for Brad
1.
I first encountered the poetry of John Wieners in the early seventies, when I was an undergraduate at SUNY-Binghamton. I read the selection from The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958) which appears in The New American Poetry (a required text in Henry Weinfield’s creative writing class), marveling at poems which seemed at once frighteningly open, direct, transgressive, and utterly lyrical. And I heard poems from Ace of Pentacles (1964) read aloud by Henry’s friend, the poet Brad Stark. Brad, a city planner by profession, ran a poetry group that was part of the University’s “Off-Campus College.” He had a remarkable reading voice—dry, nuanced, understated, but quietly expressive—and he read to us from Creeley, O’Hara, Bronk, and Dorn. Indeed, I still can’t read Gunslinger Book I without hearing it in Brad’s perfectly poised voice. The same is true for Wieners’ “Dream”:
By candlelight the room is bathed
With shadows and I am dancing
On the roof of the Waldorf Astoria
To Spanish-American music
With a companion in cocoa silk
Who is several years older than myself.
Her hair is mambo mambo done in braids
wound about her head and around her throat
are pearls as on her waist.
They catch the light of the stars
through windows open above Manhattan.
No fires are brighter than her eyes
Or the white of her teeth.
She mambos in silk shoes
Which show beneath the hem of her evening suit.
She is a goddess with hair piled on top of her head,
golden and shining as silken grass
I cannot stop seeing the white of her teeth.
It must be the whiteness of this page
against the cocoa color of my hand
in the shining light that surrounds
this room.
This is a poem of glamour—in the modern Hollywood sense of the word, but also in the older sense of a magical spell. Thinking of how enchanted I was when I first heard Brad read it, I realize now how much is contained in the fantasy it presents: sexual allure, exotic style, wealth, physical elegance, ethnic and racial otherness, and more than a dash of camp. The magic extends outward from the poet’s dream-vision of the dancing goddess to the reader, and then, in the last stanza, doubles back on itself, as the poet reveals himself to be writing the poem and thereby enchanting himself “in the shining light that surrounds / this room.” All in all, a brilliant performance, especially for a young English major from a lower middle-class Jewish neighborhood in Queens, who had never stepped foot in the Waldorf Astoria, but who longed for the romance of the poem. Of course, Wieners, the gay, strung out, unstable poet from a working- class Catholic family in suburban Boston, also may never have stepped foot in the Waldorf Astoria (despite his years in Manhattan), and he too longed for the romance of the poem.
2.
Technically speaking, Pente, a book of woe, is the second edition of Ace of Pentacles, although it appears fifty-nine years after the first. It includes an introduction, an afterword, appendices, bibliographies, and Denise Levertov’s original review, all of which are of immense value to Wieners’ readers. It is based on Wieners’ own copy of the first edition in which he handwrote various changes, and then presented to his lover, Panna Grady. About that affair, Michael Seth Stewart, the editor of Yours Presently: The Selected Letters of John Wieners, writes the following:
In 1966 Wieners fell in love with wealthy patroness of avant-garde poets Panna Grady, setting up house with her and her daughter in a large Annisquam manor she’d rented for the summer, a few miles from Charles Olson in Gloucester. Olson wrote teasingly to Wieners and Grady the “newlyweds,” marveling at his protégé’s hetero-domestic bliss. The romance was short lived; after Grady became pregnant with Wieners’s child, she chose an abortion, at the end of June. She drew closer to Olson, and at the end of October, she and her daughter accompanied him on a voyage to Europe. In his journals and letters to friends, Wieners expressed feelings of betrayal and devastation from the successive losses, but he steadfastly maintained his loyalty to Olson.
“I’m NOT in love with the men she’s slept with, I’m ‘in love’ with her,” writes Wieners to Ed Dorn (4 April 1966), when first announcing the affair. And to Panna herself, after their breakup, “Losing you meant everything to me, but I see now again the priceless gain you brought” (24 December 1966). As Stewart remarks in the introduction to Pente, “His love affair with Grady ended in heartache for everyone, and Wieners’s mental health plummeted.” And yet when the affair was at its height, something remarkable happened, something revealing not only Wieners’ state of mind, but his relation to poetry as well.
The copy of Ace of Pentacles which Wieners gave to Grady was not an altogether transformed text, but it was not merely an emended text either. Stewart calls Pente a “spectral edition,” the “ghost of a book.” I couldn’t agree more. Let us keep in mind the original dedication to Ace of Pentacles: “FOR THE VOICES.” On the title page, the poet crossed out his original title (Wieners had considered a number of titles while the book was in draft) and wrote Pente, a book of woes. Instead of the five-pointed star made of flowers that decorated the original, he noted that “for frontispiece use Blake’s drawing & poem “The Chimney Sweeper” in Songs of Experience” (which is there in the new edition). Then there is the inscription: “I’m making plans for my death now, isn’t it strange, if I die This is to go To anyone who’s interested in doing a second edition of the work. The contract to Bob Wilson and James Carr [the original publishers of Ace of Pentacles, with whom he often argued] is null and void. John Wieners July 10th, 1966 Entrusted to Panna Grady as a gift for our friendship.” Even more so than people, books have afterlives, into which they enter through portals of love.
Most of the poems were changed, some only slightly, some significantly, but then, Wieners’ work was often in flux even during his lifetime. According to Tim Fletcher in his essay which appears as an appendix in Pente, “When the Wieners’ Selected Poems [was] published by Jonathan Cape in 1972, almost all the early poems (pre-1969) were represented by variants of the versions in the originally published books. Those from Ace of Pentacles are particularly different: untitled poems have been given names, some are retitled, parts of longer poems are extracted to form new verses.” The Selected Poems 1958-1984 (Black Sparrow, 1986) includes the entirety of the original Ace of Pentacles, except for three brief poems Wieners chose to delete; as the editor of that edition, Raymond Foye, explains, “The text of this volume follows the first editions (or first published appearances) of the poems.” In reading Pente, one may wish to compare Wieners’ revised versions with a number of previous versions, going back to the original book from 1964.
For instance, to return to “Dream,” I admit that I like the version I quoted above, which comes from the Black Sparrow Selected, better than the one in Pente, but that is probably because it was so deeply imprinted upon my ear and my psyche early on. There are roughly a dozen changes. Some have to do with punctuation: in line four, “mambo mambo” becomes “mambo, mambo”—and the caesura caused by the comma distinctly changes the rhythm. Some involve syntax and lineation: in lines sixteen and seventeen, “She is a goddess with hair piled on top of her head, / golden and shining as silken grass” becomes “She is a goddess with hair piled on top of her golden head, / piled high above shining silken grass”—line sixteen is longer and again changes the rhythm, as does the newly introduced repetition of “piled” in line seventeen. Furthermore, the deletion of “as” eliminates the explicit simile. No longer is her hair like silken grass. Rather, her hair, or perhaps all of her, is hovering above silken grass, giving us even more of the surreality of a dream. Then there is the word in line ten. In the original Ace of Pentacles, it is “stairs,” and the line reads “They catch the light of the stairs.” In the Black Sparrow Selected, “stairs” has become the more conventional, but also more comprehensible “stars,” more like the old romantic tunes which the poem echoes. In Pente, we have “They catch the light of the stairs high above Manhattan,” so that the addition of “high above Manhattan” creates a repetition, since “above Manhattan” follows in line eleven as well.
What to make of all this, beyond the fact that readers will have to choose their own favorite versions? Fletcher notes that “These variants and the interest in mutability may well have been influenced by Wieners’ love of jazz, with its grounding in improvisation and thematic variation. No two acts of composition are the same but a reflection of the artist’s emotions at the time of the writing/playing.” This is perfectly plausible, especially when coupled with Wieners’ devotion to Olson’s projective poetics. As Olson writes in Projective Verse, “And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!” Perhaps this applies not only to writing poems, but also to those moments when poets are inspired to revise their poems. To be sure, Wieners was inspired to revise Ace of Pentacles during that special, ultimately disastrous episode with Panna Grady, since it appears he also wanted, however briefly, to revise his life as well.
3.
Wieners’ relationship to Olson—his discipleship under one of the most charismatic American poets of the twentieth century—provided him with a modicum of psychic stability, and the sense of artistic purpose which he needed to have continually affirmed throughout his writing life. Of course, Olson himself was almost as unstable and self-destructive as his student, and if Wieners was devastated by the role his mentor played in his affair with Grady, he was crushed by Olson’s death from liver cancer in 1970, which led to one his many periods of psychiatric incarceration. Wieners is a poet who merits a wider readership today. His connection to Olson, and to what we can broadly call a New Americanist poetic, needs to be examined further. Wieners, of course, was a crucial figure in the network of poets who appear in the Donald Allen anthology. He was lauded by all the Black Mountain poets; he was very close to Allen Ginsberg, whose Foreword to the Black Sparrow Selected Poems remains of great importance; and the friendship between Wieners and Frank O’Hara, and their mutual admiration, is well documented (O’Hara’s “Les Luths: “everybody here is running around after dull pleasantries and / wondering if TheHotel Wentley Poems is as great as I say it is”). But as a reader of all these poets, and as a poet and critic who from early on was shaped, in part, by their aesthetic, I still see Wieners as standing somewhat apart.
In his afterword to Pente, Jeremy Reed thoughtfully observes of Olson and Wieners that the “incongruities of their respective poetic agencies coexisted; with Wieners’s deeply subjective lyricism being in opposition to Olson’s ‘objectism.’…Perhaps, Olson found in the queer, self-styled Wieners, the opposite of his own ‘objectism’; someone he could praise for the perfection of his lyricism.” And this lyricism, similar, as Reed points out, to that of Hart Crane, is the work of “a poet reliant on sensation in his attempts to assimilate the cultural celebration of urban debasement, and for him, its entailed gay demi-monde.” This then is a poetry that is actually distinct from, if not at odds with, not merely Olson’s “objectism,” but with the older poet’s obsessions with history, geography, and even myth. Unlike Olson, Wieners, in his practice, has no problem with what Olson, again in Projective Verse, calls the “lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the ‘subject’ and his soul.” (Here I am revisiting the argument in my more comprehensive essay, “Lyrical Interference in The New American Poetry,” which appears in my collection of essays, Lyrical Interference [Spuyten Duyvil, 2003].) No “archaeologist of morning,” as his mentor describes himself in “The Present Is Prologue,” Wieners is an explorer of the more seedy corners of the Abendland, a poet not only like Hart Crane, but like Baudelaire. In the introduction to Yours Presently, Stewart calls him a “devotional poet, his dedication to the poem total.” This observation is similar to Ginsberg’s in the Foreword to the Selected, where he describes Wieners as “a man reduced to loneness in poetry without worldly distractions—and a man become one with his poetry.” I would go further: Wieners is a sacrificial poet who places himself on the altar of the poem, and that, psychically speaking, is the source of his lyric gift.
Here I will briefly consider two more poems from Pente, both of which, to keep things simple, are almost entirely unchanged from the original edition of Ace of Pentacles: “The Mermaid’s Song” and “The Waning of the Harvest Moon.” The first is a remarkable act of ventriloquism, an unself-conscious imitation of a seventeenth-century “song”—actually a somewhat oddly rhymed sonnet. The second is bluesy free verse, with syntactic turns and haunting images that might be considered more representative of Wieners’ style. Here is “The Mermaid’s Song”:
If thou in me the full flush of love see
Know it comes from the rose that does not die
But lives in the corner of that sure sky,
A coarser blossom than eternity
Since it too perishes and fades from earth
And falls into that kingdom without joys
Where all wingèd things cruel time destroys.
If this be said I loved with all my worth
And with thee gone I hold thee closer still
Then let my cheek press up against thy hand
And go on loving thee sweet until
My name and thine are erased from sand
For that substance contrary to belief
Is as eternal as an ocean’s grief.
No mythical seductress luring sailors into the sexual depths, this mermaid seems more the abandoned lover, a masochistic figure with whom the poet clearly identifies, appearing again and again in Wieners’ poems. Human love, doomed in time to perish, is “A coarser blossom than eternity.” The absence of the beloved ironically produces a greater closeness, until “My name and thine are erased from sand.” The mermaid’s grief is as eternal as the ocean’s: the loss of Love, beyond any one lover’s loss for any one beloved, is Wieners’ great theme. The voice in the poem, the voice of the bereft poet, is the ocean’s lament, the expression of eternal grief, in one lyric utterance after the next.
“The Waning of the Harvest Moon” is another instance of this, but in a different stylistic register:
No flowers now to wear at
Sunset. Autumn and rain. Dress in
blue. For the descent. Dogs bark at
the gate. Go down daughter my soul
heavy with the memory of heaven.
It is time for famine and empty
altars. We ask your leave for by
That going we gain spring again.
No lights glimmer in the box.
I want to go out and rob a grocery store.
Hunger. My legs ache. Who will feed us.
Miles more to go. Secrets yet unread.
Dogs bark in my ears. My man lost.
My soul a jangle of lost connections.
Who will plug in the light at autumn.
When all men are alone.
Down. And further yet to go.
Words gone from my mouth.
Speechless in the tide.
In French, pente means slope or descent, and Wieners is quoted in the introduction to Pente as associating the word, in what he called a Jungian “hypnagogic vision,” with the word woe. The feeling of woe which permeates this poem is thus related to the dark, autumnal descent in the first stanza, a going down of the poet’s Orphic soul into the infernal depths, guarded by the Cerberus-like dogs at the gate. Yet this soul, or anima, is gendered female, and she is also the fallen daughter, Sophia or Shekhinah, “heavy with the memory of heaven.” In this time of “famine and empty / altars,” it is only the soul itself which may be sacrificed, and it is at this point in the poem that Wieners startlingly changes the register of the discourse, from mythically allusive to bluntly realistic: “I want to go out and rob a grocery store.” Hungry for food or drugs, the fallen soul, “a jangle of lost consciousness,” must endure suffering, loneliness, and loss. The syntax of the last stanza, fragmented and oddly punctuated with periods, signals that there are indeed “Secrets yet unread,” and that there are experiences which take the poet even further down, until at last he finds “Words gone from my mouth / Speechless in the tide.”
4.
What we may call Wieners’ lyric speechlessness is an uncanny, contradictory poetic stance. Loss and suffering drive the poet into song, but it is a song that reaches toward silence as its fulfillment. “Words from our poems // Menace the night” declares the poet at the end of “The Meadow Where All Things Grow According to Their Own Design,” but the night in turn menaces the words of the poet, casting him down. In this respect at least, Wieners’ poetic bears little resemblance to the poetry of his contemporaries, though one after another acknowledges and seeks to articulate his originality. As Denise Levertov writes in her review of Ace of Pentacles, in Wieners’ poems, “Whatever happens is there because this is how the song goes, as a wind blowing in certain branches, a wave breaking on certain stones.” For Levertov, the poems are there “only to testify to inner voices.” “Oh my dreams are there” cries the poet at the end of “Tuesday 7:00 PM,” “and I pledge to fulfill them / as they go by in smoke.” Wieners did what he could to fulfill those dreams. Looking back, the poems in Ace of Pentacles, when I first read them, seemed to have a fragility, an ephemerality, like that of smoke lingering in a room for only the briefest moment. Now, returning to them in Pente after fifty years, I realize that they are absolutely enduring—unforgettable.
In a remarkably insightful recent essay, “The minor poet: a case of John Wieners,” Jennifer Soong addresses Wieners’ need for love, and how that love comes to be expressed in and through his isolation. Drawing on the theories of D. W. Winnicott (who is indeed the right analyst for understanding both Wieners’ psyche and his poetry), Soong tells us that beneath the texts of the poems, Wieners is saying this: “I depend on you, the reader, to be with me when I am most in need of love. Moreover, my heart is a secret that I reveal to you and trust you to bear, rather than simply mend, ignore, manipulate, or worse yet, show and betray to others.” For Soong, this condition relates to Wieners’ status as a “minor” poet, one for whom the notion of a career is alien to the writing of poems by a destitute and abject figure who is broken but paradoxically inspired by need.
Once again, I recall my friend Brad reading “Dream.” For Freud, dreams come into being as more or less hidden wish fulfillments, and the ache of longing, the need for love, is palpable in Wieners’ dream vision. Brad suffered from depression, and took his own life when he was only thirty-one. But he is alive for me every time I read his own work, and the work of those poets he read aloud to us in Binghamton long ago. If Pente is indeed a “ghost of a book”—a book I read and loved when I was first coming into poetry—then to read it, and to write about it now, is to find myself at a séance I have suddenly been bidden to attend: “and we but pass from sight, no choice to make / our song unheard / where the blue candle burns.”