AFTER DISCOVERING the writings of Boston- and San Francisco-based poet John Wieners (1939– 2002), I was left with a sense of literary regret: Where have you been all my life? I knew that, from then on, my writing would not escape Wieners’ influence. My poetry would aspire to pay homage to his subtle style, which embodies postmodern detachment while painting emotionally rich symbolic landscapes in a modestly understated light.
The forward in Wieners’ Selected Poems: 1958-1984was written by Allen Ginsberg. So, inevitably, I found myself comparing Wieners’ poetry to that of Ginsberg, particularly to Howl. Many of Wieners’ much sparser poems evoke all the personal and political struggle of Ginsberg’s work. A perfect example is Wieners” pithy poem “Two Years Later,” which reads in full:
The hollow eyes of shock remain
Electric sockets burnt out in the
skull
The beauty of men never disappears
But drives a blue car through the
stars.
With its impeccable phrasing and powerful juxtapositions, this compact poem paints vivid images of the nightmarish experience of homosexuality, mental illness, drug experimentation, and institutionalization in mid-20th-century America. For me, the words appear on paper as though they should be whispered, establishing a sense of trust between the speaker and the reader. The poem invites us into the darkness of Wieners’ tumultuous reality. Though whispered, it is whispered with authority. This 27-word poem forces the reader to project his or her own experiences, values, and inferences of meaning in interpreting the poem. It serves as an example of the poet’s conviction that there is no one true or correct way to experience a text.
In the first stanza, the intense images of hollow eyes and electric sockets produce a tortured heaviness indicative of mental illness (perhaps drug-induced), the inhumane treatment of the mentally ill, and the standard practice of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) at this time. Again, a similar theme can be found in Ginsberg’s Howl. Even in isolation, this first stanza is vividly striking and powerful, but the second stanza is the coup de grâce. The first line, “The beauty of men never disappears,” steers us toward the conclusion that he has been diagnosed “insane” due to homosexual tendencies, and that he’s been receiving ECT to treat his sexual orientation, which isn’t working.
This piece of information, presented without self-pity, as just a fact, is nevertheless a romantic image of peaceful openness, which both contrasts and resonates with the shock of the first stanza. The last line takes the beauty of men to the heavens and perhaps refers to a psychedelic experience, or perhaps to a dream of escape.
John Wieners, during his tormented life, viewed words as if they were bricks and went about building his home out of language, creating and existing in a linguistically constructed reality. In his personal journal, he described his relationship with language in this way: “If I cannot speak in poetry, it is because poetry is reality to me, and not the poetry we read, but find revealed in the estates of being around us.”
Stevi-Lee Alver, currently based in Brazil, is a poet whose work has appeared in Australia and the U.S. Her chapbook Cactusinwas published in 2016.
