Selected poems

Literature & Fiction

WIENERS, John

Poetry

Grossman Publishers

A contributor to Donald Allen's seminal New American Poetry anthology, John Wieners was on the periphery of many of the twentieth century's most important avant-garde poetry scenes, from Black Mountain and the Boston Renaissance to the New York School and the SF Renaissance. Having achieved cult status among poets, Wieners has also become known for the compelling nature of his journals, a mixture of early drafts of poems, prose fragments, lists, and other fascinating minutiae of the poet's imagination. Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners collects four of his previously unpublished journals from the period between 1955 and 1969. The first journal depicts a young, openly gay, self-described "would-be poet" dashing around bohemian Boston with writer and artist friends, pre-drugs and pre-fame. By the last book, decimated by repeated institutionalization (the first for drug-related psychosis, the rest the consequence of the first) and personal tragedies, Wieners is broken down and in great pain, but still writing honestly and with detail about the life he's left with. These journals capture a post-war bohemian world that no longer exists, depicted through the prism of Wieners' sense of glamour.
Praise for Stars Seen in Person:
"Like Rimbaud in Season in Hell, or Baudelaire with Intimate Journals, there's an unguarded spark and trust in John Wieners because impulse and imagination reign supreme. In 1955 he writes, "I shall try the only true thing I want to do. I shall go to my poems." Predating The Hotel Wentley Poems, moving through Ace of Pentacles, and ushering us into his life before Nerves, Stars Seen in Person further illuminates John as our future/former best unkept secret."Micah Ballard
"Thanks to Michael Seth Stewart’s editorial legerdemain, at long last we have the magnificent John Wieners here before us, in his full undressed splendor: poet, stargazer, philosopher, shaman, flâneur, survivor. His journalsan inspiring monument, filled with taut provocations and purple illuminationsare valuable as cultural history, as lyric performance, as uninhibited autobiography, and as a motley, genre-defying epitome of gesamtkunstwerk aesthetic possibilities that seem as fresh and enticing as anything being dreamt up today."Wayne Koestenbaum
"These pages of notebooks and poetryso exhaustively exhumed and returned to light and breathare equivalent to Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, but in reverse. John Wieners (forever young) evolved through his prose notes towards a sustained poetics of adolescence, holding that tormented phase on a long unyielding band-wave, resisting the sop of adult living with all his might and undergoing the inevitable punishments that such persistence brings."Fanny Howe
"John Wieners remains one of the best poets of my generation. His work &amp; life continue to influence younger poets. These journals reveal his deep commitment to poetry &amp; the poem; they contextualize his constant questing &amp; devotion to the art. I knew John during many of the periods his journals cover &amp;, as always, remain amazed &amp; moved by his deeply examined honesty &amp; purity."David Meltzer
John Wieners studied with Charles Olson at Black Mountain College, and later edited the small magazine Measure. He lived for a year and a half in San Francisco, where he wrote his breakthrough book, Hotel Wentley Poems (1958). In the early seventies he settled into an apartment on Boston's Beacon Hill, where he lived and wrote until his death in 2002.

Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners

Essays & Correspondence

City Lights Publishers

Selected poems, 1958-1984

Black Sparrow Press

"It is thrilling to watch the drama develop!" Allen GinsbergSo 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 16put 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")

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.

Cultural Affairs in Boston

Black Sparrow Pr

Behind the state capitol, or, Cincinnati Pike: A collection of poetry

Good Gay Poets

prose memoir of the author's famed associates

Superficial Estimation

History & Criticism

Hanuman Books

Conjugal Contraries and Quart

Best possible condition w/ ephemera.

A New Book from Rome

Bootstrap Productions

The Hotel Wentley Poems

Format Hardcover Subject Literary Collections

Literary

Literary Licensing, LLC

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