by Zack Kopp

Once described by recently deceased poet and City Lights Books founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti as a great place to pull oneself up by the bootstraps, the San Francisco Bay Area has increasingly transformed into a home base for tech giants in the last couple of decades as a culmination of a trend away from art toward profit. With Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s death at the impressive age of 102 on February 22nd of 2021, San Francisco’s more than a century as prestigious Bohemian hot spot seems at a close. American poet,[1] essayist, short story writer and publisher Allan Davis Winans, known professionally as A. D. Winans was born January 12, 1936, in San Francisco, California, and has made that city his lifelong home base. Winans returned home from Panama in 1958, after serving three years in the military and graduated from San Francisco State College In 1962. In the suburb of North Beach, he became friends beyond life with California Beat poets Bob Kaufman and Jack Micheline. Winans exchanged emails with Zack Kopp recently.

“Micheline didn’t like labels and considered himself a Bohemian. I don’t like labels either. I know I don’t like being, [as I have been] in the past, classified as a ‘Meat’ poet. If I had to be labeled, I, too, prefer Bohemian. Gino and Carlo’s Bar in the heart of North Beach was a Bohemian heaven where poets, artists, philosophers, and journalists like Warren Hinckle and the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Charles Mc Cabe hung out. Beat poets Richard Brautigan and Jack Spicer drank there. Hunter Thompson, a journalist friend of Hinckle, dropped in, as did talented musicians and singers. My most memorable experience was my painter friend Peter Onstad and I shooting pool with Janis Joplin and her friend ‘Sunshine’ as the jukebox played ‘Down On Me’. North Beach was always a happening place.”
As a lifelong resident, Winans has a long view of San Francisco’s transformation over decades of incremental change spanning most of the last century. “The ghosts remain, especially for those of us who were part of those days. As a teenager, on a warm day, I and a friend would skip class and take a streetcar to the Beach and walk the boardwalk or lay in the sand, knowing we would face detention as a punishment, but it was well worth it, [M]y old Polytechnic High School was demolished in 1987 and replaced with condos All that remains is the Boys Gym. In the 4 years there our football team lost but one game and soundly beat that same team in the Championship game. I ran the 440 and made the All-City trials and no, I did not place in the top three but finishing fourth in such a field seemed at the time a small victory. The Place, a bar on upper Grant Avenue that featured ‘Blabber Night’ where anyone could get up and espouse anything on their mind from poetry to philosophy. I hung out there on occasion and would see poet Jack Spicer there. Seen here in 1959 hosting Linda Lovely and her soapbox. She was a central figure in Jerry Kamstra’s novel The Frisco Kid. I keep calling the ‘Big Man’ in the sky but the cell phone signal is out of reach and all I get is a busy signal from one of the few old telephones left in the City.”

Winans has been referred to as “America’s foremost non-academic poet.” He was the founder of Second Coming Press, a San Francisco based small press publishing books, poetry broadsides, a magazine, and anthologies, editing Second Coming Magazine from 1972 to 1989. During this period, he befriended Charles Bukowski and Bukowski’s then-girlfriend, Linda King, both of whose work he published. Other writers published in that mag included Jack Micheline, Bob Kaufman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Levine, Josephine Miles, David Meltzer, and Charles Plymell. In 2002, he published his memoir, Holy Grail: Charles Bukowski & The Second Coming Revolution, a memoir and account of his professional relationship and friendship with a poet known for his lack of metaphoric distance, and its effect on his writing and life. Portions of Winans’ correspondence with Bukowski appear in collections of Bukowski’s letters to fans, colleagues and editor(s).

“Charles Bukowski and I corresponded for l7 years and exchanged 83 letters during the time I was publishing Second Coming. His letters to me are at my archives at Brown University. Next month I may start sharing ‘portions’ of letters from the copies I have kept here. My book Dead Lions published by Punk Hostage Press. The book details my friendship with Bukowski, Kaufman, Jack Micheline, and Alvah Bessie one of the Hollywood Ten who went to prison for defying the House Un-American Activities Committee, a dark period in our history. This poem of mine was written for Charles Bukowski in the seventies:
THE GOOD THE BAD THE UGLY
Called you from the corner
Of Hollywood and Vine
Three days in a row
Because you said to be sure
And look you up when I got in town
Managed to reach you
Late in the afternoon
On the night of my reading
At Beyond Baroque
You said …
You had trouble recognizing my voice
Hoped I wasn’t drinking too much
Said something about your having just
Returned from a trip to Europe
Paris I believe
Three weeks of intense travel with Linda
Three weeks of living hell
And an appearance on national TV
You said that I had called
At the wrong time and
Hoped I would understand
And to be sure and write to you
When I got back home
And me just back from
Eight days and nights
Fighting insomnia in New York
Listening to Louis Simpson
And a host of minor poets read
Standing here in a phone booth
Here in Los Angeles
3 days into smog
3 nights into the world series
Don’t worry Hank I understand
Don’t give it a second thought
I mean it’s okay
We all have a little
Of the gangster inside us
Al Capone or Bugsy Malone
In Chicago or in Sicily
We all dream
The dream of Diamond Jim
Only to wake in the morning sweating
A dead numbers man
In a dead-end alley
In Chicago or in Silicy
Or on Carlton way in downtown
L.A.
And the sleepless nights
Pile up like litter
And the mafia men disguised
In the clothes of poets
Wait like hitmen
To collect a bad debt
And there’s always a torpedo
From Cleveland or the Bronx
Someone with a scar and a sneer
Waiting by the window with
A machine gun or a forty-five
And if the arts and politics don’t get you
And you manage to survive the betrayals
And the long line of undertakers
That stretch out like body bags
In a battle zone
You can consider yourself lucky
Sell your letters to the University
Ignore the mad sirens wailing
In the recess of your mind
Don’t worry Hank I understand
As Bob Kaufman said:
There ain’t no piano for Lucky Luciano
There ain’t no phone for Al Capone
There ain’t no jazz on Alcatraz
There ain’t no heart on Carlton”
It was while serving in Panama Winans says he became disillusioned with the American system. Panamanian canal workers, who performed the same work as their American counterparts, were paid less than half the going pay. In the American controlled Canal Zone, the U.S. Governor refused to allow the Panamanian flag to fly alongside the flag of the United States. Elections were rigged and ballot boxes were found floating in the canal. The Joseph McCarthy era, the struggle for civil rights, the treatment of the American Indian, and the Vietnam War all became fodder for later rebellion, which resulted in the many scathing political poems I have written. I was honorably discharged from the military in February,1958, and returned home to discover the Beat generation.”

Part of the secret to Winans’ notoriety is his commitment to poetry and his prolific nature. He is the author of nearly seventy books and chapbooks of poetry and prose, including North Beach Poems, North Beach Revisited, Drowning Like Li Po in a River of Red Wine, In The Dead Hours of Dawn, San Francisco Poems, and Dead Lions. Another is his extremely prolific nature, even into his eighties. “Here’s a link to Byron Coley reading live and on the radio my long epic political poem, MAYDAY [which has been] published in a City Lights like paperback pocketbook by Holy Yurt Books as the first book in their pocketbook series limited to 100 copies, 20 of which are signed by the author. I am making available 15 of the 20 signed copies. The cost of the book including postage and shipping is $10. To make payment through Pay Pal, use my email, slowdancer2006@netzero.com.”
SAN FRANCISO BLUES
white nationalism
immigrant bashing
deadly viruses
it’s enough to drive one mad
Donald Trump Moscow Mitch and the Pope
All selling their own brand of dope
A transit system that doesn’t work
Head cases ranting on the streets
Punk rockers with rainbow colored hair
Women with nose rings
And pierced genitals
Viagra for the disinterested
Ginseng for tired blood
My illusions are fighting
A duel with my delusions
The last time I picked up
An airport white courtesy phone
The voice on the other end was mine
The dates on my calendar are blank
My answering machine spits back
Messages in Chinese
The pinball machine has no flappers
There’s no prize in my crackerjack box
My radio plays only commercials
My hand holds my cock in contempt
My love life is an unread resume
With one too many references
I dreamed I was a gun runner
Trading hardware for software
I want my picture on a cereal box
Not the back of a milk carton
The IRS is a legal shakedown
The Pentagon a slaughterhouse
Jack the Ripper sliced and diced
His way through life
And he wasn’t even a chef
Freud was impotent
But put on a good show
Monks know the answer to life
But won’t share it
You know you’re in trouble
When your shrink deals in fantasies
And leaves you with his reality
My life has become a distraction
No additions no subtractions
When it becomes an abstraction
I’ll know I’ve found success
A.D. Winans, photographer unknown.