John Wieners

 

David Trinidad's copy

10. Editor Raymond Foye presented me with this copy of John Wieners’s Cultural Affairs in Boston signed by himself, Robert Creeley (who wrote the preface), and Wieners (twice). Within weeks of moving to New York, I found myself sitting across from Wieners at a dinner at an Indian restaurant. We started to converse, but after a few coherent sentences he swerved into some alternate realm. He was certain we’d met years earlier in Canada (where I’d never been), in Toronto, I think. It was confusing to me, but everyone just accepted that that was the way John was. When I read (and fell in love with) his poetry, I understood better. His poems come from a place apart, his own desperately fragile, celebrity-ridden, drug-ravaged reality. Where else but in Wieners can you find lines like “when he put his lips to places I cannot name” or “o letters of fire fall on my head.” His poems make me swoon with identification. They also instruct. “Without image / we are bereft.” “What one knows today will be gone tomorrow. / One reason to write.” Foye, Wieners’s literary executor, has said that a collected Wieners is in the works. This is fabulous news. It’s always heartening when excellent neglected poets emerge from the shadows, fully embodied in their collected works.