Table of Contents

With Mr. J. R. Morton
Not Complete Enough

The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958)

A poem for record players
A poem for tea heads
A poem for painters
A poem for early risers
A poem for cock suckers
A poem for the old man
A poem for museum goers
A poem for the insane

………

A poem for the dead I know
A poem for movie goers
A poem for benzedrine

from The Journal of John Wieners is to be called 707 Scott Street (1959)

July 22
July 25
July 27
July 28
July 29
Aug 11
September 6

………

King Solomon’s Magnetic Quiz
`Peyote’ poem

from Ace of Pentacles (1964)

Act #2
A Poem for Trapped Things
The Acts of Youth
An Anniversary of Death
My Mother
Cocaine

………

6.8


Poems 1965–1967

Ancient blue star!
Sickness
Sunset
In the Darkness
Solitary Pleasure
Memories of you
Dope
For Huncke
II Alone
Stationary
Berkeley St Bridge
Parking Lot
Maine
We have a flame within us I told Charles

Pressed Wafer (1967)

Impasse
The Old Man:
The Eagle Bar
There are holy orders in life
The Garbos and Dietrichs
The blind see only this world (A Christmas Card

…….

Loss
What Happened?

from Asylum Poems (1969)

Suisse
Sustenance
Forthcoming
Private Estate
Stop Watch

from Nerves (1970)

Supplication
In Public
Billie
Acceptance
Deprivation
Indignation
The Suck
Reading in Bed

………

The Travel of Imagination through Time

Poems 1972–1974

Viva
Here for the Night
The Pool Hall
Money is Not Monogamous
The Loneliness
Sexual facts are tiring, too
I Hope It Goes On
Music
Yonnie

from Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike (1975)

………

What a Poet Is For . . .
By the wandering fire we sat and ate

from She’d Turn on a Dime (1984)

Lost poems are like old friends, amore.
Lordship
Biding in the Gloom
September Eleventh
au rive

Charity Balls

The Lanterns Along the Wall

Acknowledgements
Index of Titles and First Lines

Promotional Information

We are organizing readings in cities where there is considerable Wieners appeal, including Boston, New York, and San Francisco. We'll ask notable poets to read their favorite Wieners poems. Regional publicity campaigns will coincide.

Galleys and review copies will be sent to major online and print media outlets, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, Harper's, and Bookforum.

An ad will appear in Bookforum.

LibraryThing and Goodreads giveaways planned.

Co-op available.

About the Author

John Wieners (1934–2002) was a founding member of the “New American” poetry that flourished in America after the Second World War. Upon graduating from Boston College in 1954, Wieners enrolled in the final class of Black Mountain College. Following Black Mountain’s closure in 1956, he founded the small magazine Measure (1957–1962) and embarked on a peripatetic life, participating in poetry communities in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Buffalo throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, before settling in Boston in 1972. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, three one-act plays, and numerous broadsides, pamphlets, uncollected poems, and journals. Robert Creeley described Wieners as “the greatest poet of emotion” of their time.

Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of six books, including The Inside of an Apple, Take It, Shake and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is an editor at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including Poker by Tomaz Salamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award, and Five Meters of Poems by Carlos Oquendo de Amat. He is also the recipient of numerous other awards, including a NYFA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York.

CAConrad is the author of ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, and The Book of Frank, as well as several other books of poetry and essays. A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics.

Robert Dewhurst, a poet and scholar, holds a doctorate from the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo. He has edited numerous small-press publications, most recently serving as the poetry editor of Semiotext(e)'s Animal Shelter. He lives in LA, where he is preparing a forthcoming biography and edition of collected poems of John Wieners.

Reviews

In his hands, poems are at once “wound,” “tomb,” and “bomb”—sites of injury, elegy, and threat.
—Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

His poetry was unburdened and unbuoyed, free, breathless, reckless, and jarringly, frankly queer — wicking graceful elegance from grim exile.
—Michael Andor Brodeur, Boston Globe

This notion of the artist as a participant in some kind of sacramental exercise pervades Wieners’s verse, whose themes of abjection, rapture, sacrifice, and salvation mean that heroin, bulging cocks, and pleas to God mix freely together, all suffused with a profound sense of divine grace. This makes Supplication an apt title for the new selection of Wieners’s poems.
—Alberto Mobilio, Bookforum

A bridge between the radical content of Allen Ginsberg and the mainstream, Wieners’s writing fuses the plainspoken with the florid...Unapologetically queer and overtly sexual, he worries through the reality of gay life in mid-20th-century America.
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

Important for serious poetry readers and collections capturing poetry's history.
—Library Journal

Wieners presents himself as a man of astonishing seriousness, a channel for the occasional prophecy, attuned to literary ambition as to erotic devotion… He comes across as someone with no barriers, a man who could really put on paper the “hurts of wanting the impossible.”
—Stephen Burt, American Poets

Supplication is...an abundantly rewarding book, a treasure-house of occult desperation and wonder; a rage against life that somehow hungers for more life.
—Justin Taylor, Electric Literature

[Supplication] demonstrate[s] the infectious, tumultuous love and joy Wieners took in poetry.
—Patrick James Dunagan, BOMB

Supplication provides a fresh perspective on Wieners’s eclectic and idiosyncratic oeuvre, spanning the range of affective extremes that Wieners produced in verse... [It] is an important volume, one that should place Wieners back into the canon of twentieth-century American poetic innovation.
—Nat Raha, The Critical Flame

[What] comes across most strongly in Wieners’ selected collection, Supplication, is a sense of living wild and free while also haunted by death and societal exclusion.
—Arielle Greenberg, American Poetry Review

In his hands, poems are at once “wound,” “tomb,” and “bomb”—sites of injury, elegy, and threat.
—Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

His poetry was unburdened and unbuoyed, free, breathless, reckless, and jarringly, frankly queer — wicking graceful elegance from grim exile.
—Michael Andor Brodeur, Boston Globe

This notion of the artist as a participant in some kind of sacramental exercise pervades Wieners’s verse, whose themes of abjection, rapture, sacrifice, and salvation mean that heroin, bulging cocks, and pleas to God mix freely together, all suffused with a profound sense of divine grace. This makes Supplication an apt title for the new selection of Wieners’s poems.
—Alberto Mobilio, Bookforum

A bridge between the radical content of Allen Ginsberg and the mainstream, Wieners’s writing fuses the plainspoken with the florid...Unapologetically queer and overtly sexual, he worries through the reality of gay life in mid-20th-century America.
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

Important for serious poetry readers and collections capturing poetry's history.
—Library Journal

Wieners presents himself as a man of astonishing seriousness, a channel for the occasional prophecy, attuned to literary ambition as to erotic devotion… He comes across as someone with no barriers, a man who could really put on paper the “hurts of wanting the impossible.”
—Stephen Burt, American Poets

Supplication is...an abundantly rewarding book, a treasure-house of occult desperation and wonder; a rage against life that somehow hungers for more life.
—Justin Taylor, Electric Literature

[Supplication] demonstrate[s] the infectious, tumultuous love and joy Wieners took in poetry.
—Patrick James Dunagan, BOMB

Supplication provides a fresh perspective on Wieners’s eclectic and idiosyncratic oeuvre, spanning the range of affective extremes that Wieners produced in verse... [It] is an important volume, one that should place Wieners back into the canon of twentieth-century American poetic innovation.
—Nat Raha, The Critical Flame

[What] comes across most strongly in Wieners’ selected collection, Supplication, is a sense of living wild and free while also haunted by death and societal exclusion.
—Arielle Greenberg, American Poetry Review