John Wieners

Softcover,  317 pages ISBN: 0-87685-661-x 1998, $16.95 Selected Poems 1958-1984 poems by 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")   Softcover,  204 pages ISBN: 0-87685-738-1 1988, $16.95   Cultural Affairs in Boston: Poetry & Prose 1956-1985 poetry and prose by 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. By banks of the Neponset River lies our house. At night I hear voices of Indian spirits call out to me: "Each year these waters claim a pale face." ("Hypnagogic")