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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Just Perfect Now", July 11, 2007
I think even those of us who love John Wieners' poetry have been taken aback, in fact bowled over by the greatness of his hitherto unknown BOOK OF PROPHECIES, written in the 1969-1970 period right after NERVES and preceding BEHIND THE STATE CAPITOL OR CINCINNATTI PIKE, but whatever, we're all happy now. Halfway through the book you can trace the mark, so obivous it feels like an actual physical thing, perhaps a torso in marble missing an arm or two, where Wieners must have decided that the lyric style of NERVES, ASYLUM POEMS, etc., just wasn't going to cut it for him any more and it was time to move onto the "derangements" of his later style, the accent on language's materiality, the "cut up" effects, the slide into a slippery first person multiplicity. It's fascinating just from a biographical point of view, and in effect what you get is a whole mini-anthology of two very different strains in Wieners' writing, and this BOOK OF PROPHECIES provides wonderful example of both styles.
The other night there was a launch for this book at New College here in San Francisco, and as reader after reader took the stage to read from this book, we were struck by how many of these poems, which we had never heard before, had the force and the "click" of what amounts to instant classics. They were new to us, and yet we felt we had known them forever. As it happens, a few poems will be already familiar to you from this book, as Wieners published them separately or in magazines and they wound up in the old Black Sparrow SELECTED POEMS, only now in their full context they make sense, and accrue a patina or lustre of richness which they lacked before, appealing as they were in their abandoned state.
The book itself is physically beautiful, and the young Boston-bnased poet Michael Carr has done a fantastic service by providing this transcription of a "lost" Wieners notebook--replete with some scans of the actual holograph--with a fine sensitivity to Wieners' variegated methods of punctuation, spelling, line break, revision, and so forth. (At the end of 1991 the notebook itself was bought by Kent State Special Collections in Ohio, where Carr "discovered" it.) The poet Jim Dunn, who was close to Wieners in the final years of JW's life, has written an introduction that might be a model for this sort of thing, a memoir and an appreciation in one, in which he doesn't seek to shield the reader from the immense difficulties of reading Wieners, nor does he romanticize Wieners' psychological and physical ruin.
"I died no one/ as I once felt I had/ to be someone." He is the poet oh heartbreak, and the shadow figure enslaved by the more vigorous and together figures in his life, like Olson or Creeley, feeling himself hardly human in his pale remnants of a life. Both shamed and inspired, as well, by the superhuman, glamorous Hollywood actresses and female artists he had glimpsed on screen, or met in "real life," from Jean Seberg and Barbara Stanwyck to nico and Nell Rice, Grace Hartigan and Phyllis Webb. A BOOK OF PROPHECIES begins, eerily enough, with the single poem, "2007," a Blakean, ecstatic prediction of a moment tragically removed from our own, his vision of Aquarius in "full flowers" and "music string and forms of verse controlled symbolism." The poems don't always work, and a couple of them dangle sadly into a ludic space, but the best of them are among the greatest poems Wieners ever wrote, and that's saying something. At the launch I read "Sexual Despair," nearly made myself cry out loud with repressed longing and hardcore sex tension. "I need you, my little son/ / to be beside me in bed/ jerking your meat and/ smoking hash-hish/ /What will the future bring/ this fear ling-/ ers every day." Well, as you can see, all I am saying is, this is a signal event for poetry and a rare opportunity to re-assess the work of an authentic lyric genius.
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