Don Winter went from being owner of Southeast Real Estate to poverty after a 1998 divorce. He’s since taken up the poem, with acceptances from New York Quarterly, Passages North, 5 AM, Southern Poetry Review, Pearl, Portland Review, Slipstream, Sycamore Review, Chiron Review, and close to 500 other journals in the US, Canada, England, Ireland, Switzerland and Australia. He has published 2 chapbooks of his poems, Things About to Disappear and On the Line (both Bone World Publishing), which are distributed by New York Quarterly here. His poems have been nominated for nine Pushcarts. He is co-founder of the journal Fight These Bastards, for which subscription and submission guidelines are available here
DON'S INFLUENCES:
EAVAN BOLAND
Eavan Boland bravely establishes a position, a self, from which to speak in her poems as a woman, and utters actual female experience heretofore excluded from canonical Irish poetic. I sense my inclusion into poetry of the quotidian of my class (the working class), from a non-spectator position, like Boland’s insertion of the extraordinary experiences of ordinary women, pushes the envelope on what is seen as “fit” (or unfit) subject matter for poetry.
Click image for links relating to Boland and sound clip of Boland reading her poem 'That the Science of Cartography is Limited' on the WW Norton website; for a biography, profile and interview on the Academy of American Poets website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here
JAMES SCULLY
To write about work is to write about class and class issues. Scully observes that class consciousness is the white elephant in American poetry: “I learned that American poetry may on rare occasions tolerate the raising of class issues, but only if these are presented as issues of race or third world victimage.” Like Scully, I want to write working class poetry that does not gibber or evade, that isn’t soft focus, romantic, that isn’t voyeuristic. I want to put my poetry into the middle of life, to be a part of life, and not simply mimesis of it.
Click image for James Scully's author page on the Curbstone website; for Jon Andersen's essay 'A Very Partial Response to Bill Mohr and an Appreciation of the Work of James Scully' on the Pemmican Press website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here
is drunk with rain.
And our tables are careless
with empty bottles, cigarette ash.
And we run our fevers
up over a hundred
arm wrestling our motorcycle buddies,
drinking pitchers on one breath
for a dollar. And we try to drink enough
to lose our names.
And we make up stories to fit
the bad things, by turns hero and victim.
And the waitress acts vaguely in love
with each man. And the need for touch
is a razor-toting, cuss-tongued bad ass.
And the best sex rises from vacancies:
divorces, failed jobs, incarcerations.
And the closing time door flings open
like a warrant.
And the land tears away from us
and slides off the horizons.
2 A.M.
On the tube
the actress says, How do you want my tears,
halfway down my cheek
or all the way down?
I say, How do you want my poem,
halfway down the page
or all the way down?
Working the lot,
he unweaves the hose,
spreads the soap. He scrubs until
an oil stain lightens to dull grey.
Hosing down the foam
he thinks of the cuts
in pay, in hours, of all the times
he’s wanted to leave,
weighs these against
his brother laid off in Wyandotte,
his uncle in Coker, factories everywhere
slamming shut, empty like cash drawers.
He puts down the hose,
walks past the other parking spots
with names of people he’ll never meet.
The guard’s seen it
before. He smiles and nods.
Eugene walks out of the lot,
past rows of clipped hedges, past
sprinklers ratcheting a slow, broken sound.
Yard after yard
dogs bark behind fences.
He won’t admit
his greatest fear:
that he’ll fling his life
into the distant, grey highway,
past all the signals blinking “don’t walk.”
I buffed a floor
at Wanda’s Grill and the buffer hit
a slick spot, went gazooming like a kid
spinning to be dizzy and kicked
my balls. But no, I squealed like a hog, oh goddamn but no. All boss did
was put ice down there real fast
to get the heat out.
He said I might be a eunuch
in at least my right nut
and don’t forget to fill out
this accident report. After work,
I went to Tintop Tavern
and said to my girl, Here sit in my lap.
Nothing would go down nor come up.
She couldn’t make it, neither.
Someday right soon, she said,
there’s just gonna be
a lil’ piece of your ass left.
She was drunk as a hoot owl.
Pabst on tap. Your mouth’s runnin’
like a whippoorwill’s ass
in chokecherry season.
I picked a cue
and leaned. The eight ball wobbled
like a thrown wheel
and scratched.
EAVAN BOLAND
JAMES SCULLY
