POEM FOR BUKOWSKI

He was the original

Jack the Ripper

He was the tormentor

Of John Bryan

He was the villain

Of women’s lib

He was the last hope

Of the down and out

He was a Third Reich monster

He was a Hindu Guru

He wrote Harold Norse

Get well cards

He tormented his enemies

He frustrated his friends

He wrote poems in the shit houses

Of America

He wrote poems in the ballet

Of his sleep

He wrote Harold Norse

Get well cards

All he was folks was

The best show in town

Holy Priest Circus clown

The best act around

He was a Roman sonnet

He was an Irish ballad

He was the best Cesar salad

In a gourmet restaurant

He had the face of a moon crater

The stomach of a wheelbarrow

The heart of a whore

Which is more than you can say

For 90% of the poet’s around

He dug Brahms

He dug Beethoven

He was the heavyweight champion

Of Los Angeles

He was the Chaplin of San Pedro

He was stalked by the minor poet’s

Of San Francisco and Los Angeles

And the soft-boiled egg eaters

Of the Café Trieste

He was a rainbow of watercolors

Mixed in with one too many

Sunday morning hangovers

He loved boxing

He loved his beer

He loved his daughter

He loved his women

He was an antique book

In a broken down hotel

He was a bottle of aspirin

In an empty water glass

He wrote Harold Norse

Get well cards

All he was folks was
The best damn show
In town

Winans Receives Water Color Bukowski Portrait

and THE WINNER...................... is A.D. WINANS

Bukowski's Grave Site (RIP)

In honor of the 20th anniversary of Charles Bukowski’s passing — the author left this world on March 9, 1994 — Silver Birch Press raffled off an original 18×18″ watercolor portrait of Bukowski by Bradley Wind. The winner (A D Winans) was chosen in a blindfold process on Sunday, March 9, 2014. This portrait is from the personal collection of Silver Birch Press, acquired after the portrait appeared in the Silver Birch Press Bukowski Anthology.

San Francisco Chronicle Review on The Holy Grail

San Francisco Chronicle Review

The Holy Grail
Charles Bukowski and the
Second Coming Revolution
By A. D. Winans

DustBooks 189 pages
With center photo section
$9.95 paperback. $19.95 hardback

Insider accounts of any industry offer a certain amount of titillation, but San Francisco native A.D. Winan’s “The Holy Grail” delivers that and a lot more as he recounts over 40 years inside the small press revolution as publisher of Second Coming Press and Second Coming Magazine.

Winans, a respectable post Beat poet himself builds his memoir cum literary history around his long friendship with he most notorious, and probably the best writer to come out of the American small press scene; the late Los Angeles novelist and poete maudit, Charles Bukowski.

“The Holy Grail” comes closer than any book yet published in showing how and why the small press revolution broke the iron clad hold of stodgy traditional publishers back in the early 1960s, enabling a whole new generation of radical and counter cultural writers to get their work before the public and, as in the case of Bukowski and others, to become outlaw artist celebrities on a par with rock stars. Winans reminds us that even publishers like City Lights (which first published Ginsberg) and Black Sparrow, began as small publishers.

Bay Area readers will doubtless revel in Winans’ intimate gossip about dozens of our more outrageous local writers, especially the North Beach Beat and post-Beat gang –
including Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Micheline, Harold Norse, and Kaye McDonough – that dominated the San Francisco literary scene, at least the sensational side of it, throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s. Most remarkably, for all the infighting among that gang, Winans writes of it in a very evenhanded manner, admitting hi own grudges but not taking time to grind his own ax.


As it all this weren’t enough for the price of admission, “The Holy Grail” also gives one of the most honest and compelling portraits of Bukowski yet in print, destroying almost every myth about him still current. The supposedly cantankerous, drunken, degenerate, womanizing Bukowski turns out to be a fiercely loyal friend who stands up for Winans in a battle between Winans and Ferlinghetti, despite the fact that Bukowski was seeking publication from City Lights. He graciously bows out when he discovers himself and Winans pursuing the same woman, and he even advises Winans to cut down on his drinking because in words we never expect to hear from the Buk – the “body asks for a bit of kindness.”