Customer Reviews

The Holy Grail: Charles Bukowski & the Second Coming Revolution

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I found this book hard to put down. Easily accessible in style, A.D. Winans describes the fifties-early sixties in San Francisco in a way that someone who wasn't there couldn't. In addition to vivid descriptions of his encounters and correspondence with Bukowski, he gives a picture of how different the small press for poetry was in those days. If someone is looking for a straight bio of Bukowski, the book makes no pretence at being that. Rather, it's a book of the times and the poets, yes, largely Bukowski, who lived that era in their poetry, their readings, and their adventures. In contrast to one reviewer, I didn't find Winans bitter at all. Instead, I found him amazingly forgiving of some of the betrayals Bukowski perpetrated on him and others during those years. I would highly recommend the book.

Have you been curious to find out how SF Beat poet A.D. Winans came to know the Los Angeles rabblerouser Charles Bukowski? In this book you can find out the whole in and out of their relationship, in which they were sort of like the Hemingway and FitzGerald of a nascent poetic movement which Winans has called, "The Second Coming Revolution," after his own magazine, the long-gone, and sadly missed, "Second Coming," which might be said to have started a revolution in letting the common people speak in the language of the human tongue. But maybe "revolution" is the wrong word. Plenty of fine photos stud this book, some of the talented San Francisco poet Harold Norse, and other figures around the legendary 50 year old bookstore City Lights on Columbus Avenue (San Francisco), where "Hank," as his intimates called Bukowski, made some of his most colorful public appearances. But A.D. Winans got to know "Hank" in private too, and some of the most telling stories in the book comcern the way Winans counts it up and realizes that actually, he only met with Bukowski a handful of times, and that he got to "know" him mostly through his letters and through his many volumes of verse.

There is also an explanation of why Winans is bitter today, for rightfully so he feels ignored, and plus he had a spiked drink some time ago and was jailed by malicious SF cops who put him in a cell with deadbeats and dangerous felons, and subjected him to a nude body search which was humiliating. But, he survived his ordeal and has since then written over two dozen books. Thought Bukowski is dead now, Winans lives on to dare to dream the visions of glory dreamt by the knights of the round table who wanted to find . . . "the HOLY GRAIL."