Interzone was a network of William Burroughs' readers founded (1997-2013). Its sites are still accessible at http://www.inter-zone.org/ , but most of them are sites of archives.
The site presently active are:
- Interzone Éditions http://www.interzoneeditions.net/
- La sémantique générale pour les nuls https://www.semantiquegenerale.net
- La sémantique générale pour tous semantiquegenerale.free.fr
- Pour une économie non-aristotélicienne https://generalsemantics4all.wordpress.com/
The muscles the cells changing Dying and yet somehow surviving Traveling through a warped time tunnel Through an origin you cannot remember Because there is no you to remember it Walking behind my shadow Shedding the
years like
A burlesque dancer sheds her clothes .
I who have never called myself a poet
Never clothed myself in consonants
Vowels similes or metaphors Yet planting the words on the page Like a florist prepares a bridal banquet A tender arrangement of flesh and bone At war with the demons who leave behind A Custer
massacre of words .
Approaching eighty I race the clock like
a hungry dog sniffs a gourmet meal Left feeling like the last sentinel The last paying customer At the last
movie show .
All these years an explorer
Set out to discoverer a new world Blindfolded
without map or compass
The Holy Grail a shameless slut
Plays the
role of a gypsy fortune teller
Spits out bits and pieces of the puzzle .
The poems arrive like
A migration of birds Poems mated with a full blood moon Left cooking
these strange images
Like a fry cook sweating over
A greasy grill .
Waking at three in the morning
With half-remembered dreams
My eyes a heat-seeking missile Honing in for an invisible kill Feeling like a junkie overcome
With tremors A matador waving a red flag
In the face of a raging bull
A blind man tapping Into raw
emotion . AD Winans: http://www.adwinans.com/
Woodstock, NY poets Andy Clausen and Pamela Twining hit the road, venturing off on a “Beat Revival Tour,” destination: San Francisco. Joining them is San Francisco poet A.D. Winans. Events at the Beat Museum are free of charge, made possible by Friends of the Beat Museum.
Andy Clausen
Andy Clausen
Andy Clausen was raised in Oakland California USA. He graduated from Bishop O’Dowd High School in 1961 and attended six colleges. After reading the poems of the characters in Kerouac’s books, he felt he’d found his life’s vocation and headlong began trying to be a Beat poet in 1965. He has traveled and read his poetry all over North America and the world. (New York, California, Alaska, Texas, Prague, Kathmandu, Amsterdam etc.) He has maintained a driven intrepid lifestyle and aspired to be a champion of the underdog. He has had many occupations studying humanity and earning a living. Clausen has written about his friendships with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Ray Bremser, Janine Pommy Vega, Peter Orlovsky, and many others of the Beat Generation.
He has lectured at universities, high schools, and art centers. Clausen has taught at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University. He was co-editor of, POEMS FOR THE NATION, with Allen Ginsberg and Eliot Katz (Seven Stories Press). He was an editor at LONG SHOT Magazine. Clausen wrote about Ray Bremser and appears in Encyclopedia of Beat Literature (Kurt Hemmer, editor) Clausen has back packed around the world and has resided in over twenty states and provinces.
For twelve years AC conducted poetry workshops in the NY state prison system for Incision Arts. In 1999 Clausen began teaching poetry in the schools under the auspices of Teacher’s & Writers Collaborative. Andy now resides in Woodstock, NY, where he teaches, writes, and performs his work. He lived with Janine Pommy Vega the last 12 years of her life and celebrates The Annual Janine Pommy Vega Poetry Festival in Woodstock.
I was born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the middle of the last century, to a melting pot American family with early settler roots, as well as a Native American connection that no one ever discussed. I was always a poet, my first efforts published only in elementary school journals, but my sonnet “Neveah”, written at 16, was honored with a scholarship to a six week poetry workshop in Washington DC. An early poem, “Rejoice! The Second Coming!” was performed at Regina High School in Hyattsville, MD, with orchestration and conducted by prominent Philippine composer, Rosendo E. Santos, professor of music at the Catholic University.
I left school to travel, raise children and live off-the-grid on an organic farm, always finding time to write, though I only started reading my work in public in 2010. During the 1990s, I attended Vassar College on a scholarship received from the Ford Foundation, using poetry as a voice for a Women’s Studies discipline. A long poem “The Rape of Humankind: a Conspiracy Theory”, after William Blake, was used as the subject of a Graduate thesis on Blake, at the request of the professor.
Most of the past years were spent “inhaling”, as it were. And in 2009, my children raised, my parents no longer in need of me, I began to read my work at Open Mics and was soon a Featured performer. My first chapbook, “i have been a river…” was published by Heyday Press in 2011, followed by “utopians & madmen”, DancinFool Press, in 2012 and “A Thousand Years of Wanting” by Shivastan Press in 2013. My work has also appeared in Big Scream #51 and Big Scream #52, Heyday Magazine, Vol 1, Issue 1 and Vol 1, Issue 3, and Napalm Health Spa 2013, the annual magazine of the Museum of American Poetics.
I have appeared with beat legends Andy Clausen and Antler, Jeff Poniewacz, Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, Anne Waldman, George Wallace, and others on stages in Detroit, Milwaukee, Boulder, Denver and Ward CO, and in New York City, as well as Albany and my home of over 40 years, Woodstock, NY.
I am currently working on a long piece, a memoir in poetic form. I am also one of the organizers of the Janine Pommy Vega Poetry Festival, held annually in Woodstock at the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum.
A. D. Winans is a native San Francisco poet, writer and photographer. He is a graduate of San Francisco State University. He returned home from Panama in February 1958 to become part of the Beat and post-Beat era. He is the author of fifty books and chapbooks of poetry and prose. Major books include The Holy Grail: The Charles Bukowski Second Coming Revolution, North Beach Revisited, and This Land Is Not My Land, which won a 2006 PEN Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. Most recent books include The Wrong Side Of Town, Marking Time, Pigeon Feathers, Billie Holiday Me and the Blues, No Rooom For Buddha, and Love – Zero. In 2007 Presa Press published a book of his Selected Poems: The Other Side Of Broadway: Selected Poems 1995-2005. In late 2010, BOS Press published a 300-plus page of his Selected Poems.
Poet A D Winans is a native San Franciscan who came of age during the heyday of the beat generation in His hometown. The beat poets along with Kenneth Patchen and Charles Bukowski had quite an influence on the direction he would take in his own poetry. It's a poetry of the streets and a poetry of the common language, going back to Walt Whitman. Over the years, Winans has written about some of his literary heroes, always with passion, always with a deep understanding of how the tradition of poetry is passed hand-to-hand down the generations. It is a great moment to see a few of his essays, or portraits, collected in one volume.
Dead Lions is aptly named. Winans has chosen to write of Alvah Bessie, that heroic screenwriter who was one of the Hollywood 10, a victim of the Communist scare of the 1950s engendered by Senator Joseph McCarthy and others. There are tributes to three poets as well, Bob Kaufman, Jack Micheline, and Charles Bukowski. One might read the text and feel as if they had been wandering through a portrait gallery. That is how keenly Winans does his job. I came away from reading this book with a new sense of all of these people. The three poets I knew well. Bessie is known to me only from a distance in the context of the persecution.
What really makes Dead Lions an important book is the intimacy Winans brings to the page. It’s that same sense of the intimate that is in his own poetry. Kaufman, Micheline, and Bukowski we're true literary outsiders. For each of them it was a long pull to be given notice from the literary Community. Winans knew Bukowski in the days when he was a creature of the little poetry journals and a major figure in the Mimeo revolution of the 1960s, which now seems so long ago. He knew Bob Kaufman in North Beach hanging out with him at bars and cafes. He was closest to Jack Micheline and that comes through in his book. For Winans Micheline's defiance of literary propriety was an important signal to younger poets. Once again, Whitman is echoed. Jack's "barbaric yelp" was the ticket to freedom from academe.
I was particularly taken with Winans’ portrait of Bob Kaufman. He offers a good deal of biographical information that one rarely finds. He writes, “Kaufman considered himself a Buddhist and believed that a poet had a call to a higher order.” As one of Bob’s intimate friends, I remember him quoting from ancient Buddhist texts as we sat around the kitchen table in my apartment. He was never loud about it. Winans tells us, “He was an oral poet who didn’t write for publication or expectations of fame and fortune, which is what drew me to him.’
This is romanticism and it is charming to witness. I think of Nelson Algren’s book title, “A Walk on the Wild Side.” It reminds me of the poets Winans admires. He wraps up the Kaufman piece with a description of the pubic outpouring after his death as more than one hundred people marched through North Beach in tribute to the poet’s life.
Winans has written extensively on Bukowski. Once again, it was the rebellion in "Buk" that Winans admires, and he pays him tribute. This piece is filled with up- close and personal recollection. Winans indulges in a bit of psychological profiling, including Bukowski’s mistrust of friends. In contrast, he writes: “His first book, Post Office, was written in nineteen days. The book is filled with laughter that shines through the pain of working at a dead-end job that kills a man’s spirit and physically breaks him down. I know! I worked for the San Francisco Post Office for five years.” It was after reading this novel that Winans became an avid fan. The snapshot of the times he spent hanging out with Bukowski are memorable, including a jaunt into one of the famous San Francisco watering holes, Gino and Carlos, a venerable poet’s haunt. He recounts taking Bukowski to the Caffe Trieste in North Beach. The L A. bard would not enter. He just commented that the habitués were sitting there waiting for something to happen. “Hank, “as Bukowski was known to his friends, comes through with full flavor. One finishes the essay and wishes for more. Perhaps Winans will find the time to expand this interesting portrait of the raucous poet. Jack Micheline comes through as the quintessential literary barbarian. Some biographical information quickly gives way to anecdote. Jack is plunked onstage by Winans and we watch him in court and jail, in one bar after another amid quotes from the man himself. Winans has a good memory and may have scribbled some of Jacks words down in a notebook. Describing the old days to A D. Micheline said, “Poetry was everywhere. Every day Kaufman and I read a poem. It is not part of history, but I was arrested for pissing on a police car the same night Kaufman was arrested outside the Co-Existence Bagel Shop.” It was the fervor of Micheline’s attack on our safe and sound society that Winans admires, and it comes through remarkably well. It is another one of those useful handbooks of poetic sensibility, with the added bonus of having insights into the life of Alvah Bessie.
*** The signed copy of the book can be purchased from the author (reserve yours by writing (ad1936@juno.com) at a discounted price of $14.29 that includes free shipping. An unsigned copy of the book is also available at Amazon at the same price plus whatever shipping they charge.
The latest Harold Norse poetry reading in Petaluma was one of the best! Great readers, great audience and an old friend of Harold's showed to boot. Check out the photos, video clips and write up at http://haroldnorse.com/1707
The Beat Museum has partnered with San Francisco's famed Top Of The Mark to begin a new poetry and jazz series running from 3/3 through 4/28. The March 17 theme is ""Poetry Through The Generations." I'll be reading with Neeli Cherkovski, William Taylor Jr and Cassandra Dallett. There will be two sets, the first beginning at 6:30 PM. Further details will be forthcoming
Who would have thought skittles and ice tea was a death sentence
light rain sings its night song death folded away like a black rose clamped in a buzzard’s beak
A boy with a dream walks home alone at night a shot rings out in the air like a popped popcorn kernel
a lifeless body falls to the ground gunned down by a wanna-be cop and Florida’s “stand your ground” license to kill law
Justice denied by a judge’s tortured jury instructions
No appeal for Trayvon no appeal for the dead in the State of life-takers and death-makers where a young black boy must forever fear to walk home alone at night always within a legal sniper’s gun sight
Lock and load the chamber no safety on the gun make it as black as the night holster it at the back hip to keep it from sight
Know the law is on your side black is black white is white it’s OK to shoot on sight when a black boy with a dream walks home alone at night
Punk Hostage Press has just released my new book Dead Lions , a literary memoir on my friendship with literary legends Alvah Bessie (one of the original Hollywood Ten), Charles Bukowski, Bob Kaufman, and Jack Micheline.
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
“Dead Lions is a must read for young poets and writers and those who may be unfamiliar with four literary icons of our time. The author gives the reader an intimate look into the lives of Charles Bukowski, Bob Kaufman, Jack Micheline, and Alvah Bessie, one of the Hollywood Ten who went to prison for defying the House on Un American Activities Committee.
Take a trip down memory lane as Winans recalls his friendship and personal experiences with these poets and writers who influenced Winan’s own considerable body of work.”
ORDER information can be found on Amazon Com, as well as information on my PEN Josephine Miles award winning book (This Land Is Not My Land) and other books.
A. D. Winans is a native San Francisco award winning poet and writer. He is the author of sixty 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. He is a graduate of San Francisco State College (now University).
In 2014 he won a Kathy Acker Poetry and Publishing Award. In 2006 He won a PEN Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature. In 2009 PEN Oakland awarded him a lifetime achievement award.
From 1972 to 1989 Winans edited and published Second Coming Press, which produced a large number of books and anthologies, among them the highly acclaimed California Bicentennial Poet's Anthology, which included poets like David Meltzer, Jack Micheline, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ishmael Reed, Josephine Miles, Bob Kaufman, and William Everson.
He worked as an editor and writer for the San Francisco Art Commission, from 1975 to 1980, during which time he produced the Second Coming 1980 Poets and Music Festival, honoring the late Josephine Miles and John Lee Hooker.
He has read his poetry with many acclaimed poets, including Diane DiPrima, Bob Kaufman, Jack Micheline, Harold Norse, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and all of the past and current San Francisco Poet Laureates.
His work has appeared in over 1500 literary magazines and anthologies, including City Lights Journal, Exquisite Corpse, Poetry Australia, Confrontation, The New York Quarterly, The Patterson Literary Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry.
In April 2002 a poem of his was set to music By William Bolcom, a Pulitzer Prize winning composer, and performed at New York's Alice Tully Hall. In January 2009 Sound Street Tracks released a mastered CD of Winans reading from his book, The Reagan Psalms.
In 2012 The Louisiana University at Lafayette recorded a CD of Song Cycles by American Composers, and included in the CD is the song cycle of nationally acclaimed William Bolcom. Old Addresses, with song poems by Winans, Oscar Wilde, Ezra Pound, Langston Huges, C.P. Cavafy, Kenneth Koch and others.
Writers like Colin Wilson, Studs Terkel, James Purdy, Peter Coyote, Herbert Gold, and the late Jack Micheline and Charles Bukowski have praised his work.
He has worked at a variety of jobs, most recently with the U.S. Dept. of Education as an Equal Opportunity Specialist, investigating claims of discrimination against minorities, women and the disabled.
Winans is a member of PEN, and has served on the Board of Directors of various art organizations, including the now defunct Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers (COSMEP). He is currently on the advisory board of the San Francisco International Poetry Library.
He is listed in Who's Who International Poetry Directory, Who's Who in America, the Gale Research Contemporary American Authors series, and the Gale Research Contemporary authors autobiography series.
Most recently he served on the host committee for the 2012 San Francisco International Poetry Festival.
His essay on the late Bob Kaufman was published in the American Poetry Review and was republished in 2007 by The Writer's Research Group. In September 2009 the article was again re-published along with a poem of his for Bob Kaufman, as part of a booklet produced by the Los Angeles Afro American Museum.
like pulling a wisdom tooth
like an attack of sciatica
I sit here lost
in the attic of my mind
the fog rolling in
slips through the crack
in my living room window
born at home premature
under the light of a full moon
I walked the jungles of Panama
Fed off Beat Mania in North Beach
Shaman poets sang in my ears
under a bed of stars
young women with dresses
that clung to firm thighs
damp dark cavern
wet as morning dew
peach fuzz dinner
drew me in devoured me
like quicksand
the sweet fragrance of the past
swirls inside my head
mates with comrades long dead
as I walk back into my birth
work my way through
the sound of water
the wind sharp as a knife
propels me toward my destiny
my boyhood gone
like an old jalopy used-up
rusting in an auto junkyard
I head toward the comfort of the now
nailed to the cross of the past
in the language of the present
with no words to light the fire
as I carry the memories
like a mountain climber
with a heavy backpack
vague memories of my mother
singing me to sleep
and the chill of waking
the tongue of dawn
cold as dry ice
the hawk sweeps down
for the kill
a dog howls at the moon
a cat yawns in boredom
the universe draws a new boundary line
fragile as a new born child
the careful academic poet
weds the careful language poet
vie for who is published the most
in Poetry Magazine
the monkey rides the master’s back
the coo-coo bird moves backward
into the clock
fearful police lock and load their guns
black boys moving targets
in the night
voter suppression laws
to keep the voting down
southern barbecues
with rednecks hungry
for “nigger” steak
gone the passion of revolution
sell out satisfaction
to the status quo
the night hound of death
stumbles into the day
the rich roasting the poor
like a pig on a spit
labor unions turned
into mannequins
the war machine money makers
fuel the cash register
with the blood of our youth
no guilt no shame
the Roman Senate proceeds unabated
turn out gladiators
like machinery parts
endless parades marching bands
waving flags, played out
like an amusement park
slavery without chains
government without representation
this nation of criminal politicians
the ghost of Custer rises
like a creature from the lagoon
creeps through the night
like a faceless Santa Claus
with a bag of Indian scalps
Allah competes with the Pope
for the rights to the head of Jesus
beheaded by Isis barbarians
back from a night of slaughter
as the congregation stumbles
like a drunk into the future
carved out in the hands
of a gypsy fortune teller
as I wait out the night hours
in solitude
shut out the demons of insomnia
like a faulty night light switch
the holy of the unholy money exchangers
make and pass new laws
laws that feed on the bones
of the poor and blue-collar worker
a future where animals
turn into animal crackers
and birds are served live
at holiday feasts
the angels occupy the cheap seats
at Yankee Stadiums
God sends down a bolt of lightning
dismayed at the flawed diamond
he created
lift your spirit as high as the mercy airplanes dropping food and
water to the 40,000 Iraqui men women and children seeking reguge from
yet another religioius sect bent on genocide in the name of
their invisible God
put your heart where your words are all this killing in the name
of God be it Christian, Muslim or somewhere in between
Buddha's crossed legs won't stop it the Pope can't stop it the Koran
can't stop it
the evil inside man's heart began with the caveman and waits the
resurrection hidden in a secret silo with its missiles pointed at
God
Availability: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s, Small Press Distribution (SPD). To the Trade: Ingram Distribution, SPD
Winans is an award-winning poet and a 2014 recipient of a Kathy Acker poetry award. He is a member of PEN and the author of over sixty books of poetry and prose. He edited and published Second Coming for seventeen years. He worked for the San Francisco Arts Commission for five years as an editor and writer. His work has been published internationally in over 1,500 literary journals and anthologies. In 2002 a poem of his was set to music and performed at Alice Tully Music Hall. The New England Conservatory of Music accepted several of his poems to be set to music and performed at a later date. In 2006 he won a PEN Josephine Miles award for excellence in literature and in 2009 PEN Oakland presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served on the Board of Directors of several literary and art organizations, and is currently an advisory board member for the proposed San Francisco International Poetry Library.
NYQ Books™ was established in 2009 as an imprint of The New York Quarterly Foundation, Inc. Its mission is to augment the New York Quarterly poetry magazine by providing an additional venue for poets who are already published in the magazine.
Jazz waking up the dead
Miles, Charlie Parker, and Lester Young
Serenade an army of poets
Sitting on my bookshelf
T.S. Eliot playing the banker
Walt Whitman walking the battlefields
Williams Carlos Williams suturing wounds
Kaufman walking the streets of New York
Juggling a “Golden Sardine”
Sings a duet with Billie Holiday
Blake playing cards with God
Lorca playing Russian Roulette
Micheline dancing with Mingus
Gary Snyder building word bridges
Me doing a tango with a fallen angel
And suddenly I’m not alone anymore
The words falling like hard rain
I was just notified that I have been selected to be a Poet of the Week at
Poetry Super Highway. My poem below will appear online at their web site
during the week of June 2-8 and then be part of the Poetry Super Highway's
archives.
!EARLY BIRTHDAY POEM
sitting here fifteen days before my
seventy-eighth birthday I drink my morning coffee in
solitude
wear the early chill of morning like a
quilt of stitched memories my mind a nosy intruder plots the course of my
life
the moon a graveyard shines its eyes
down on me
surely that is not me I see in the
mirror
the months the years revolving
doors
like the trick mirrors at the
Funhouse at Playland at the Beach
friends fewer in number wait for me in
my dreams
like ducks in a
blind
left with a cup of morning coffee a
spoon that stirs memories of young women
the pleasure of warm flesh on fresh
linen sheets hot as an iron pressed to a singed garment turned to bones
that rattle in the graveyard of my dreams
the conversations that lasted into the
early morning hours turned to idle chatter with ghosts from the
past
ghosts appear in my bedroom at night they are faceless and their moans are inaudible one is as large as sidney greenstreet he sits on the side of the bed leans over like a sinking ship his eyes anchors that weigh me down
mock my 78 years move like bulls in a bull ring leave wreckage everywhere
they mark the months on my calendar with large X's, Sidney gets up from my bed, plays the saxophone in a wailing blues melody
one female ghost mocks Billie Holiday sings the lyrics, "hanging fruit."
a mortician appears wearing a black beret
He looks a little like Ferlinghetti walks in heavy boots to the sound of John Sosa's marching band
I'm assigned a seat in Dante's hell where Satan turns up the heat my mind boils over zombie women flirt with me a tribal council is convened finds me unfit for membership a cannibal sizes me up invites me to dinner
God weighs in admits he did not create man in his own image that Adam's rib was a joke the night engulfs me the four walls collapse in the lap of a defrocked priest who sings me a lullaby
The dead sea comes to life high tide battles low tide a smattering of stars fall from the sky land at my pillow like fairy dust
The Pope washes my feet Jesus is not impressed God lets out a yawn The universe holds back its laughter
