Rediscovering John Wieners at Critical Flame

For the journal of literature and culture, Critical Flame, Nat Raha reviews Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners, edited by CA Conrad, Joshua Beckman, and Robert Dewhurst. "Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books, 2015)" Raha writes, "is the first comprehensive volume of Wieners’s poetry to appear for nearly thirty years. Providing a chronological account of the transformations of Wieners’ writing from the mid-to-late 1950s into the 1980s, and restoring a significant amount of material into print, Supplication provides a fresh perspective on Wieners’s eclectic and idiosyncratic oeuvre, spanning the range of affective extremes that Wieners produced in verse." More, from the beginning:

The poetry of John Wieners is lyric, bold, shameless. It is a poetry of dereliction in the face of the artist’s almost religious devotion to verse and its inherent magic. His early work—the era between The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958) to Ace of Pentacles (1964)—swings with blues and sexual desire, the glamour of drugs and counter-cultures, gay subculture, celebrities and starlets, and tarot, all sources to feed his magical art. Wieners’s work in subsequent years contends with romantic loss and poverty, juxtaposed with moments of pleasure in sexual and gender transgression, and a political awakening in the face of state harassment and psychiatric incarceration. In his 1958 breakthrough volume, Wieners announces his radical poetics coolly, almost objectively:

I find a pillow to
muffle the sounds I make.
I am engaged in taking away
from God his sound.

The erasure of God’s articulation is achieved by the young poet’s flawed articulation of worlds that negate the very premise of an all-loving God—worlds that the popular morality of that era would certainly describe as vice-ridden, worlds that were outside the bounds of sanctioned activities. [...]

Read more at Critical Flame.