Wieners As Outsider - "Cure the Hurts of Wanting"

 

 

John Wieners [1934-2002] is a curious and mysterious figure in post-Modern American poetry. An unstable, Gay man, who suffered throughout most of his adult life from severe bouts of delusion, he nevertheless managed to cobble together an impressive, if peculiar, body of work. 

 

He lived quietly, but his inner life was rich with frequently bizarre illusions. Immersed in a close reading of pre-Modern English poetry, many of his poems document a tormented emotional progress, by turns passionate, bitter, coquettish, nostalgic, and fatalistic. Often preoccupied by tawdry Hollywood fan magazines, the strange world of trashy Forties and Camp porn, his delusions, also peopled by real lovers and friends, were transformed in his imagination into a private theater of emotional morality plays.          

   

 

His first, famous brief collection, The Hotel Wentley Poems [1958], is notable for its barren lyricism, documenting a shadow world of Gay bars, addiction, furtive assignations, and youthful passion, with a frankness and tenderness that is genuinely convincing. Though he was only in San Francisco for two years, he belongs unquestionably to the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Beat phenomenon. 

 

Heavily influenced by Charles Olson, he was initially drawn to Black Mountain College where he studied with Olson and Robert Duncan [1955-56]--and it changed his life. He edited an important literary journal, Measure, and his eventual efforts produced poems of a distinctly late-romantic lyrical bent. Surprisingly, his individual style never seems to have been much affected by these early post-Modernist influences, in the way that Dorn and Jonathan Williams, for instance, (also students at Black Mountain under Olson's massive sway) were. His second book, Ace of Pentacles [1964], is a collection of amorous lyrics and lover's complaints, influenced by Wyatt, Campion, Shelley, Poe, Clare, Swinburne, and Whitman. Like O'Hara, the other great later 20th Century American homoerotic voice, Wieners is a poet of love. But instead of art--the stimulating society of writers and artists and patrons which O'Hara inhabited--Wieners dreamed of the tarnished glamour of movie queens, a private universe ofNational Inquirer archetypes ("Jackie", Lex Barker, "Liz"), and the usual suspects of the Noir world, of misanthropic gestures cloaked in a mocking, masochistic charm.

 

Wieners's poems are decorative and formal, but as his career progressed a psychological involution occurred in which the imaginary world of fan magazines and tawdry, doomed assignations combine in a kind of hybrid fantasy-life, culminating in Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike [1975], an eccentric hybrid poetic masterpiece. But my emphasis here is upon the quality of his verse as such, not his attempt to get beyond poetry as performance into a descriptive objectification of culture.     

 

He adopts the classical straight persona of the female object derived from the Renaissance trope, but refigures it as the receptive bottom of Gay cultural paradigm. The narcissistic yearning for a forbidden fulfillment, denied by official society, is fictionalized as a romantic persona of the neglected, abused, recessive self. Readers coming to Wieners's verse for the first time will undoubtedly be surprised, and perhaps dismayed, by the faux antique address, the often archaic phraseology, the single-minded concentration on betrayed affection, the feminine mystique of seductive vulnerability. On one level, it's the typical frustrated Gay prototypical sexual reversal, the clichés of the outré masquerade, employed in the context of classical metaphysical love poetry. Wieners identifies the Gay lifestyle profile with the persecuted sexual frustration of the seduction of capital, expressed through the idealized fantasy life of Hollywood, media gossip, the commerce of sex, the emptiness of the lure of glamour and pixie dust.     

 

My favorite Wieners collection is Nerves, New York: Cape Goliard/Grossman, 1970. Unpaginated, it contains 68 pages of text. Aside from Ace of Pentacles [New York: Carr & Wilson, 1964], it's probably his best unified book published during his lifetime, a clear presentation of his prosodic styles and persuasions, and a strongly defined self-portrait, the last section of which, Asylum Poems, was written during a period of psychiatric confinement. The two-edged connotation--of asylum as punishment for the sins of delusional thinking--and of asylum as refuge, as safe harbor--is a common triad, so the poems become temporary syntheses, stays against the wanting/having//despair/remorse dilemmas which torment him.           

  

  

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.

 

  

 

The Dark Brew

 

      for Louise

 

At least these wounds were opened

by your love that allowed the deeper sickness in,

yea, they budded lush and festival in the dark

Silence of summer agony; when supposed love wreathed on the hill

these dark lilies grew beneath and polluted the stem

  

So two or three years later, I collapse under the burden,

the dark love grew immense in another's form

And silenced all holocaust in their wake.

Belladonna of morning, autumn grapes for symphony and pansy

Immediately following as birth in place of life of foetid mind

Why go on; the list is endless what these wounds your opened, fed.

  

First hallucination of transient loveliness; second, voices of

self-importance, guiding and cajoling, canceling all

connection to nature; third false vision of love and

its simples; fourth murderous challenge to the

dawn of thought, and envy, jealousy, rage as

accompaniments to artistry. 

   

Some women bathe their hands in these blossoms,

and wear them pinned to their brows, as stars; others

anoint their bodies with the petals, calling a cape of

it perfume and pay enormous prices for its

scent, pollen caught off any extreme as death

but the chaos, culmination, conflagration of

what should be love's union but is not is

simply pest of confusion in the face of order.

  

 

             2

  

What odor called forth by these buds, spring rain under murderous taxi tires,

a store window open to new design; the fresh arousing of debutantes on Madison Ave.?

Who knows the stop signals of their gas, their lightning roar from the cliffs on country roads,

the damp spring we allowed to forget; why stop; the abandoned goats walk from Pennsylvania

Ah there the haven lies in some sweet vision of you collapsing purple amethyst eyes?

within a face not mine to surmise, ringed with outshooting apple blossoms

Oh, who knows the look of false surprise; the badgering pity

the dream of death lives still under morning's sunrise,

despite the clatter of broken bumper and shining festoon

of afternoon's patience for drunk twilight to halo drawn's root cart.

there where I was splattered, now taken in its guise

on field and bed, as one wounded must arise

these dark bruises regard as love defended.     

 

 

In the second poem, degrees of incoherence alternate between luminous impressions--of words employed almost as stereotypical specimens ("budded lush...dark silence...summer agony...love wreathed...dark lilies...polluted stem...dark love...Belladonna of morning...autumn grapes...foetid mind...endless wounds...First hallucination...transient loveliness...murderous challenge" and so on)--which resonate and evoke vague but intensely imagined feelings--and a passionate indignant protest against loneliness, betrayal--enumerated in a descending order of decadent aesthetic illusions, from ideal love...to vanity...lust...dissolving into a catalogue of sins endemic to the case--  

  

First hallucination of transient loveliness; second, voices of

self-importance, guiding and cajoling, canceling all

connection to nature; third false vision of love and

its simples; fourth murderous challenge to the

dawn of thought, and envy, jealousy, rage as

accompaniments to artistry.          

   

Wieners's theme is repeatedly the quest for knowledge through love's possession--its empty conquests--and a decadent susceptibility to the richness and fulfillment of indulgence. Self-pity vies with insolent sarcasm in a relentless argument whose outcome is routinely concluded in a wounded resolve. 

  

   

The Patio

  

I created eternity

to bind you within it

A scheme worthy of the pope

to keep my prince

  

An ivory wall, have you seen it? there

as we travel on the road, together'd

shadows flit at twilight

we will not be one of them vespers

  

failing in confinement.

I built it. Where are you?    

 

   

Severe as this kind of utterance may seem, it's like a shield against the blandishments of attraction, against disillusionment, the temptation to guilt, the inebriation of self-deception, false hopes.  

  

Wieners, a native of Eastern Massachusetts, spent the last decades of his life in Boston, a city whose history, both personal and imaginary, meant much to his sense of identity. 

  

  

 

After Symond's Venice

 

            for Allen Ginsberg

  

  

Boston, sooty in memory, alive with a

thousand murky dreams of adolescence

still calls to youth; the wide streets, chimney tops over

Charles River's broad sweep to seahood buoy; the harbor

With dreams, too; The Newport News has arrived for a week's stay

Alan on Summer Street sailors yet stride along summer afternoons

  

and the gossamer twilights on Boston Common, and Arlington Street

adrift in the mind, beside the mighty facade of convent and charnel house,

who go through those doors, up from Beacon Street, past the marooned sunset in the

West, behind Tremont Hill's shabby haunts of artists

and the new Government Center, supplanting Scollay Square.

  

Who replace the all night films; and the Boston dawn

in the South End, newly washed pavements by night's horses.

  

What happens here from the windows on Columbus Avenue

to Copley Plaza, and the library, Renaissance model, the Hotel and smart shops down

Newbury Street's lit boutique, lept by Emerson College,

who triumph light over dark, the water side

endures beside the moon and stars of Cambridge's towers

 

...past Park Square pavements so wide for the browser, drifters

from Northampton Street behind the Statler, by the bus stations and slum tableaux

Finally to return to the Gardens, and the statue of George Washington

appealing to later-day shoppers to go home, in what dusk

what drunken reveling matches this reverie

of souvenirs, abandoned in the horror of public elevators

as this city is contained time, and time again the State House

from Bulfinch's pen, over School Street and Broad down the slope of Federal mirages over blue grass

to the waterfront; Atheneum holding all the books of men, directed

against the foe, hapless Pierre churns through the Parker House coming to the Vendome mentally

over the Brunswick, eternal in the mind's owl of phantoms stretching from boyhead.

  

When vows first establisht were to see this world and part all within it

You, Boston, were the first, as later San Francisco, and before that

New York, the South and West

penetrated, hard holds the Northwest, Chicago, Detroit

much in the same manner of industrial complexes

covering the rising cigarettes of patriots. 

  

The Park Street Steeple as painted by Arshile Goky zooms higher.

Slumbering city, what makes men think you sleep,

but breathe, what chants or paeans needed at this end, except 

you stand as first town, first bank of hopes, firsts envisioned paradise

by the tulips in the Public gargoyle's crotch, Haymarket

Square included spartan business enterprise and

next to South Station, the Essex evoking the metropolitan arena hopes entertain. 

 

 

It's interesting to try to place Wieners among the competing trends and influences of the post-war period. Though he was clearly influenced by Olson, with whom he studied at Black Mountain College, and under whom he worked at SUNY Buffalo, the accurate function of this relationship is obscure. There is also the indirect influence of Allen Ginsberg or Frank O'Hara, two Gay writers whose approaches were both less restrained (than Wieners's formalist styles), and more "sensible" than Wieners ever would be. Undoubtedly, Wieners would have been a different writer in the absence of any of these figures, but his creative focus really lay in earlier models of the lyric. Aside from the expected figures--Campion, Wyatt, Jonson, Shakespeare--one might add Shelley, Byron and Poe--but the central position behind Wieners would seem to be occupied by Baudelaire, with his interest in vice, sensual sophistication and indulgence, cynical and ironic; his commitment to the principles of embarrassment and shock, violence and dissolution; the dedication to art as a pursuit independent of conventional morality; the corruption of the city; the interest in prurience and vagrant sexuality. 

 

Whitman's literary side seems absent in Wieners's imaginative space, as does the work of almost any Modernist writer one might think to name. A faint echo of Stevens can be detected but only in a thematic or sense, in much the way that Crane stands symbolically behind every homoerotic writer since the Twenties. Wieners's tortured moral-aesthetic struggles, within the framework of his Catholic upbringing, produce resistant declarations and prayers for an emotional release.

 

Queer

Do I have to accept his

repetition of rival thrust   

use of assholes and bitches

to gain entry of a youth's kiss?

run by alcoholics and fakes

to penetrate each night

with the tenderness and pride

from ambition's sneer.

 

Supplication

 

O poetry, visit this house often,

imbue my life with success,

leave me not alone,

give me a wife and home.

 

Take this curse off

of early death and drugs,

make me a friend among peers,

lend me love, and timeliness.

 

Return me to the men who teach

and above all, cure the

hurts of wanting the impossible

through this suspended vacuum.

 

This is only a snapshot of a poet whose work and significance are difficult to describe in brief. The attention paid to the Hotel Wentley book has tended to obscure Wieners's career, as if the only value in his poetry was his participation in a very short-lived, and poorly delineated "movement" which occurred in San Francisco in the late 1950's. The neglect and generally cool reception accorded Wieners's later work suggests a misapprehension of the meaning of his aesthetic, and a dismissal based on prejudicial regard. Wieners's work is on one level like an exploration of trans-sexual archetypes, which comprises the ostensible subject-matter of his compositions. His effort to build a castle made of fetishized autotropes--in which a private language, fractured by delusion, instability and aesthetic license is given free reign--is an important contribution to post-Modern poetics. 

___________________     

 

For those interested in a probing and informative look into Wieners's life and work, Andrea Brady's brilliant essay, "The Other Poet: John Wieners, Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson," can be accessed in Jacket online magazine #32, April 2007.  Her analysis of the relationship between certain thematic elements and the primary biographical facts and specimens is among the best I have ever read, a model of care and insight:         

 

 http://jacketmagazine.com/32/brady-wieners.shtml