Wieners, John (1934–2002)

John Wieners was born in Milton, Massachusetts,
in 1934. After taking a B.A. at Boston College
(alongside poet Steve Jonas), he attended Black
Mountain College on a scholarship in spring 1955
and summer 1956 following a chance encounter
with its rector
charles olson in Boston in 1954.
Though Wieners was immediately drawn to Olson’s forceful and energizing poetics and persona,
he was quick to accommodate a broader range of
then-available poetic idioms, finding equally significant orientations for his writing in the poetries
of Robert Duncan (also a teacher at Black Mountain) and Frank O’Hara, who would later describe
him (in “A Young Poet”) as “a poet exhausted by /
the insight which comes as a kiss / and follows as a
curse.”
After the demise of Black Mountain College in 1956 Wieners returned to Boston and
published three issues of a magazine,
Measure. In
1958 he relocated with his lover Dana Duerke to
San Francisco where he wrote his great debut,
The Hotel wentley poems. This volume quickly
found favor among his peers and elders across the
country for its determined candor, its treatment
of gay and narcotic themes, and its controlled,
high lyric address, traits that would consistently
characterize his work. Also from this period is
707
Scott Street
(1958–59, but it was not published
until 1996 by Sun and Moon Press, Los Angeles),
a journal of writings—poems, aphorisms, diaristic
fragments—that includes this useful statement on
his project: “All I am interested in is charting the
progress of my own soul. And my poetics consists
of marking down how each action unrolls. Without my will. It moves. So that each man has his
own poetic.”
In 1960 he returned to the East Coast and
during the next five years would spend time in
both New York and Boston. In New York he
shared an apartment with
herbert huncke and
stage managed and acted in the production of
three of his plays at the Judson Poets Theater.
In this period Wieners read closely such kindred
writers as Friedrich Hölderlin and John Clare
and was composing the poems of
Ace of Pentacles
(1964), which hint at the later, more-wry developments in his writing, in such O’Haran titles as
“You Talk of Going But Don’t Even Have a Suitcase.” His narcotic ingestion remained keen in
these years. O’Hara’s partner Joe LeSueur has this
anecdote from a week that Wieners spent at their
apartment: “Saturday afternoon John went to do
some sort of research at the 42nd Street public library while we went to see
The Curse of Frankenstein at Loew’s Sheridan. That evening John, high
on Benzedrine, came home and told us about the
horrifying, hallucinatory experience he’d had at
the library. Later I said to Frank, ‘Isn’t it funny?
We go to a horror movie and don’t feel a thing,
and John just goes to the library and is scared out
of his wits.’”
In 1965 Wieners’s relationship with Olson regained intimacy, and he made appearances alongside Olson at two landmark poetry festivals in
Spoleto, Italy, and Berkeley, California, also working as his teaching assistant at SUNY Buffalo.
But his stints in mental institutions throughout
the 1960s were frequent and debilitating, as the
eviscerated emotions of
Pressed Wafer (1967) and
Asylum Poems (1969) suggest. With the support of
his many friends he continued to write prolifically
into the 1970s: The Jonathan Cape publication
Nerves (1970) cemented an audience for his work
in the United Kingdom, and a
Selected Poems from
Grossman in 1972 offered a valuable reckoning of
his achievement to date. In the preface (itself a
primary Wieners text), he restated the project of
the
Hotel Wentley years: “To stay with one’s self
requires position and perhaps provision, realizing
quality out of strangeness.”
This first
Selected Poems was followed with the
stunning
Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike
(1975), by which time Wieners had settled permanently on Boston’s Beacon Hill; though continuing
to experience erratic mental health, he was now
active in local politics and the gay liberation movement. A local collective called The Good Gay
Poets undertook publication of this collection,
controversial for its pronouncedly disjunct logic,
as in the poem “Understood Disbelief in Paganism,
Lies and Heresy”: “Brevity; yes or no arsinine Coliseum / arrogance, attrib. Constant shout / Emperor
Hippocratic misaligned.” Writings of such disassociated flourish, though not necessarily the book’s
dominant tenor, gave previous admirers such as
Robert Duncan some skepticism as to its merit,
while many younger writers in the United States
and abroad found it exhilarating. Certainly
Behind
the State Capitol
marked exciting new terrain for
Wieners, but frustratingly, from this point on, very
little new work would see print. Raymond Foye’s
editorial work on the 1986
Selected Poems and the
1988
Cultural Affairs in Boston made for crucial
gatherings of previous collections and individual
unpublished poems, and two wild, glamour-soaked
narratives from Hanuman Books, A Superficial
Estimation (1986) and
Conjugal Contraries and
Quart
(1987), also served to whet readers’ appetites. In his last years Wieners found support from
a younger generation of writers and editors, including William Corbett, Raymond Foye, Peter Gizzi,
Michael Gizzi, Fanny Howe, Kevin Killian, and
Charley Shively, who ensured that his work continued to circulate. The festschrift
The Blind See
Only This World
(2000) testifies to the scope of his
impact.
In a statement for Who’s Who (circa. 1976),
Wieners wrote: “I like my poetry to have an emotional validity or veracity. If I can get something
out that’s emotionally true for myself and a few
others that’s good enough, and I would subject
the form to that statement or utterance. Charles
Olson,
robert creeley, Robert Duncan, ed
dorn
, joanne kyger, philip whalen, gary snyder, [jack] kerouac, [allen] ginsberg, [gregory] corso, Jack Spicer and Steve Jonas. These
were the most interesting people I knew. It was not
deliberate that we were influences on each other.
We just did a lot of things together.”
Wieners died of a stroke in Boston on March
1, 2002, on his way home from a friend’s book
party.
Bibliography
Corbett, William, Michael Gizzi, and Joseph Torra, eds.
The Blind See Only This World: Poems for John Wieners. New York, Boston: Granary Books, Pressed
Wafer, 2000.
Thomas Evans

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