexual assault, which I walked away from, and later I saw two political prisoners die in a jeep explosion in town. And there was regular degrading treatment of both our own men and the people in Panama. But this was nothing compared to what went on in Vietnam and Iraq. The book I wrote about those days, This Land is Not My Land, which won a PEN Josephine Miles award for Literary Excellence in 2006, can be purchased for $6 from Presa Press. Kennedy: Is it correct then to say that you write poems about your life in the confessional manner of Lowell and Sexton ? Do you consider yourself a confessional poet? Winans: I don't like labels. But the answer to your question is both yes and no. A lot of my poetry is confessional, but a great deal of it is not confessional. My jazz poems are a good example of this, as are my political poems, with the exception of my Panama military experiences. I don't constantly put myself into my poems as Bukowski did. Kennedy: Some of your poems are often like films of place, people, and circumstance. Though you are not in them, as you say, at their best I observe that you, the writer, are more than the observer; you are the camera. In this way you are like the eye of God, seeing without judging. Any comment on this? Winans: Funny you should say this because I am a photographer as well as a poet and writer. I see many of my poems as "word snapshots." My eye becomes the camera lens and captures the visual in written format I try to keep personal judgments out of my poems, but this is not always possible, especially with my political poems.