The BURIED Book Club discussion

A Beat poet and member of the San Francisco Renaissance, Wieners was also an antiwar and gay rights activist. His poetry combines candid accounts of sexual and drug-related experimentation with jazz-influenced improvisation, placing both in a lyrical structure.
Related to Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan.

Thanks for taking up the torch of the poets, Dolors.

Seven threads in a day! Short & sweet- thank you so much for taking the challenge...Proud of you <3 <3 <3

Need to update the Beat Poets to be able to put more into the threads, won't be long! Thank you both for the warm welcome and implication! :))

Try & put some links to your threads,Dolors. Just see how some threads are done here,that'll give you ideas.
Of course,I'll help when ever I find time ( even though some ppl never read poetry & wear it as a badge of honour [cough,cough]).

Mala wrote: "put some links to your threads"

yesyes. Links are like cyber-spades. Links by the bucketload remove the dead EARTH from the yet breathing BOOK.

I very much enjoyed his Nerves . Which of his works would you recommend most highly? (I'd like to read some more from him.)

two choice excerpts from this remembrance published in the school paper of his alma mater, Boston College: 1) "John Joseph Wieners was born in 1934 on Eliot Street in Milton, Massachusetts. (‘Look at his address,’ says Jim Dunn, a fellow poet and close friend. ‘He was destined to be a poet.’)"

2) "... When they broke up Wieners retired to his room at a boardinghouse in San Francisco’s red-light district and in less than a week composed a volume called The Hotel Wentley Poems (Auerhan Press, 1958; Dave Haselwood, 1965), which instantly became a classic of modern melancholy. It read, wrote Raymond Foye, ‘like a résumé of Beat poetry and of late romanticism as a whole: urban despair, poverty, madness, homosexual love, narcotics and drug addiction, the fraternity of thieves and loveless transients.’"

3) While in San Francisco during the late 50s, Wieners worked at City Lights, on which he said ‘gave me a Beat image.’
"Others find Wieners’s association with the Beats purely a generational tag. Says Robert Creeley, ‘If “Beat” is to cover poets at the time who had, as John, put themselves entirely on the line — “At last. I come to the last defense” — then he was certainly one. But I think better to see him as The New American Poetry locates him, singular and primary — not simply as a “Beat” poet, nor defined only by drug use, nor a regional poet, nor one of a “school.” Because that begs all the particulars of John’s writing, his immense articulation of the situation and feelings in a relationship with another — literally, love. It’s not a question of gay or straight — it’s how we, humanly, are attracted to and moved by one another, how we know another as being here too. There is no greater poet of this condition than John.’"

4) "In an interview Charles Shively asked Wieners what label he’d put on himself as a poet — Black Mountain, New York, Boston, San Francisco — and Wieners replied without hesitation, ‘I am a Boston poet.’ "

There is also The Blind Only See This World, a 100 page tribute book for Wieners by many many other poets. Published by Granary.

His WorldCat listing is very very extensive.