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Selected Poems: 1958-1984

John Wieners

"It is thrilling to watch the drama develop!"
Allen Ginsberg

So quoth one of the 20th century's most well-known poets - and not about the latest piece of manufactured pop culture suspense, be it from John Grisham or Jerry Bruckheimer, but about the poetic work of John Wieners. Wieners, unknown to so many today, was schooled at the famed Black Mountain College and, taking his cue from contemporaneous poets, focused his art on such themes as drugs, sex, and homosexuality.

Considered by many to be a most undeservedly unrecognized genius, in this collection "Wieners' glory is solitary, as pure poet" (Ginsberg). Certainly, Wieners has the capacity, as great poets must, to heighten and change one's consciousness of the world; this collection brings the pains and joys of a unique man, the Weltanschauung of one who has seen more than most, to the willing reader.

DAVID ASPELIN
died at 16
put a rifle in his mouth, and laid across his bed at night.
After he held my hand on the way home and said
I will be dead tomorrow.

("A Poem for the Dead I Know")
A Book of Prophecies

John Wieners
707 Scott Street: The Journal of John Wieners (Sun & Moon Classics)

John Wieners

San Francisco 1958-9, prefaces by L Warsh & F Howe
Angel Hair Sleeps with a Boy in My Head: The Angel Hair Anthology

Tom Greenwald, Joanne Kyger, Lorenzo Thomas, Hannah Weiner, John Wieners, Lewis Warsh, Robert Creeley, Tom Clark, Alice Notley, Joe Brainard, Clark Coolidge, Kenward Elmslie, Bernadette Mayer

This anthology presents material selected from the collection of Angel Hair magazine and books edited by Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh between 1966 and 1978. Included are substantial sections of writing--in some cases entire books--from an impressive range of poets including Clark Coolidge, Alice Notley, Hannah Weiner, Robert Creeley, Bernadette Mayer, Kenward Elmslie, Tom Clark, Joanne Kyger, Bill Berkson, Ted Greenwald, Lorenzo Thomas, John Wieners, Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett, as well as Waldman and Warsh, among many others. From the nascent St. Mark's Poetry Project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Bolinas and Boulder, Angel Hair published an idiosyncratic cross-section of innovative writing in distinctive format, becoming one of the longest-lived and most influential publishers on the small press scene. The anthology of literary writings is supplemented with brief memoirs by more than twenty writers, and the book also includes an annotated checklist by Aaron Fischer and Steven Clay that comprises a citation and photograph of each of the approximately eighty books, magazines, broadsides and catalogues issued by the Press.
Cultural Affairs in Boston

John Wieners
Cultural Affairs in Boston: Poetry and Prose 1956-1985

John Wieners

Black Mountain don Robert Creeley wrote of his contemporary John Wieners, "there is no one for whom that city [Boston], or any other, has proved so determining and generative an experience." In Cultural Affairs in Boston, Wieners writes as a man imbued with the spirit of the City upon a Hill, but also with all that is antithetical to Winthrop's town: Wieners recounts dalliances with men behind night-ensconced park statues; jaunts to New York City and elsewhere with fellow libertines; and, of course, drugs ("Our faces show the strain / at 30. Hah, 30! we'll never see again / why heroin redeems us.").

Still, this collection is notable for the way in which poet and place are both intertwined and brought into stunning focus for the reader, no matter how unfamiliar with Boston or temperate the reader be. As Creeley continues, "nor do these poems, any of them, seem ever some place else . . . they're here, as we are."

Gifted and neglected, John Wieners bedazzled all who encountered his work, and this particular work, putting Wieners into his beloved context, is bound to win over the unacquainted.