What a strange land we live in where our most saintly, graceful and angelic lyric poets go almost unknown. Poetry had a high and rightful place in the pantheon of consciousness for tens of centuries but then the baby boomer generation idolized and grovelled over pop musicians to such a completely neurotic degree that poetry, as well as music—and the country you might argue—never recovered.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there..
— William Carlos Williams, 1962 e.v.
If only even a few more people realized that poetry is nothing like the slop that’s taught in school, if it’s still even taught at all. There are medicine soul poets for everyone, literally each and every one of us. Poetry is not some mystery school of the elite educated, poetry is the people’s voice.
This is my tribe. Poets are the missing link to what’s missing in America, and they will be illuminated here, poet after poet, poem after poem, line after holy line.
The Hipster Of Joy Street
John Wieners was an absolutely exquisite poet—easily the equal of any of the far more well-known of his contemporaries who unlike John sought and cultivated notoriety while their craft atrophied—and he was part of the immortally mesmerizing scene that was Black Mountain College, the greatest amalgamation of cultural talent in one place this continent has ever seen.
He was also my homeboy from Boston, cradle of the revolution. No city has ever come close to producing poets as Boston has. Just no contest, and there are reasons for this—to discuss another time.
John Wieners not only let you know that you weren’t alone in your deepest hurt, he did something about it. Most so-called poets just write about booze and beer, their dumb breakups, appetites and vices paired with some political whine. An ascended practitioner like John is a surgeon of consciousness, who can remove or neutralize a malign growth on the emotions with the singularly deft incision of a word or line.
I caught up with John on 25 March 1990 at his last ever reading in his beloved San Francisco, at The Roxy in the wondrous Mission District before the tech weenies sold out its soul. We talked for a while and then I bid farewell with “Say hello to Boston for me.”
John paused thoughtfully for a near-uncomfortable extended set of moments and just as he ever does in his unforgettable poems, spoke with the most sincere and heartfelt earnestness, “I shall.”
Of all artists, only poets are so sweet, so cool, so true.
With Meaning
by John Wieners
Rise, shining martyrs
over the multitudes
for the season of migration
between earth and heaven.
Rise shining martyrs
cut down in fire
and darkness,
speeding past light
straight through imagination’s park.
In the smart lofts on West Newton St.
or the warehouse district of S.F., come,
let us go back
to bequeathed memory
of Columbus Ave., or the beach
at the end of Polk St.,
where Jack Spicer went,
or Steven Jonas’ apts.
all over tower
from Beacon Hill to St. Charles,
without warning how they went.
The multitude of martyrs,
staring out of
town houses now on Delaware Ave.
in the gray mist
of traffic circles, taking LSD
then not holding up
to rooming houses, Berkeley and motorcycles.
Books of poems all we had
to bound the frustration
of leaving them behind
in Millbrook mornings, on the swing
with Tambimuttu, exercising his solar plexus
during conversation. Each street
contains its own time of
other decades, recollected
after the festival, carefully
as so many jewels
to brush aside for
present occupation.
A printing press by the Pacific,
a Norman cottage in the east,
dancing to Donovan, in Pucci pajamas,
or perhaps prison, past imagination’s plain,
with Saturday night sessions in the tombs, oh yes
rise shining martyrs, out of the movie house’s matinee
on Long Island, to your love walking by
in the sun. Over the multitudes,
shorttripping. And backyard swimming pools
of Arizona or Pacific Palisades,
in the canyons of L.A.
plus the journeys over oceans
and islands, to metropolis
spreadeagled the earth.
Yes rise shining martyrs
out of your graves, tell us
what to do, read your poems
under springtime moonlight.
Rise and salvage our century.
❏