"There is no doubt in my mind or in anyone's mind who knows these poems well that they are major American poetry and will be in anthologies for one hundred years, I mean that good."—Allen Ginsberg
"A graceful rigor seems to be Wieners' natural mode; we feel the force of deliberation in his most free forms—he is never casual. The grace is miraculous, for he aims at intensities, by orders that shape and then restrict feeling to the ardent."—Robert Duncan
"What moves us is not the darkness of the world in which the poems were written by the pity and terror and joy that is beauty in the poems themselves. . . . In Wieners the glamor is in the word-music itself."—Denise Levertov
Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners gathers work by one of the most significant poets of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. Includes poems that have previously never been published, the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems, plus poems from rare sources, facsimiles, notes, and collages by Wieners. An invaluable collection for new and old fans.
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 at 44 Joy Street 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.
Industry 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
