Date: Sat, 2 Mar 2002 21:16:04 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Bernstein <bernstei@bway.net>
Subject: John Wieners (1934-2002)
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There is an audio file of John Wieners reading "A poem for Painters" from
The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958) at Joel Kuszai's Factory School site. The
sound starts out pretty shaky, but the reading of "A poem for Painters"
brings out all that is great in Wieners ... all that is already acutely
missed, even in these few hours since his death.

http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Wieners/Wieners-John_Poem-for-Painters.mp3

__________________________

from "A poem for Painters"

[6]
...
This nation is so large, like
our hands, our love it lives
with no lover, looking only
for the beloved, back home
into the heart, New York,
New England, Vermont green
mountains, and Massachusetts
my city, Boston and the sea.
Again to smell what this calm
ocean cannot tell us. The seasons.
Only the heart remembers
and records them in the words
of works
we lay down for those men
who come to them.


7.

At last. I come to the last defense.

Note
My poems contain no
wilde beast, no
lady of the lake no music
of the spheres, or organ chants,

yet I know by these lines
I betray what little given me.

One needs no defense.
Only the record of a man's
struggle to stay with
what is his own, what
lies within him to do.

Without which is nothing,
And I come to this,
knowing the waste, leaving

the rest up to love
and its twisted faces
my hands claw out at
only to draw back from the
blood already running there.

Oh come back, whatever heart
you are left. It is my life
you save.

[text based on Wiener's performance on this recording]