One of the most
democratizing aspects of literature – and especially poetry – is that it
remains one of the few fields in which people who have severe psychiatric
issues can, and sometimes do, succeed. While mental illness is by no means a
prescription for quality writing, it also doesn’t appear to preclude the
possibility of writing well. In addition to all the depressives, bipolars and ADHD kids among us, there have been a number
of poets in the past 50 years who have carried the more difficult diagnosis of
schizophrenia & have created substantial bodies of writing. Jimmy Schuyler
won the Pulitzer Prize, Hannah Weiner was an active,
visible & important part of the
Even by these standards, John Wieners was a unique figure
in American poetry. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer & Frank O’Hara all
acknowledged their homosexuality in the 1950s & early ‘60s, Robert Duncan
had been out of
the closet in print since the end of the 1930s. But even Ginsberg’s rapidly
flashing consciously gaudy imagery in “Howl” – the same feature that caused
William Carlos Williams to warn the “ladies,” that, in Ginsberg, “we are going
through hell” – seems innocent, even naïve in comparison to The Hotel Wentley Poems. Written over
the space of a single week in June of 1958, just 45 years ago, Wieners offers a
view of the demimonde that is both specific & almost completely
unsentimental:
I sit in Lees. At
Jimmy the pusher. He teaches me
Ju Ju.
Hot on the table before us
shrimp foo yong, rice and mushroom
chow yuke.
Up the street under the wheels
of a
strange car is his stash – The ritual.
We make it. And have made it.
for months
now together after
Soon I know the fuzz will
inter-
rupt will arrest Jimmy and
I shall be placed on probation.
The poem
does not
lie to us. We lie under its
law, alive
in the glamour of this hour
able to
enter into the sacred places
of his
dark people, who carry secrets
glassed in
their eyes and hide words
under the
roofs of their mouth.
I say almost because that last stanza, which generalizes from the
specificity of the first three, trades a little too easily on some old romances
(glamour … sacred places ... dark people)
– you can almost see Tim Yu rolling his eyes at this part of the text.
But even as we recognize the
acknowledgements to O’Hara (“At
This however is mere bon mot
compared to the poem Wieners would write five days later. When Dave Haselwood
printed The Hotel Wentley Poems at
the
It’s worth noting just how
many taboos Wieners violates in 26 lines:
Well we can go
in the
queer bars w/
our long
hair reaching
down to the
ground and
we can
sing our songs
of love
like the black mama
on the
juke box after all
what have
we got left.
On our right the fairies
giggle in
their lacquered
voices &
blow
smoke in
your eyes let them
it’s a
nigger’s world
and we
retain strength.
The gifts do no desert us,
the fountains
do not dry,
there are
mountains
swelling for
spring to cascade.
It is all here between
the
powdered legs & painted
eyes of the
fairy
Friends who do not fail us
Mary in our hour of
despair. Take not
away from
the small fires
I burn in the memory of love.
The images of cruising that
filter through Hart Crane’s “Cutty Sark” sound Victorian compared to this scene. What is
remarkable here, I think, is not so much this vision of a universe unknown in
the far suburban tracts, but all the modes of redemption Wieners manages to
identify, even in “the small fires” of cigarette smoke. The poem may have been
the first to use the noun phrase “queer bars” – it was certainly the first famous poem to do so – but what is so
unique are all the elements of the lyric that are offered into what even
Wieners understood would be read as a contemporary picture from Brueghel.
Between tea heads,
cocksuckers, fairies, “A poem for the insane” that invokes Munch, vampires, the
Death Chamber and ends with a “Tingel-Tangel / in the
afternoon,”** The Hotel Wentley Poems, with
just 17 pages of text, presents a thorough vision not just of an underworld but
of one utterly infused with a lyric grace that makes it one of the lasting
great books of the 20th century.
What then are we to make of
this, titled & dated “
Do not take big glasses out
Butter
Worth
Cocoa & Marshmallow fluff
40 Carrots: Last Night at the Ritz
tomatoes
chick peas It Had To Be You
Muelleur’s Spaghetti
Oatmeal get some sour cream OKEH!
Bread
or crackers for Teddie B.
A doz
of doughnuts
1 Franks & rolls for Muelleurs.
2 or 3 cigs
723-8376
Johnnie
Tuesday addendum Sept 16 OKEH!
Dennis and
Joe Buck for
His Emminence
Herbert
von Karajian
TRUE; Men’s Magazine
Double Entendre
Mazarin
To Kill A
Cardinal
This piece comes from
Wieners’ Kidnap Notes Next, published
by Pressed Wafer, the Boston
chapbook collective that takes its name from a work of Wieners. It’s a
reasonably typical example from this collection, perhaps a shade less prosey than some others. But what jumps out, as it has in
everything I’ve read by Wieners since Good Gay Poets published Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike
in 1975, is just what a radically different kind of poet Wieners has become
from the elegant, if sad, lyricist living in a borrowed room at that old San
Francisco residential hotel.
It’s not as though one could
write The Hotel Wentley Poems forever
regardless of how great they might be. The logic of binding the lyric to
personal devastation can only go so far. By 1968, Wieners will be writing poems
like “A Dawn Cocktail”:
We lie in a pool of blood,
smashed glass
all over stone
cut neck,
chest, calves
bleeding to
death
over
moonlit goblets
Even here, the use of the
first person plural at the very beginning & the regency overtones of goblets at the end demonstrate Wieners’
complete mastery as he frames a tale that is in fact appalling.
From State Capitol onward, the texts become,
like “
Acknowledging the recurring
cycle of heroin abuse & institutionalization that Wieners found himself in during those years explains, to my mind, nothing.
I don’t – never have – read the post-’75 texts as a
disintegration narrative. My experience tells me that writing doesn’t function
like that.
Rather, I think that life
made Wieners much truer to his initial instincts as a projectivist poet. There
is that moment in his essay “Projective Verse” when Charles Olson, whom Wieners
claimed to have discovered one night as he stepped into a local library to get
out of a sudden downpour only to find this 6’9” poet giving a reading, defines
this projectivism as process rather than as product:
Now (3) the process of the
thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is
accomplished.
And I think it can be boiled down to one statement (first pounded into my head
by Edward Dahlberg): ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A
FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all
points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily
work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the
perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep
it moving as fast as you can, citizen. 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!
Wieners had become precisely
such a poet of process. Thus it becomes an unintelligible, if not just irrelevant,
question to ask what a particular poem might be doing or be in any way “about.”
Meaning is invested only at the instant of contact & refuses to hark back
(or plan forward) toward a larger unity that would only disperse its energy.
Indeed, Olson’s own later
works tend to follow the same path as Wieners’ poetry, leaving behind the more
composed traditional texts of his early years for works, especially in the
later volumes of Maximus,
that are extremely notational. One might make the case even that the
major difference between Wieners’ later poems & those of Olson’s are that
Wieners’ energy is livelier, more ragged, electric, rather like dancing with a
broken power line snaking about in all directions, giving off sparks every
which way. Thus the typos, the use of phone numbers – that particular one
appears more than once in Kidnap Notes
Next – underlining (even where there are no words to underline) &
sudden ventures into ALL CAPS prove as integral to any sense of meaning in
Wieners’ poetry as any so-called references or content. Why not write about Mrs. Butterworth? No one was more attuned to
the reality that brands still smell as strongly of burnt flesh as they did when
they were restricted merely to the buttocks of cattle & horses as was John
Joseph Wieners.
* This is
nine years before the
** Which Bob
Dylan transforms in 1964 into “Jingle Jangle morning / I’ll come following you”
in his Wieners homage, Mr Tambourine Man.
Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan’s next
album, is virtually all Wieners, Burroughs, Ginsberg & Kerouac.
