Just up on Penn Sound—part of a bumper crop of recently-digitized recordings from the Eric Mottram archives—a 1988 reading by John Wieners, hosted by Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College, and split into two parts here and here. “Reading” here is not so much noun—a discrete recitation of a set of poems—as verb, Wieners reading aloud from a book, extemporising, elongating, truncating, extending. The book in question appears to be the author’s copy of the then-recently published Black Sparrow Selected Poems, into which he’d collage various images and text fragments. Within the first few sentences, we’ve had text from bodybuilder Charles Atlas about “what it means to be a man”, a mention of the nowadays obscure poet Jean Garigue, displacing the Beat lore Ginsberg tries to extract from Wieners when he mentions their first meeting in New York; a discourse where a character from a film—a bit of digging reveals it to be the war film Candlelight in Algeria—is juxtaposed with a novelist, a poet, and so on: a giant, collaged ensemble.
It’s of a piece with the turn Wieners’ work takes in the ’70s, exemplified in his magnum opus of that period, Behind the State Capitol: disavowing the self through collaging devices, reading-through his own and others’ work without indication, a surface in language jagged and dazzling, scattering clues and then retreating. In this there are echoes of his poetic comrade Bob Kaufman—like Wieners, championed by the inexhaustible Raymond Foye, who helped shepherd work resistant to book publication into texts that could be read by others. Kaufman would suddenly speak poetry in the middle of a conversation, improvising off the many poems of his own and others he’d retained in his head. Yet, while Wieners’ Brooklyn College reading often obscures whose words are being spoken and what is being read, he also deploys a-near excessive identification of source. Flicking at will across the book, sometimes reading only a line or two at a time, he identifies each page number, though by the time whoever reading along has turned to the relevant place, he’s off somewhere else, frustrating his host Ginsberg’s bid to keep up and keep track of all the references. In some cases, he even reads out the punctuation, as in these lines from the 1970 poem ‘Consolation’: “It’s best not to think too much. What awaits but death, question mark. A long life of misery, comma.”
In Delirious Verse, a talk on versification recently published by The Last Books, Amelia Rosselli claims that “sound was once so close to the written sign that people wrote without spaces between words”. Wieners treats the normally invisible notational frame of punctuation as part of the spoken text itself, establishing distance in the middle of immediacy. Likewise, when he reads flashes of his more famed, emotionally wrenching lyrics, his voice speeds up and his tone becomes hard to place—sarcastic, or a kind of sigh, as if he can’t wait to get to the ends of the words, which he has to read them, but wants to render incomprehensible. As such, it’s an anti-lyrical gesture. Yet at other points, Wieners whispers, barely audible. And isn’t one of the classic definitions of lyric poetry talking to oneself in public? Wieners is still reading, but not to us, perhaps not even to himself. Selving and un-selving. (“For the voices”, as the dedication to the 1964 collection Ace of Pentacles goes.)
But this is a reading at a college: the event is supposed to have a pedagogical function, something of which Ginsberg, with his history at Naropa, is keenly aware, interjecting to ask for clarification—what exactly is Wieners reading now?—entreaties Wieners gently brushes off, at one point waspishly remarking, “you should call the embassy and tell them you’re Allen Ginsberg and they’ll translate it for you”. But Wieners doesn’t refuse interpretation, though “it’s best not to think too much”. Misreading a phrase as “heartbreak libertarian”, Wieners wonders “who would that be? Jack Spicer?” (His devastating 1965 elegy for Spicer, ‘Hotel Blues’, opens: “Pass by this room, stranger / Heartbreak hides within it.”) This additive approach nonetheless continually calls back to memories of the past, of poets and lovers who are gone yet live on in the poems’ haunted shell: a constellation of references subject to melancholic improvisation. This may be an inability to move on, yet it, too, is a kind of transformation of loss, perhaps at times even a triumphant one, keeping the dead alive.
This is not an easy listen. It refuses the pathos and heartbreak of Wieners’ earlier work. Like Kevin Killian, interviewing Wieners in San Francisco a couple of years later, Ginsberg tries to keep up and give the audience some way in, while Wieners speaks on associatively in a barrage of names, always at an oblique angle to the question (there is a relation, but it might take a few minutes of puzzling to work out exactly what it is.) There’s no literary-critical guidebook for how we experience this—and how it’s inflected by our knowledge of Wieners’ biography, of the toll of drugs, heartbreak, psychiatric incarceration. At one point, Wieners refers to the Selected Poems as a “cookbook”. We may not know what the ingredients are, but it’s up to each reader to implement the recipe. As readers, we too, have to improvise. Along the way, some our fundamental assumptions about a reading, what is, what it’s for, poetry, what it is, what it’s for, are at stake.
The imminent reissue of Behind the State Capitol from The Song Cave is eagerly awaited!
