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Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners
"There is no doubt in my mind or in anyone's mind who knows these poems well that they are major American poetry and will be in anthologies for one hundred years, I mean that good."—Allen Ginsberg
"A graceful rigor seems to be Wieners' natural mode; we feel the force of deliberation in his most free forms—he is never casual. The grace is miraculous, for he aims at intensities, by orders that shape and then restrict feeling to the ardent."—Robert Duncan
"What moves us is not the darkness of the world in which the poems were written by the pity and terror and joy that is beauty in the poems themselves. . . . In Wieners the glamor is in the word-music itself."—Denise Levertov
Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners gathers work by one of the most significant poets of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. Includes poems that have previously never been published, the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems, plus poems from rare sources, facsimiles, notes, and collages by Wieners. An invaluable collection for new and old fans.
John Wieners (1934–2002) was a founding member of the "New American" poetry that flourished in America after the Second World War. Upon graduating from Boston College in 1954, Wieners enrolled in the final class of Black Mountain College. Following Black Mountain's closure in 1956, he founded the small magazine Measure (1957–1962) and embarked on a peripatetic life, participating in poetry communities in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Buffalo throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, before settling at 44 Joy Street in Boston in 1972. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, three one-act plays, and numerous broadsides, pamphlets, uncollected poems, and journals. Robert Creeley described Wieners as "the greatest poet of emotion" of their time.
"A graceful rigor seems to be Wieners' natural mode; we feel the force of deliberation in his most free forms—he is never casual. The grace is miraculous, for he aims at intensities, by orders that shape and then restrict feeling to the ardent."—Robert Duncan
"What moves us is not the darkness of the world in which the poems were written by the pity and terror and joy that is beauty in the poems themselves. . . . In Wieners the glamor is in the word-music itself."—Denise Levertov
Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners gathers work by one of the most significant poets of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. Includes poems that have previously never been published, the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems, plus poems from rare sources, facsimiles, notes, and collages by Wieners. An invaluable collection for new and old fans.
John Wieners (1934–2002) was a founding member of the "New American" poetry that flourished in America after the Second World War. Upon graduating from Boston College in 1954, Wieners enrolled in the final class of Black Mountain College. Following Black Mountain's closure in 1956, he founded the small magazine Measure (1957–1962) and embarked on a peripatetic life, participating in poetry communities in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Buffalo throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, before settling at 44 Joy Street in Boston in 1972. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, three one-act plays, and numerous broadsides, pamphlets, uncollected poems, and journals. Robert Creeley described Wieners as "the greatest poet of emotion" of their time.
216 pages, Paperback
First published October 13, 2015
About the author
John Wieners
62 books15 followersJohn Joseph Wieners (January 6, 1934 – March 1, 2002) was an American poet.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 28, 2019
More than 20 years ago, the writer Bobbie Louise Hawkins told me very seriously that I must read John Wieners. She said that he wrote the very best love poems*. When Bobbie passed away last year, I realized I’d never followed her instructions.
What amazing poems! ‘Supplication, the Selected Poems of John Wieners’ is a heroic act, a rescue. Out of print, these poems were well on their way to vanishing -- I know because I looked for them. This is a beautiful and sly book, and not an easy one. Yes, there are horny gay poems, some of them, but they are not anthems, not simple. This ain’t James Broughton and praise is nearly always -- complicated. There is a genius for feeling, for sensitivity, but it’s paired up with something more challenging and stark. (Forgive me, I’m not really a poet. I’m doing the best I can.) There seems to be an underlying sense that -- a great poem is just the most interesting possible marks you can make on a page. There’s a lot of feeling, sure, but it’s paired with a lot of intellectual and formal daring, which makes since when you consider Wieners’ connections to the Black Mountain School, Creeley, and Olson.
I read these poems, night after night until it got dark, sitting on a low wall overlooking the sea, drinking a beer from the convenience store, in the company of other acutely non-rich people. It felt correct to read that way: out in the open and not entirely safe. Actually, that’s the best way I can describe the poems. The early poems were the ones I’d heard about, “The Hotel Wentley Poems”. They have their own perfection to be sure. The latter poems often found me entirely unmoored in their mix of text blocks, sometimes hermetic language, and gonzo typography.
The very wildest poems are those from the book ‘Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike’ and those are actually presented in photographic copies of the original edition. There are images, collages, and newspaper articles, and the typography is berserk. In the Acknowledgments we are told that these poems were “collaboratively typeset, per John Wiener’s instructions, by a group of volunteers within the Good Gay Poets Collective.” I laughed when I read that. You are taunting me! I want to say. What the heck were those instructions! We need to know!
I can’t say anything useful about the poems in that section, but reading a selection made me yearn to read them all. Copies of the original book, published in 1975 by Good Gay Poets, now sell for hundreds of dollars. The bio notes for this book mention that a Collected Poems is in the works -- will it include photostatic copies of every page of ‘Behind the State Capitol. . .’?
I’ll go on reading this book now, over and over. (In time one hopes I’ll have smarter things to say about it.) In the meantime, it is without a doubt a delightful and mysterious text, and a necessary one, especially for gay and queer poets who want to acquire strength, daring, and vision from their holy lineage.
(* 20 years after Bobbie’s praise of Wieners, I sense a sly slam. Because Robert Creeley, after all, dedicated “For Love” to Bobbie. And Bobbie did very often mention that being a muse was a lousy, useless job.)
What amazing poems! ‘Supplication, the Selected Poems of John Wieners’ is a heroic act, a rescue. Out of print, these poems were well on their way to vanishing -- I know because I looked for them. This is a beautiful and sly book, and not an easy one. Yes, there are horny gay poems, some of them, but they are not anthems, not simple. This ain’t James Broughton and praise is nearly always -- complicated. There is a genius for feeling, for sensitivity, but it’s paired up with something more challenging and stark. (Forgive me, I’m not really a poet. I’m doing the best I can.) There seems to be an underlying sense that -- a great poem is just the most interesting possible marks you can make on a page. There’s a lot of feeling, sure, but it’s paired with a lot of intellectual and formal daring, which makes since when you consider Wieners’ connections to the Black Mountain School, Creeley, and Olson.
I read these poems, night after night until it got dark, sitting on a low wall overlooking the sea, drinking a beer from the convenience store, in the company of other acutely non-rich people. It felt correct to read that way: out in the open and not entirely safe. Actually, that’s the best way I can describe the poems. The early poems were the ones I’d heard about, “The Hotel Wentley Poems”. They have their own perfection to be sure. The latter poems often found me entirely unmoored in their mix of text blocks, sometimes hermetic language, and gonzo typography.
The very wildest poems are those from the book ‘Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike’ and those are actually presented in photographic copies of the original edition. There are images, collages, and newspaper articles, and the typography is berserk. In the Acknowledgments we are told that these poems were “collaboratively typeset, per John Wiener’s instructions, by a group of volunteers within the Good Gay Poets Collective.” I laughed when I read that. You are taunting me! I want to say. What the heck were those instructions! We need to know!
I can’t say anything useful about the poems in that section, but reading a selection made me yearn to read them all. Copies of the original book, published in 1975 by Good Gay Poets, now sell for hundreds of dollars. The bio notes for this book mention that a Collected Poems is in the works -- will it include photostatic copies of every page of ‘Behind the State Capitol. . .’?
I’ll go on reading this book now, over and over. (In time one hopes I’ll have smarter things to say about it.) In the meantime, it is without a doubt a delightful and mysterious text, and a necessary one, especially for gay and queer poets who want to acquire strength, daring, and vision from their holy lineage.
(* 20 years after Bobbie’s praise of Wieners, I sense a sly slam. Because Robert Creeley, after all, dedicated “For Love” to Bobbie. And Bobbie did very often mention that being a muse was a lousy, useless job.)
May 3, 2016
If you're interested in poetry Weiners is one not to be missed. After studying at Black Mountain with Charles Olson, he became part of San Francisco in the late fifties, traveled, lived in New York and Boston (where he was from). He Came out West for the great Berkeley conference of '65, was then edited by Louis Warsh and Anne Waldman, so he was in on Saint Marks. The book also has a very touch personal statement he wrote on poetics for the students in Robert Creeley's class.
In other words, he was a full participant in the movements of his time and a writer all poets interested in modern poetry in the United States should read. Stylistically, for what seems the first 10 years of his work (I say seems because this is the collected work), he works with beautiful clear language and then interesting, in the bits from 1974, the language fragments entirely.
I believe this is because so much of his writing is driving by desire, loneliness, and ecstasy. A gay writer in a repressed age, he lets us understand the environment of the sexual hunt in the manner of a pilgrim in search of the grail. perhaps this is a realization behind the title of Supplication.
For every Olson, Spicer, Ginsburg or Snyder, there were a host of lesser known but phenomenal poets, such as Whalen, Lew Welch, Kandel, one of my favorites, Joanne Kyger, and many more.
But whereas Kandel was writing about fucking with love in 1966, Weiners is of a different more repressed generation writing beautifully about the truly taboo subject of homosexuality.
Of course his work transcends sexuality, ranging into the human condition. The room and the street are a few of Weiners abiding concerns but there are many more. Read and enjoy.
In other words, he was a full participant in the movements of his time and a writer all poets interested in modern poetry in the United States should read. Stylistically, for what seems the first 10 years of his work (I say seems because this is the collected work), he works with beautiful clear language and then interesting, in the bits from 1974, the language fragments entirely.
I believe this is because so much of his writing is driving by desire, loneliness, and ecstasy. A gay writer in a repressed age, he lets us understand the environment of the sexual hunt in the manner of a pilgrim in search of the grail. perhaps this is a realization behind the title of Supplication.
For every Olson, Spicer, Ginsburg or Snyder, there were a host of lesser known but phenomenal poets, such as Whalen, Lew Welch, Kandel, one of my favorites, Joanne Kyger, and many more.
But whereas Kandel was writing about fucking with love in 1966, Weiners is of a different more repressed generation writing beautifully about the truly taboo subject of homosexuality.
Of course his work transcends sexuality, ranging into the human condition. The room and the street are a few of Weiners abiding concerns but there are many more. Read and enjoy.
October 13, 2015
"Verbal blowjob"; beginning to end.
June 22, 2016
I forget how much I adore him until his words are embracing me again.
November 4, 2021
In de gedichten van Wieners staan de zintuigen en gevoelens centraal, waardoor hij zichzelf kwetsbaar maakt voor de narigheid die hem overkomt. Deze verzameling trekt hem hopelijk uit de marge van de Amerikaanse poëzie, gezien zijn werk sterk doet denken aan dichters als Frank O'Hara of Tim Dlugos. De gedichten van Wieners zijn op hun mooist wanneer de melancholische inborst wordt verenigd met zijn leven op straat: 'How many heads have I had under mine? / Strange mattresses for mistakes. / Does it matter? The quick mating, / The meeting in public gardens.'
August 22, 2018
Haunted and erotic and romantic, but slightly mystical and delving into the mind and world of an interesting and thoughtful man John Wieners, both Black Mountain and Beat, but also stand-alone and unique, this collection features collages and a wide time span of poems.
September 29, 2022
Wieners I love you. Wave--the organization of this
book makes me very mad.
book makes me very mad.
January 12, 2024
The best love poems of the 20th century maybe, and almost certainly the best desire poems of that time. Kudos to Wave for including reproductions of Wieners’s assemblage work, too.
January 22, 2016
Don't let the plain cover fool you. This book is very colorful and gay. I love it. It feels almost like the journal of a gay "everyman". Sexy, clever, and sneaky.
February 6, 2016
Many of these poems are classic gay poems--revealing and sex-filled. All have been published before. Happy to have read this as I had never been exposed to John Wieners
June 13, 2016
Good stuff, lots of bjs. Made me look forward to the one editor's upcoming biography of Weiners.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews