Michael Seth Stewart | Untitled 1962 Journal by John Wieners: Excerpts from a Work in Progress
Note: This journal was in the collection of late Boston poetry legend Bill Corbett, who gave a photocopy to my partner in John Wieners scholarship Robert Dewhurst, who gave it to me. It’s a real treasure, coming from a strange and fertile period for Wieners – his first book, The Hotel Wentley Poems, had been released to great acclaim in 1958, but then a forced hospitalization in 1960 derailed his plans. In 1964 he released his majestic full-length book Ace of Pentacles. This journal shows a wounded but still brilliant Wieners working out the ideas that would go into that work.
When I do an initial transcription I always do what’s called a genetic edition (I learned all of this from truly great and beloved Graduate Center professor David Greetham, who passed away quite recently), where strike-throughs are preserved and inserted text is placed in italics. As I move from a genetic to a “final” edition, the task is to remove everything that Wieners wanted struck, doing my best to present it as I think Wieners’ wishes would be for a final published copy. For this excerpt I have chosen to retain a couple of the struck-through passages so you can see one of the challenges of this process – many times in our work we come across moments that the author has redacted but which we as editors love! In editing it is not just our own darlings we must kill. I hope this excerpt provides an exciting glimpse at Wieners’ poetic process and my own editorial process.
“Apprehensions are God’s
Introductions
Extended inscrutably.” Emily Dickinson
5.10
After reading a book of poems by Barbara Guest,
three beers at the Casablanca, a blowjob in Fields
Corner
I come home to this bed and green velvet slippers.
Compassion is on your face although the light blinds it;
When I can’t write, I am sick, and that is most of
the time.
All my themes I exhausted.
I need a new continent to explore.
I remember a room where I tried to read Rimbaud
and fled out of doors, trembling. Into the night
I gave my energy to explore that park and ended
in despair. It is no good. I cant go on under this dim
light with no words in my mouth and my head empty.
I know the desert and am frightened of its expanse –
again.
Once though your face shines under the star
and reminds me of someone I love
who comes from afar.
I.
Farewell through the cool night;
Stars glistening in front of
my eyes.
The mind is as dry
as a bone on a beach
when the sea’s run out.
II.
Soft flying things
inhabit the air, and invisible wings
buzz in the grass.
Buds fall off the trees
and rain down the wind,
a white butterfly, bumblebees.
You are on my mind today
as wood crackles by the river
as though on fire.
A black crow lands
on the bird-bath, shakes
its feathers and wings away again.
The clarity of blue sky, with wisps of clouds puffed out in it, floats over white blossoms on two nameless trees across the street. Who could teach him the names of those trees? Who would ride with him at sunset into the west? It was no good living alone. With half his heart. When the green plant within him whispered through its leaves with desire of the wind that would come someday and shake together the leaves and branches of the whole tree that was love.
One black bird, no two, flutter towards the dawn then changed courses and head into the light that is sinking west.
Traffic continues ceaselessly up and down the street. He watched each car go by. The old and young. Objects of movement. All headed somewhere with an end in view or so it appears now, but when the end is gained, another object glares in sight, new means presented themselves, and the mind and body are off to goal.
5.13
The green leaves quiver towards the sun
[paperclipped to the page: an illustration of Perseus clinging to Pegasus] a gift of Joe Dunn
Friday May 25th
The leaves blow eastward in the wind.
Their leaves tremble beneath the rain
which falls through this air like death
On our eyelids, putting us to sleep
forever, o oblivion; near is the spell / you weave
“O western wind when wilt thou blow
And the small rain down shall rain
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.”
Tell the difference between the first stanza and the second.
There seems to be an emphasis on long vowels in the first.
lying at the borders of death, the birds are a comfort
in the trees. Poems for no ears but their own.
Wings that whirr through the air. Crows that caw
down the night at day.
“I urge you towards construction.” Olson’s words to me, 5 years ago.
5.14
Green trees, green leaves
and memories of New York 12 years ago.
Over a decade – 1950 of war and peace.
Soon I will be there and walk its streets
as a New Yorker.
Knock on wood.
Slowly the old fires kindle in the heart.
Or the old rains wash the leaves of the tree
that grows there.
To live in a house with women
and hear their chatter thru the halls
all day.
Buds on the sidewalk lie plastered
by the rain. Birds sing in the wet tree.
Slow –
Jackie
Sparrows by the side of the road.
In the car with a woman on Reedsdale Road. Her progression over the years, and months to frigidity; where May flowers, she does not. A tenseness to her face, roughness with conversation, shrillness of tone against the dull romanticism of the day. A robin flies across our path and all is right again. Rain, and the sky gray, air warm with the landscape of the road clear bright green against the sky.
Purple what appears to be jonquils in a driveway; the word Devens in front of a house William 7, Rodgers SKI SLOPES, Metropolitan District Commission.
The empty parking lot of Howard Johnson’s and the wet asphalt with memories of when it was not empty and we drove north from Cape Cod over the Bourne Bridge
Time slips by, as the hands on a clock
leaving us behind, to wrestle with the past.
Reminiscence, memory, and desire.
Bred in the cold months, now come to birth
in May. Its green flower grows in my heart
What is the land of my past? A hot barrel in the sun
in this kind of weather.
Out on the open highway
with the road, its trees blend –
ing into the sky, like an expressway
to New York, that seems to have no end.
She shows me by her silence she is displeased.
This is not a silence of peace, or con-
tentment, intoxication, rather one of a hole,
a retreat where there is no escape, a place to go
when the world is wrong, or you are wrong in
it and every gift is a labor.
I would ride with the windows down
to taste again that intoxication, joy
of youth, when love was a blessing,
an occurrence of men in the night,
under pine trees and the moon.
Oh lift me again into the sky,
broad arms, wound me with the arrows
of longing and desire which we taste
so bitterly and in fragments now
removed from that wood.
where you roam, feet daintily
stepping over needles
fallen from the trees.
and making a carpet
for your bones.
No, they dont know tbis joy
to explore the woods side by the road
hand in hand, over the sunlit leaves
from last season. To stop on the slope
of a pond and play boys in the light.
Desire remains
despite love gone. I make plans
for his advance in the night. Though
the light is out that leads them to my side
5.14
Knowledge brings with it
sorrow experience wisdom
which withdraws our youth.
Marlborough Street
on Sunday night, with the trees
shimmering and lights flooding
the underside of leaves.
Innocence and vitality
lost so easily.
Wieners by Dorfman