John Wieners - Hyannisport, MA - 2.21.02 - Last Public Reading

Found at Silliman's blog, but worth reposting.

Letters to Yesenin #3

Last night, in a reaction to some new meds, all my joints exploded with a pain I can only describe as burning from within. I felt like shit and knew I wouldn't sleep, so I picked up Letters to Yesenin by Jim Harrison, a book I reread every year or so to remind myself to stay alive. Last night was the time; I grabbed it and a bunch of John Wieners (check out the new EPC page on Wieners) for my dark night of the soul. It's a great life-affirming read though every poem is more or less about suicide. I think this poem is from 1972 or 1973, as it describes events from the 1972 Olympics.

Letters to Yesenin

3

I wanted to feel exalted so I picked up

Doctor Zhivago again. But the newspaper was there

with the horrors of the Olympics, those dead and

perpetually martyred sons of David. I want to present

all Israelis with .357 magnums so that they are

never to be martyred again. I wanted to be exalted

so I picked up Doctor Zhivago again but the TV was on

with a movie about the sufferings of convicts in

the early history of Australia. But then the movie

was over and the level of the bourbon bottle was dropping

and I still wanted to be exalted lying there with

the book on my chest. I recalled Moscow but I could

not place dear Yuri, only you Yesenin, seeing the Kremlin

glitter and ripple like Asia. And when drunk you appeared

as some Bakst stage drawing, a slain Tartar. But that is

all ballet. And what a dance you had kicking your legs from

the rope–We all change our minds, Berryman said in Minnesota

halfway down the river. Villon said of the rope that my neck

will feel the weight of my ass. But I wanted to feel exalted

again and read the poems at the end of Doctor Zhivago and

just barely made it. Suicide. Beauty takes my courage

away this cold autumn evening. My year-old daughter's red

robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.

More on John Wieners

Just a quick note on John Wieners, via Silliman.


Between Visions:

I printed a few paragraphs from the essay below in My Year 2004 in a piece devoted to Marjorie Perloff, in whose course I first encountered the work of John Wieners. The essay was one of my first attempts to discuss contemporary poetry, and it reveals the graduate-student environment in which it was written. The essay was written at a time when postmodernism was just beginning to have an impact on literary texts and my own notions of postmodernism, moreover, were highly influenced by the course for which I wrote the essay, which would ultimately result in Marjorie Perloff’s important study, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage.

Consequently, I had decided not to republish the piece until news came last week that Wieners had collapsed on a Boston Street and died a few days later, on March 1, in Massachusetts General Hospital. Without any identification upon him, he lay in the hospital for several days, hooked up to a machine, until a worker traced a prescription in his pocket to a local pharmacy. Soon after, the hospital connected with John’s friends Jim Dunn and Charles Shively, who sat with him as he died.

I first met Wieners in the mid-1990s when Raymond Foye, who had edited Wieners’ Selected Poems in 1986, introduced me to him at a small press book fair in New York. I had previously communicated with Wieners and had published some of his poems in my 1994 volume, From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990, but I don’t believe John ever knew of the essay below. Nonetheless, he recognized my name, and, although he looked like a street derelict with his three-day beard and torn and ripped clothing, he spoke—as Fanny Howe described him—like a Southern gentleman: “Sir, it is so very nice to meet you,” he slightly bowed. The paradox was memorable, as if one were witnessing a true-life character out of a Damon Runyon novel.

I believe that I met him again a year later at the same affair, which I attended briefly for several years out of a sense of affiliation with these very small presses similar to mine years before. I believe Raymond invited him there each year—where he stood out as a sort of unexpected celebrity—to sell books and signatures that might bring the destitute Wieners a few needed dollars.

John Wieners

Consider this a collection of links, I guess, like the whole interwebs. I find myself periodically fascinated by John Wieners, enough so that I've tracked down a number of his books, most of them long out of print, but well worth the minor searching you'll have to do to find them. He died in 2002, and I much regret that I wasn't 'on the scene' back then because I would have loved to meet and talk with the man for just a few moments. He seems to have had very little regard for his poems toward the end of his life, furiously scribbling on paper bags, receipts, or anything else that came to hand, but his poetic legacy is relatively large--cult figure--and deserves all the attention and prominence it can get and more. Here are a few links to help you get a sense of the man and his work.

• From Jacket, a biographical and historical piece by Pamela Petro.
• his Wikipedia entry, which needs updating and deepening, certainly, given how little anyone but his friends knows about him
• A poem from his seminal first chapbook, the Hotel Wentley Poems
• An article from Jack Kimball, which I don't quite know how to describe, but is interesting nonetheless
• Creeley on Wieners, audio lecture, parts I and II
• Wieners papers at UConn
• Audio from Pennsound
• Tom Raworth
• A Day in the Life, by Raymond Foye
• Ron Silliman on A Book of Prophecies

Lastly, I'll point you to the most comprehensive (best, IMO) of his books:

• from Black Sparrow or from Amazon, Selected Poems 1958-84
• from Bootstrap Productions, A Book of Prophecies
• from wherever you can get it,  Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike

What I find interesting in Wieners' books is the steady forward march of change; his late poems really don't resemble his early ones at all, and there are gems in both, unlike, say,  the later work of his friend (and obsession?) Robert Creeley. These poems, particularly the Wentley poems and much of the early work, ring clear with lyricism and the steadily observed sometimes unpoetic image, the agitated meditations on love.

Later, his work took on a bit of the surreal. He seemed in his personal life to have succumbed to inhabiting his own world. This may or may not have been a reaction based on his mental health at the time, which bio notes suggest was fairly extreme in its scope even by today's standards when every poet's mood disorder seems part and parcel of their identity as poets. Take some Paxil, make a poet. Urgh. I say that with all due respect to the mental health care industry, which does its best for me and many of my friends. I hope.

And let me not forget, somewhere in Cambridge is Pressed Wafer Press. I don't know if they still print books or not. I can find no editor info, and catalog info is sparse.