Michael Seth Stewart on Stars Seen in Person, Selected Journals by John Wieners

Following up from last week when we reported on the publication and review of Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners, just out from City Lights is Stars Seen in Person, Selected Journals by John Wieners. At City Lights blog the editor of the volume, Michael Seth Stewart, answers five questions about the book and more. First, about Wieners's journals:

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 Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners collects four of his previously unpublished journals from the period between 1955 and 1969. These journals capture a post-war bohemian world that no longer exists, depicted through the prism of Wieners’ sense of glamour.

Stewart talks a little bit about how the book might sound, as heard through the ears of Wieners:

CL: If your book had a soundtrack, what would it be?

MSS: Stars Seen in Person has a soundtrack: Billie Holiday live at Carnegie Hall, 1956, released in 1961 by Verve Records, filled with holiday classics that John Wieners absolutely treasured. I’d argue that Billie Holiday’s style–on all levels–had as big an impact on Wieners’ poetics as did Edna St. Vincent Millay and Charles Olson. In the liner notes, Nat Hentoff wrote a description of Holiday that reminds me very much of Wieners: “The beat flowed in her uniquely sinuous, supple way of moving the story along; the words became her own experiences; and coursing through it all was Lady’s sound–a texture simultaneously steel-edged and yet soft inside; a voice that was almost unbearably wise in disillusion and yet still childlike.” When I defended my dissertation, a collection of Wieners’ letters, I gave the committee two gifts (bribes): a jar of genuine Appalachian moonshine and a copy of Billie Holiday at Carnegie Hall.

Head to City Lights blog for the rest of the questions and answers.