John Wieners
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 on Beacon Hill 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 once described Wieners as “the greatest poet of emotion” of their time.
Image by Elsa Dorfman
Supplication: Selected Poems
Supplication: Selected Poems
This book gathers work by one of the most significant poets of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. It 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. SUPPLICATION O poetry, visit this house often,
imbue my life with success,
leave me not alone,
give me a wife and home. Take this curse off
of early death and drugs,
make me a friend among peers,
lend me love, and timeliness. Return me to the men who teach
and above all, cure the
hurts of wanting the...
£12.99