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THINGS
ABOUT TO DISAPPEAR
Note:
Proceeds
from Things About to Disappear will be used to support Don
Winter’s son, Dylan Coyle Winter After reading Don Winter’s first book of poetry, Things About to Disappear I now believe some writers are born
and not made. They are the lucky ones who come into life with the grace of
words. I asked Winter when he began writing; thinking poems this well
crafted were from a poesy veteran. He said, “In
1998, I went through a divorce in which I lost everything that gave my
life meaning: my son, my wife, my real estate business, my home on
Lake Tuscaloosa. I think shit happens to everyone and you kill
yourself or you make changes and go on living. I have been writing on
and off for around 5 years.” Winter told me he has no formal training as a writer. He said, "I have degrees; however, I find that where writing is concerned, well, it can be encouraged but not taught. In other words, I taught myself to write. You can't teach someone to write, so I think school is irrelevant. I don’t do many rewrites. I don't think you should make changes just because others suggest them, or you risk losing confidence in yourself. I think you should only revise what sounds untrue or imitative in your work; I sense as a writer you come to recognize when you are using your own voice (being truthful) and when you're not.” Yet, despite his late start (or maybe because of it) his work has appeared in close to four hundred print and electronic literary journals. He has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize and he is the Assistant Editor of the Alaska Quarterly review. His poems are alive and heartfelt not just because he had a shock to the system - great themes don’t necessarily make great poems. This collection works because the writer is perfectly centered on place, structure, and pacing, as in these opening lines from, “Silent In America”: “If you were fifty-five / and your speech had been crushed / by factories and divorce / to a single vowel, you might drift, / as he did, transient as a dream, / beneath the random lettering / of a broken marquee, beyond / all bittersweet efforts to connect, / to make sense, to endure.” Winter told me that, “I
want the reader to experience the frustrations, the dehumanization,
and the small victories of ordinary, work-a-day people.” As for
influences he says, “I'd have to say some of my influences have been
"whats": managing Burger Chef in Niles, Michigan.
Managing a real estate company on the mean streets of Birmingham,
Alabama.” There is a yearning
sadness to these poems, a hole-in-the-head as well as the heart
immediacy that I greatly admired as in, “The Dream Home”:
“Traveling north to hunt deer / you take a wrong turn / and stop for
directions / at a house you’ve never seen. / A woman, fat and
wholesome, / awaits you on the porch. / She smells of freshly baked
bread / and when you ask her / for directions she leads you inside /
to a clean white table, / a cup of black tea. // This is more than you
ever imagined before. / A plate, a knife and a fork are already laid
out. / You pretend you’re not starving, / take a sip of the hot tea,
/ place the napkin in your lap. / Three girls, each under 5, / hold
their shirts / as they walk down the long stairway / into the room.
They smile at you, /and you smile back. // After supper the woman asks
/ if you might tuck the girls in / before you leave. As you tuck each
on in / you hum nursery songs / under your chest. // After they’re
asleep / the woman invites you/ to the back porch/ to watch the sun
go. You do not refuse her / when she opens your red flannel shirt. /
You need love like all of us. / This
is not dream, you think, / No
dream. In the wet grass / you try to match your breathing / to
hers.” To have the ability to
convey such sentiment with balance and at times, brilliance after just
five years of writing is amazing. As in, “Bone Lonely”: “Some
nights, I wake with longing / for nothing I can name. / I drink one
beer after another, / watch the traffic lights change, / a late bus
pass through. / Someone’s window goes black. / All the old questions
/ have their way with me, / like why are life’s gains and losses, /
the greatest romances fleshed / with failure. I keep turning up / the
radio: hearts are cheating, / someone is alone, there’s blood / in
Tulsa. / Something like that. / This of course wakes her. / She opens
the bedroom door / with a slightly ruined look / at me. / I pour
myself one / shot of whiskey, look at her, / pour her one and say,
“so.” It’s renewing to read
poets with Winter’s skill and sentiment. I asked him who the two
women are standing with him on the inside jacket of Things
About to Disappear and he said, “My sister Betty is quite
ill---wanted to get a picture of her with me into the chap. The other
woman is my sister Lynn. If my sister Sherry had been around, I'd
probably have lassoed her, also.” This picture made me reflect on
why poetry, perhaps better than any written form so effectively
reveals the inner world of its author. For Winter this world is the
shock of his divorce and entry into poverty. It is his sisters and the
son he rarely sees. It is the hard luck life he lives. He reveals
himself to the reader with deceptive ease and transforms intimate
catharsis into word art. Maybe - thinking about it
again - writers aren’t born or
made, but rather created. For Winter it has been the ups
and downs, the loves and the losses that have given a born writer the
need to speak his mind and do so with perfection. __________________________________
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