John Wieners, in memoriam

Six years ago (March 1, 2002) a great poet passed away.

I read my first John Wieners poem in grad school in a workshop. When he died a few years later, I took the opportunity to collect some eulogies who knew Wieners or were affected by his work. The piece appeared in the James White Review.

Eulogies for John Wieners (1934-2002)
with an introduction from Christopher Hennessy

John Wieners was born in Milton, Mass., on January 6, 1934. Though he had a remarkable education -- he graduated from Boston College, and studied at Black Mountain College and at SUNY-Buffalo with luminaries like poet Charles Olson as mentors -- he could never be called an academic poet and his work resisted categorization. Often described as a poet’s poets, Wieners was highly respected by his peers. Throughout his life he interacted with, influenced and was influenced by some of the country’s most noted poets.

From 1955-56, Wieners studied at the “open education” experimental Black Mountain under Olson, the poet guru of the school, and with poet Robert Duncan who would become a major force in San Francisco in the 60s. Both Olson and Duncan were impressed by the “sheer authenticity” of Wieners’ talents and soon viewed him as an equal, according to Wieners’ editor Raymond Foye.

In 1956 Wieners met poet Frank O’Hara at the Poet’s Theater in Cambridge, Mass., beginning a friendship that would lead O’Hara to champion Wieners’ work. From 1958 to 1960 Wieners lived in San Francisco and participated in the poetry renaissance there, meeting famous Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg, Duncan, Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure, Jack Spicer and others. For the next five years, he divided his time between New York City and Boston. It was in Boston in the 70’s that he met and found support in area poets like Charley Shively, Jack Powers, Gerrit Lansing, and Stephen Jonas. In an interview, Wieners stated, “I am a Boston poet.” He died there at the age of 68.

Wieners’ first book, The Hotel Wentley Poems, appeared in 1958 when he was only 24. Described by Ginsberg as the “work of a naked flower,” the book became an overnight Beat classic. Over his nearly 45-year career, he would publish over a dozen other works, including the selected editions, Selected Poems:1958-1980 and its successor Cultural Affairs in Boston: Poetry and Prose, 1956-1985, both from Black Sparrow Press, edited by Foye.

From 1976 to 1983, he wrote only about a dozen poems, according to Foye. While he never stopped writing completely, in his last yeas he rarely sought publication. In fact, Wieners was known to resist publication of his older work and actually would lose or destroy manuscripts. In Foye’s note in the selected editions, he notes that Wieners referred to his earlier poems as “old faces I don’t care to see again,” kept no copies of his own books and cleaned house by discarding manuscripts. Friends report, however, that he had privately announced he had been recently working on a new book. Soon after his death Pressed Wafer Press published selections from Wieners’ notebooks (from 1988-97) in a chapbook called Kidnap Notes Next, edited by Jim Dunn and with an introduction by William Corbett.

Some of Wieners’ most important volumes include Ace of Pentacles (1964), Nerves (1970), and Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike (1975), considered by Foye as a “sprawling magnum opus” and singled out by The Guardian in Wieners’ obituary as “one of the great books of the twentieth century, a two-hundred page whirlwind of paranoid fury, hilarity, outrageous theatricality and ventriloquism.” In 1996, he saw published The Journal of Wieners is to be called 707 Scott Street for Billie Holiday, 1959, a chronicle of his life in San Francisco.

Wieners was also active in the gay liberation movement, educational and publishing cooperatives, and political action committees. Linking his life and work, Wieners stated in an interview, “Lyricism in still a quality of a political career.” He has long been recognized as one of the first poets to deal directly with homosexuality.

Wieners confronted mental illness in his poetry as well, perhaps most notably in The Asylum Poems (For My Father) in 1969. He was often in and out of mental institutions and struggled with drug abuse in the 50’s and 60’s. In the Boston Globe’s obituary for Wieners, poet and close friend Corbett commented: “[John] never exploited his madness for glamour - it was a burden for him. He was a man for whom poetry was sanity. The lucidity of his poetry was a saving grace.”

He spoke openly about his poetics in the poems and journal entries he published. At the beginning of his career he wrote, “I must learn how not to write. I must watch with my 5 senses.” And later, in an interview with Foye: “I try to write the most embarrassing thing I can think of.” But there was nothing frivolous in his approach, rather Wieners sought new forms and felt closest to a poet of “total embracing.” Wieners once described his themes as “heartfelt ones of youth and manly desire.” He lists his subjects as “despair, frustration, ideal satisfaction, with Biblical and classical referential echoes. Their forms are declarative, orderly and true, without invention.” In his statement of poetics for Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology, the seminal New American Poetry, he said, “A poem does not have to be a major thing…. I am allowed to ask many things because it has been given me the means to plunge into the depths and come up with answers.” Perhaps it’s this plunge that makes Wieners the quintessential, ‘touched’ poet, existing outside of everything but, as Gilbert Sorrentino once put it, writing “with the nobility of the inevitable that only the best art can claim.”

He once admitted to friend and fellow Boston poet Charley Shively that he wanted to be popular, that he felt isolated and wanted to write “for the poetical, the people. Not for myself, merely.” While Wieners’ work remained outside the mainstream, his reputation among poets is certain. Black Mountain alum and poet and writer Michael Rumaker once called Wieners “one of our best and most important poets” who possessed a “visionary eye.” In an introduction to one of Wieners’ books, poet and novelist Fanny Howe wrote: “John’s poetry has always been the closest thing possible to a new form of speech, one that narrows the gap between longing and calling.” His poetry is also included in the essential anthology Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry (2000), edited by Timothy Liu.

While Wieners was still alive, this influence was given shape with the recent publication of The Blind See Only This World (2000), an anthology which “celebrates the vast, strange and irreducible spirit of Wieners’ poetry and person,” said Publisher’s Weekly. Edited by Corbett, contributors include luminaries like John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Thom Gunn, and Charles Simic, among many others, both gay and straight. At a memorial reading of Wieners’ work (May 2, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 32 readers and musicians also paid tribute to Wieners.

Ginsberg’s foreword to the Selected Poems 1958 – 1984, perhaps one of the most targeted, poetic appraisals of Wieners’ work, ends with the following description:

Wieners always has an oddly humorous aesthetic floating on the surface of his somber reverie, or New Yorker glamor daydream. The puns & doubleplay or words almost dreamlike themselves suggest a mortal tangle too true & deep to be recognized in the gossip columns, a world of meat, drink, gambling, rich hotels, transvestite fellatio, married aristocrats, shopping, masturbation, tormented Pilgrim spirits. Tremendous morbid wit, derived from his stubborn resilient strain of New England genius (Emily Dickinson to Robert Creeley), is evident in swerve & switch of verse line & subject, last line moral, afterthought, or poem title.”

Ginsberg aptly nominates Wieners as “a man become one with his poetry.”

John Wieners died March 1, 2002, after suffering what appears to have been a stroke. A moving account of Wieners’ final days, contained in an email from poet and friend Jim Dunn to poet Robert Creeley, was posted on the "John Wieners In Memoriam" website. It’s printed here in its entirety:

John attended a party with Charlie Shively Sunday around 7:30 PM. Charley drove from Cambridge and picked up John even though the party was just across Cambridge Street. Charley stopped at the drugstore first and bought John some medicine, a box of candy, and an inhaler. The host of the party had a cat and John was feeling slightly under weather because he was allergic to cats. Charley thinks John left the party around 9:30 or 10. He was found in a nearby parking garage by the parking attendant and was admitted to the ICU at Mass General at midnight that night. John tried feebly on Monday morning to breathe on his own, but to no avail. He was put on the respirator machine. An MRI was taken that showed little or no brain activity. Friday, the doctors took another MRI and it confirmed that he was brain dead. Also, as he was lying in the hospital, there was a social worker who doggedly pursued finding John's identity. If it wasn't for her and the nurses at MGH [Massachusetts General Hospital], he may have never been ID'd. John's cousin (Walter Phinney's mother) stopped by after she was contacted by the hospital Friday afternoon. John was pronounced dead at 5:11 on March 1st. I arrived at 5:30 and Charley arrived an hour later. John was still breathing on the machine and his heart was still beating. Charley and I spent some time with him and then summoned the on-call priest to administer last rites. The priest said an "Our Father", and anointed John's forehead and hands. Around 8:00, the technician arrived and removed the breathing tube and shut down the respirator. Charley and I stood by. I had my hand on John's chest as his heart fluttered. We watched as his blood pressure dropped and his heart rate decreased from 111 down incrementally to 28 and then to X. His heart stopped beating at 8:16 PM. Immediately at that moment, the lights over the sink and the hospital supplies began flashing on and off in a strange rhythm. I pointed it out to Charley saying, “Look it's John”. Charley responded, "He must have gotten into the electrical system" It was a strange, sad and beautiful moment. We said our final good-byes and left him looking peaceful, serene, and almost heroic - eyes closed, full beard, and worry-free.

Wieners funeral was on March 7 and was steeped in the verse and fellowship of poets that defined his life. The service was held at St. Gregory’s Church in Milton, where his parents had been married, and he was buried in the family plot in the Milton Cemetery – “surely an Irish only cemetery, stones decorated with shamrocks, Irish flags flying above graves,” wrote Corbett in a message posted on the memorial website.

Along with Corbett, in attendance were extended family members (including his cousins, the Walter Phinneys), a few old friends and classmates, a neighbor from Wieners Elliott Street childhood home, and poets Ed Barrett, John Mulroney, Charley Shively, Jim Dunn, Jon Landry, and Joe Torra.

Shively and Dunn read Bible verses as part of the service. For the homily, the priest plumbed Wieners’ famous line (and the title of the tribute anthology), “The Blind See Only This World.” His cousin, Walter Phinney, Jr. (who also handled Wiener’s finances), read a prayer in which he thanked the EMT’s who found Wieners, the hospital, and those who befriended John through his life, including the poets in attendance and poet Robert Creeley. “There were maybe thirty people in the church, some soft weeping and a good feeling of contentment,” wrote Corbett.
At the committal, Shively read Wieners’ “Broken Hearted Memories" and Dunn read “A Poem for Trapped Things” as well as an unpublished poem about his visions of the Virgin Mary. A copy of The Blind See Only This World was buried with Wieners at the family’s request.
Further details of Wiener’s last days, his wake and funeral and numerous tributes and reminiscences can be found at the "John Wieners In Memoriam" website (http://tomraworth.com/winers.html). Significant details about his life and work can be found in the introductions and two interviews located in editions of the selected poems and in a length entry in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 16. But, of course, the true, most radiant, most “inevitable” John Wieners can only be found in his poetry and in the memories of his devoted friends and peers.

IN MEMORIAM

First coming upon the work of John Wieners is an event -- for many, an unforgettable event, not unlike a first kiss or the day we realize poetry is in our blood.

The poets Wieners touched in this way are numerous, and some of them have been gathered in the following pages to pay tribute. Poignantly and tellingly, they react with poetry itself – quoting their favorite lines from Wieners, recalling his work with poetic grace, and even offering their own poems.

John understood the importance of community for artists. It’s no coincidence, then, that these eulogies really began to accumulate as friend contacted friend, student contacted mentor, and poet contacted peer – the very action of community that is in itself a tribute to Wieners’ life. Those gathered speak eloquently and in unanimity of what Edward Field calls Wieners’ “important contribution to the literary culture of a time.”

When I was a teenager -- it must have been the mid sixties -- I saw John Wieners read on the television program USA: Poetry, one of the most remarkable series ever on educational television. And he seemed to burn through the cathode rays, reading these intense, soaring lyrics from The Hotel Wentley Poems. None of the other poets in the series impressed me more. I looked everywhere for the poems, but of course, I couldn’t find them in any of the bookstores I knew. Only when his Selected Poems appeared in 1972 -- I was a senior in college by then -- did I get the chance to read him at length. I just now pulled from the shelf my copy, carefully preserved for 30 years, and to my astonishment found two poems I wrote at the time on the back pages, a sign -- if I needed one -- of how much he influenced me. Here’s one:
For hours in silence
we’ve done the most intimate things
two men can do
but now that you speak
(do I want a drink, or a towel)
it’s as if I’ve been touched for the first time
and roughly the words stiff as bone
while your skin a soft music.
When I kiss you now
it will be to keep you from talking:
there are no words as chaste as sex.
-- David Bergman

John Wieners had the bad luck to write an incandescent first book, The Hotel Wentley Poems. He loved the poems, but suffered under the book's celebrity. Readers of the future who will encounter the poems and not the legend will learn what John knew -- his lyricism intensified and became more song-like and glamorous. Then in the 1970’s his lyric gift became an antennae sensitive to new inner voices and outside alarms. He said that he wanted to write down the most embarrassing things he could think of which may be why these poems are so jangly and exposed, naked rather than nude. His work and example meant a great deal to me and to Fanny Howe and increasingly to a number of younger poets. I think of his street address 44 Joy Street as the title of a great black and white movie, a story of love, guilt, degradation and redemption starring Louise Brooks or Valli, whom John adored, as John "Jackie" Wieners. He was an original soul, and as I walk the streets of this "old brick city" I will remember him often.
-- William Corbett

John Wieners was true and pure. His unique poetic voice, on the page and in speaking, had the timbre and the sonorous beauty of a dream. Beyond his courage and faith in the absolute, uncompromising search for love and beauty, there lies the indomitable spirit of a great poet. Through the depths of drugs, mental illness, and lost love, he stood ever faithful to the art of poetry and the solitary pursuit of heavenly visions amidst the ruins of daily life. His very existence was elementally poetic; a triumph of artistic spirit over the damages of a turbulent life lived to its fullest without regret and with the utmost faith in the courage of love through intense lyrical creation.
John was a dear friend who opened himself to me without condition. He had the manners of a saint. There was a certain divine light that shone from within him that was truly connected to his muse as a poet, as a Catholic, as a gay man, and just as a human being. He had the rarest gift of always seeing the magical in the ordinary and the sublime in the mundane. His heart was always open to me in a compassionate, giving and unconditional way. Our time spent together was filled with the most enjoyable and comfortable silences that I have ever shared with another person. No doubt, the
appreciation of his work will flourish with time. I will always carry him with me in my heart.
-- Jim Dunn

John Wieners was without defenses; his imagination did not protect him from the world and he described that openness (in conversation with Robert Duncan) as a condition of personal danger. He transmuted that vulnerability into a sweet and heartbroken poetry whose fragmentations can be comic but are painful at heart, like those in the world. Who has written such beautiful love poetry? “I beg I bring you closer/with each word I write/I hope/your loveliness, despite jealousy/plays beauty upon my head/upon your breast. I exist/for your kiss.” His work is an “event” in language because of its sweetness and dissonance.
-- Robert Glück

Wieners explored the often sad and marginalized experience of gay existence in the fifties and sixties, presenting those darker shadows of marginality and perceived decadence that filled that world. Wieners gives us the "tea room," the pick-up, the after-sex moment, ever aware of the politics of desire -- the sad, oblique light that illuminates human moments. Poems such as "The Loneliness" and "My Mother" share this Keatsian melancholy transposed upon modern American life. He spoke what was taboo.
In, "Two Years Later," perhaps his most defiant and beautiful poem, you have a summation of sort, his poetic vision wearied by "madness" and its management (shock treatment, hospitalization), but a defiant sort of poetic truth declaimed, a truth about his desire, his eros. Like Keats, truth is beauty and beauty is truth, no matter how "ugly" or
politically "unsavory" that truth is. And it is the lyrical quality that drifts in and out of this poetry of defiance that ever surprises and gratifies us as readers.
Wieners never forgot his soul. He always sought "a new home" apart from the room that was his confining age, his censured present.
-- Walter Holland

While still a very young man, John Wieners wrote the single best book ever written in or about San Francisco-- The Hotel Wentley Poems. Its direct, powerful lyricism has influenced generations of succeeding poets. Wieners' later poetry, dense, difficult, and formally challenging, has its fans as well. I loved him as a person, though his abruptness and shifts in mood could be disconcerting. He bought me a pack of Lifesavers once --'digestive aids' he called them. I guess he was a poster boy for "Just say No to drugs," but till the end of his life he held on to that most elusive of qualities, his magic. No one who reads his work is ever able to love again in exactly the same way.
-- Kevin Killian

“there, airy but steady...”
Throughout his long life of downs and ups John Wieners never wavered from responding to a faroffcalling, what remains his poems fragments of a disordered devotion always his primal leading, glimmer of dusk and hits, blue, gay, and mad, fighting anxiety in colored boxer shorts on lonely beds, snowlit in inky storms, flash hotels with neon glow, until exhausted, the sound of drums in the early afternoon, the poems echo our marvelous faults, their fruits.
-- Gerrit Lansing

John Wieners was nuts. There's a charming straightforward ease about his lyrics akin to Frank O'Hara but without a hint of trafficking in art-world glamour. No whiff of academia about him, not this loner. Wieners doesn't seem to be courting us -- he's off in his own world (which is our world). In many ways, he's our Rimbaud; only he got to keep on writing, whether holed up in Berkeley or Beacon Hill. I think most people are surprised he lived as long as he did -- self-destruction never seemed far off. No New York Times obit for this poet who remained too off-radar. Glad we're taking notice now.
-- Timothy Liu

John was a great soul, and an amazing, breathtaking poet. The Hotel Wentley Poems will have a lasting place in our twentieth century poetry. One saw him hardly at all in the last 20 years, yet his presence was a reminder, a continuity, of the "bohemian" poets' lives on Beacon Hill since the early 1900’s.
-- Gail Mazur

John Wieners’ “Poem for Cocksuckers” in the Hotel Wentley Poems first aroused my enthusiasm for his incredible verse. Later I heard him read at Harvard's Paine Hall with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky in 1964; we met in 1972 and remained close friends until his passing. Wieners’ Behind the State Capitol, published by The Good Gay Poets, endures as one of the masterpieces of twentieth century poetry; it is a mine waiting with stunning gifts for those who are ready to find them.
-- Charley Shively

I first read John Wieners when I was in high school in the sixties; in college I sought out his books, buying The Hotel Wentley Poems and Ace of Pentacles from the Phoenix Book Store on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village. I needed his work because I had never before heard a voice at once so romantic and so imaginative. His books provided me with the courage to risk sentimentality and even nonsense to get to the heart of what matters. I know many of his lines and passages by heart, not memorized intentionally, but simply etched there by their unforgettable lyricism: “There is nothing I can do/ but go on led by the flickering of a flame/ I cannot name.”
-- John Skoyles

John Wieners is the only Divine person I've ever known. His life and art were seamless. His poems are lyric lightning bolts.
-- Joseph Torra