Jacket 34 — October 2007        Jacket 34 Contents page        Jacket Homepage

John Temple

Haven of the Heart: The Poetry of John Wieners

This piece is about 80 printed pages long.
It is copyright © John Temple and Jacket magazine 2007.

This article will be included in a book of essays by John Temple
to be published in 2008 by Untitled.

Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion — heaving, boiling, hissing — gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices.
                                                               — Edgar Allen Poe: ‘A Descent into the Maelström’

Process, Improvisation, Revision.

In his obituary for John Wieners (1934–2002) in the London Independent, Geoff Ward describes Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike (1975) as ‘one of the great books of the twentieth century, a two hundred page whirlwind of paranoid fury, hilarity, outrageous theatricality and ventriloquism’.[1] This amplifies his view that it is ‘a deranged masterpiece, at one and the same time the capstone of Wieners’ career and the book that would sink his reputation’.[2] The latter claim is cited by John Wilkinson in ‘A Tour of the State Capitol’, his recent introductory survey of Wieners’ poetry, which focusses in particular on Behind the State Capitol and Nerves (1970).[3] Together with ‘Chamber Attitudes’ (which seems to some extent to have been its earlier draft), Wilkinson’s article will be my point of entry to Wieners’ work, offering a frame of reference for several of the issues I wish to explore.[4]

Alert to Wieners’ insistence that Behind the State Capitol — in fact a mixture of prose and verse — should be considered as ‘a single work — a single poem’, Wilkinson allows that ‘this monstrous and magnificent book’ is ‘not exactly a collection of poems’. He endorses Ward’s praise for the book to the extent of calling it Wieners’ ‘crowning work’ and would seem to share the view of Wieners’ career expressed in the obituary: ‘His poetic career effectively finished at this point. It was not a case of unfulfilled promise but of a life’s work that developed rapidly and led with its own determined, internal logic to a natural conclusion.’ This conclusion is ‘the spectacular splurge of Behind the State Capitol [with] ‘its vortex of proper names and syllabic strings’, whose relationship with the ‘highly-charged economy of Nerves is ‘a first puzzle to contemplate’ in approaching it. (Tour 114)

‘Determined...logic’ evokes the author even as it personifies the ‘life’s work’ and may well be endebted to Wieners’ 1984 comment about ‘living out the logical conclusion of my books’.[5] The deeper equivocation in ‘determined’ points to a central question concerning Behind the State Capitol  — the degree and nature of control (or its absence) in the writing. The internal logic of Wieners’ oeuvre was indeed determined by the mental illness with which the poet struggled ‘for much of his life’ without, as Ward rightly indicates, ‘[exploiting] his condition’ as Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath had done. (Obit.) Yet a condition presenting or displaying itself in this non-exploitative way might encourage the sympathetic reader, familiar — and at ease — with the tenets of modernism, to overlook pathological content while granting the work aesthetic authenticity.

This is not in any way to suggest simple correlation between pathological content and poetic disfunction. The neo-classical critical platitudes of forty years ago — that ‘great poetry is greatly sane’ etc. — seem as remote in time as the first fine careless rapture of Dadaist ‘insanity’. Though he was discussing a specific example of ‘artistic purposiveness’, I also take Wilkinson’s general point that ‘the language of schizophrenia in poetic use could be consistent with the absence of schizophrenic process’ and its corollary that ‘the absence of the language of schizophrenia...may indicate active psychosis’.[6] The latter point may well apply to certain revisions of earlier poems, published in the U.K. in 1972 in Selected Poems. [7]

Lowell and Plath’s ‘more smoothly-turned declarations of suffering’ contrast, for Ward, with Wieners’ simple ‘reference to this burden’ in ‘Asylum Poems’ (1969). When the burden overwhelms the poetry in 1975, in Wieners’ first clearly ‘deranged’ book, it is an absence of the ‘smoothly-turned’ that seems of crucial value: ‘Wieners’ punishing and punished refusal to control his lyrical flights became a bequest to younger writers’.(Obit.) The ‘silence or alarm of those American writers of Wieners’ own generation who were now winning prizes’ is set against careful reading of the book by ‘British poets such as John Wilkinson’. Prize-winners from within the American avant-garde Wieners belonged to being few and far between at that time, the transatlantic comparison is only a glancing (though resonant enough) evocation of the ‘Cambridge School’, English late modernist divergence from a broader church of Anglo-American free-verse.

This context untangles other ellipses enforced by the space constraints of obituary. The equivocal syntax, expanding a bequest of lyrical abandon to include a ‘punishing and punished refusal’, serves to reminds us that, whereas the beneficiaries’ principled eschewal of easy popularity was grounded in conscious pursuit of modernist ‘difficulty’, that of Wieners himself became enmeshed in difficulty — indeed ‘difficulties’ — much more personal in nature. The spectre haunting Wilkinson’s well-argued distinction between Wieners’ ‘modernism’ and ‘unmodernism’ is the distinct likelihood that ‘refusal to control his lyrical flights’ was — in truth — substantially an inability to do so. The potential price of such haplessness is hinted at in Ward’s, ‘in person he was a shy and gentle man, courteous in an old-fashioned way, though with the same verbal flights and gifts of the poetry’ and is more directly evident in the poet’s own words: ‘A quart of champagne, one pill too many/ and a paper from the state saying I am “a mentally ill person”...// If I tread the straight and narrow/ I should no trouble, do what’s/ expected of me, realize my friends/ are not my enemies, and get rid of// them both...’. (‘Does His Voice Sound Some Echo in Your Heart’, (Behind the State Capitol 155) [8]

To the extent that refused control itself implies a form or measure of control, it finds an echo in Wilkinson’s comments on both the form and content of Behind the State Capitol. In ‘Chamber Attitudes’ Wieners’ earlier ‘poetry of nostalgia and formal grace [persisting] until at least the mid-1970s, at the same time that much of his writing had seemed to take a very different turn’ is distinguished from ‘another kind of writing... [which] rafts the present moment...the only habitation it can conceive is fugitive, the hotel room, another persona, a snatch of music from a jazz improviser.’ This distinction appears to segregate the last two terms of Ward’s description of Wieners’ work: ‘a new candour regarding sexual and drug-induced experience co-existed with both a jazz-related aesthetic of improvisation and a more traditional concern with lyric form’. (Obit.)

The jazz improviser’s split-second controlling choices shadow those of the helmsman who, helped by our variously residual or energetic paddle-work, will see us through the bumpy stretches of white water. That the writing is really writing itself and the raft a sort of freshwater Marie Celeste, is naturally a Blavatskian rapids too far, though not so very distant from Wilkinson’s conclusion that ‘Signs of the President Machine’’s hellish but (self-) liberating brew ‘enunciates [its] own lyric — this is detritus singing its own song, and the poet can be only its occasion’. If this seems to contradict the claim (based on Wieners’ metaphor) that ‘the rationale for such writing is to direct the traffic rather than pipe ineffectually on the road shoulder’, both statements can be viewed more constructively, as the operating parameters of what they invoke; the collage and ‘cut-up’ technique of Wieners’ later poetry.

In tone however, the second relates more problematically to Wilkinson’s detection of ‘a different side — collective and political — to the society poems’ in Behind the State Capitol. (Chamber Attitudes) Although lent support by Wieners activism in communitarian and sexual politics throughout the seventies, this claim is to some extent a reverse image of the view that the earlier verse of ‘nostalgia and formal grace’ is ‘independent of... disproportionate claims for the social and ideology-shaping efficacy of verse.’ Despite the disarming force of ‘disproportionate’, I will try to argue the limits — and possibly the limitations — as I see them, of both assertions.

 —    ¶    —

Integrating a new strand of political concern into Behind the State Capitol in the face of evident textual disintegration involves recourse to a metaphor connoting both radical upheaval and formal containment, the latter designed to validate the book’s status as a ‘unified’ long poem. As noted above, it is a ‘whirlwind’, a ‘vortex of proper names’. Indeed, as modernist work it descends from Gaudier-Brjeska’s ‘vortex of will, of decision’ and sweeps us off as uncontrovertibly as Dorothy was swept off to the Land of Oz.[9] The implied formal claim buttresses Ward and Wilkinson’s shared view of Wieners’ career, with Behind the State Capitol and Nerves its twin peaks, representing the long poem and lyric respectively. Nerves for Ward, ‘shows Wieners at the height of his powers’ (Obit.) while Wilkinson — insisting that focus on the former ‘does not imply a lower estimate of earlier Wieners books’ — sees Nerves as ‘the bedrock of any case for Wieners’ greatness as a lyric poet’. (Tour 115)

Whatever its merits or limitations, the dual-genre approach encourages meditation on what ‘a jazz-related aesthetic of improvisation’ might imply. It is easy to see an analogue for writing which ‘rafts the present moment’ in Charlie Parker and the later style of John Coltrane (not least in the latter’s intense self-communing and expansiveness-flirting-with-longueur) or in the calculated cacophony of other sixties ‘New Music’ jazz. On the other hand, the more controlled lyrical flights of Lester Young and — more especially — Billie Holiday’s melodic invention in rephrasing the familiar, clearly had deeper influence on Wieners’ career-long and apparently obsessive habit of written revision; a compulsion to ‘make new’. The early poem-title, ‘With Mr. J.R. Morton’ also brings to mind jazz improvisation’s origins within ensemble, partly-’scripted’ playing.

Beyond analogy, Behind the State Capitol provides an interplay of revision and performative improvisation:

Something strange happens to these poems when read aloud, or perhaps when written down, for the compositional priority is impossible to determine: the ghosts of old formal poems may be visible behind accretions, or record of performance may have been tidied up for the page. (Chamber Attitudes)

Whatever the rationale of dual modalities in a ‘deranged masterpiece’ (Wilkinson speaks of Behind the State Capitol in instinctively performative terms) similar channel-switching is likely to be more unsettling in an outwardly conventional collection of poems. Amidst more eye-catching revisions in Wieners’ second and last U.K. publication, Selected Poems (1972) are hints of a self-communing notation for reading performance.

That book’s attractive and traditional presentational layout meanwhile (in total contrast to Behind the State Capitol) implies that its revisions of poems from earlier collections be judged simply as such. They are frequently consistent with a modernist desire for verbal economy and the related aim of ‘tautness’ (a point I will return to) announced by Wieners in his 1959 diary, 707 Scott Street.[10] Occasionally too, they seem prompted by an endearing concern to reach across that common language dividing him from his British readership. The book appeared however, two years after a period of incarceration in a mental institution following schizophrenic breakdown.

While it is extremely difficult to disentangle signs of a loss of poetic judgement (influenced or not by editorial intervention) from evidence of pathological illness, the revisions’ consistent and frequently bizarre sacrifice of poetic power raises this very issue. Quite apart from the inherent value of a number of affecting new poems, the 1972 Selected Poems is a valuable touchstone for assessing the lyric achievement of the earlier books and also in the premonitions it offers of Behind the State Capitol. An example of revision will serve as bridge to my main argument and also to draw together a number of the points raised so far. It is the opening stanza of ‘An Anniversary of Death’ from Ace of Pentacles (1964) (revised title ‘Anniversary’):

He too must with me wash his body, though
At far distant time and over endless space
take the cloth unto his loins and on his face
engage in the self same rising as I do now.

Ace of Pentacles

He too must with me wash his body, though
at far distant time, over endless space
take the cloth unto his loins, upon his face
engage in the self same toilet as I do now.

Selected Poems, 1972

A persistent tendency of the revisions in Selected Poems is to impose a degree of syntactic subordination on parataxis — or what at least feels paratactic. The syntactic links between ‘wash’ and ‘time’, ‘space’ and ‘take’, ‘face’ and ‘engage’ are tightened to apparent exclusivity in the revision while free-floating in the relaxed continuum of the original stanza, where the phrases ‘over endless space’ and ‘on his face’ refer both forward and backwards. The strong pause in sense at the end of line two in particular creates space (and time) while giving ‘take’ (as later ‘engage’) an injunctive edge. In the revision, the stress thrown on ‘space and ‘face’ as a result of punctuation, denies the verbs this quality, replacing it with the subliminal urgency of the ellipsis — ‘must’.

The tightened syntax reflects that urgency in a strengthened forward impulse, which disperses the original sense of the half-awake state of ‘rising’ and — arguably too — the entire evocation of ‘space-time’. These depend crucially on the paratactic link of ‘and’. Without it certain echoes weaken or are lost altogether. The second line paraphrases ‘Long Ago and Far Away’, Ira Gershwin and Jerome Kern’s wistful 1944 song which, intentionally or not, reverses the title of W.H. Hudson’s 1917 classic memoir of his boyhood in Argentina, ‘Far Away and Long Ago’. If cadence is crucial to this evocation, it is also what lends the original closing line sufficient independent force — as a summary of the first three — to override any readerly qualms at the semantic haziness of ‘on his face/ engage in the self same rising’.

In fact haziness is essential to the poetic force of the original, not least the semantic haziness of ‘with me’ which — since it actually means ‘as I do now’ — adds weight to that concluding performative. Its ambiguity meanwhile is used to transcend space and time, conveying a physically impossible mutuality: — ‘He too must with me wash his body’. The effect is reminiscent of Keats’s line, ‘Already with thee! Tender is the night’, whose elliptical opening enacts desire’s leap to union, abolishing distance. The line unit, meanwhile, already there, both subverts and anticipates ‘intended’ meaning. The reiteration of Keats’s ‘self same’ and the implied return to one’s ‘sole self’ strengthen the echo.[11]

With the resurrectional overtones in ‘rising’ prepared for by biblical language and hints of the Deposition from the Cross, the poem’s defamiliarisation is also helped by a different afflatus in line two, which — given that the ‘death’ in the title is symbolic rather than literal — refers neither to endless space nor far distant time but rather the time zones that are measured distance, separating ex-lovers on opposite coasts of the country.
The fact that, syntactically, the revised stanza in this case merely segments and realigns what is a somewhat archaic sentence, raises the possibility that Wieners intended to simply produce a ‘score’ for reading performance, a syncopated version of the original.[12]

This interpretation however, would have to find a place for such frankly hallucinatory (however Shakespearian) changes as ‘see clouds and beaches/ in the sky’ for ‘see the clouds and breeches/ in the sky’. Short of a mild attack of Tourette’s syndrome, only myopia could explain the disastrous substitution of ‘toilet’ for ‘rising’. One might have expected an English editor to point out the danger of collocating ‘engage’ and ‘toilet’ (all the more excruciating for its italics) let alone that of the phrase between.

The revision’s impulse to fragment and sequence perception may be a faint portent of Behind the State Capitol’s hectic rafting of the present moment, signalled by parodic invocation of Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ principle: ‘Suite facing Pacific Life — Los Angeles clip cloche/ merely socks White House to certify Lords/ Churchill & Chesterfield patent/ “one perception must directly lead/ to another!’ (‘Ma’s Deck Chairs’ (9)).[13] The original stanza is, by contrast, closer in spirit to (offering in effect a meditation on) a passage in Olson’s 1954 essay, ‘Against Wisdom as Such’:

A poem is ordered not so much in time (Poe’s Poetic Principle) or by time (metric, measure) as of a characteristic of time which is most profound: that time is synchronistic and that a poem is the one example of a man-made continuum ‘‘which contains qualities or basic conditions manifesting themselves simultaneously in various places in a way not to be explained by causal parallelisms.’’ (CP 263)

Four years after ‘Projective Verse’, Olson appears to be qualifying its single-minded emphasis on speed within the ‘process of the thing’: ‘speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts,...keep it moving as fast as you can’. (CP 240) It is clear that in Nerves, Wieners’ formal lyrics achieved a particular virtuosity within the terms of Olson’s later essay. In a fine account of the opening stanza of ‘Desperation’, Wilkinson identifies a ‘verbal seesaw where positions are exchanged and whereby ‘melancholy resignation’ does not supersede ‘mad pursuit’ but coexists with it’. (Tour 106) This command of ‘process’ however, though energised by acquaintance with Olson’s work, is something Wieners demonstrated instinctively from the start.

In the early formal lyrics of the fifties and early sixties it is frequently inseparable from a quality Olson identified with the ‘projective’: — ‘It would do no harm ...if both rime and meter, and, in the quantity words, both sense and sound, were less in the forefront of the mind than the syllable, if the syllable, that fine creature, were more allowed to lead the harmony on.’ He adds the rider that this ‘is to engage speech where it is least careless — and least logical.’ (CP 241) This seems ideal commentary on ‘He too must with me wash his body, though/ at far distant time...’ At the same time many of the later lyrics of Ace of Pentacles suggest that Wieners had paid careful attention to a passage in his teacher and fellow poet’s 1956 essay, ‘Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare’s Late Plays’: ‘logicality persists in the syntax and image but the thinking and weighing in of the quantity stop twist and intensify the speech, thus increasing the instancy.’ (CP 273)

In ‘Against Wisdom as Such’, Olson refers to the poet’s task of heating and ‘bending... the concrete continuum’ of time. This ability is an integral part of Wieners’ lyric ‘sophistication’. Nevertheless it is almost by definition easier to acknowledge the persistence of a ‘poetry of nostalgia and formal grace... in Behind the State Capitol’ (‘despite [its] being swathed in seemingly extraneous material’) than to give sufficient weight to the less visible but pervasive presence of process and projective values in the early poetry; ‘closed verse’ — so to speak — only on paper.

If such ‘process’ is characteristically secured within the terms of Wilkinson’s comparison of Wieners and Ann Sexton — by ‘rhythmic and semantic accumulation which... plays with and against poetic form rather than laying down each line as a semantic unit’ (Tour 102), the full range of his skill is still revealed by exceptional cases. One such is the absolute authority of phrasal and sentential accumulation in the final stanza of ‘The Waning of the Harvest Moon’, where skilled use of enjambement in the first two stanzas modulates into a crescendo of unenjambed notation and questioning, to convey ‘a jangle of lost connections’:

No lights glimmer in the box.
I want to go out and rob a grocery store.
Hunger. My legs ache. Who will will feed us.
Miles more to go. Secrets yet unread.
Dogs bark in my ears. My man lost.
My soul a jangle of lost connections.
Who will plug in the light at autumn.
When all men are alone.
Down. And further yet to go.
Words gone from my mouth.
Speechless in the tide.

(Pentacles 22; SP’86. 58)

The premonitory final lines are a last reminder of poetry’s dual modalities. They trace the poignant journey from the writerly risk of Ace of Pentacles: — ‘And the hand trembles/ at the next word to put down’ — through Behind the State Capitol’s theatrical ‘difficult triumph of keeping [an] edge’, finally to the stand-up-comedy ‘death’ of the later She’d Turn on a Dime (SP’86. 263) ‘where too often queenish quips perish in inconsequentiality’.[14]

Ace of Pentacles and Selected Poems 1972: (a) Revision, The Sociopolitical.

Although I entirely share his admiration for Nerves’ powerful mix of abstraction, opacity and concentration, I find myself differing most strongly with John Wilkinson in his singling it out from the other ‘earlier books’. This can hardly escape sounding like de facto denigration of Ace of Pentacles (1964) and it also goes some way to explaining how The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958) can be described as a ‘glorious false start’.[15] False starts are of course the stuff of modernist — even late modernist — legend, just as The Waste Land (and variously also, Crane’s The Bridge and Pound’s The Cantos) established an association of the modernist long poem with authorial personal breakdown that may have contributed to Wieners insisting Behind the State Capitol be viewed as ‘a single poem’.

Naturally, given constraints of space, the decision to omit detailed discussion of Ace of Pentacles is quite understandable. Opting instead however, to show ‘the typical [if overstated] stance’ on the grounds that it is difficult to select a typical poem — while it does serve the comparison with Sexton — risks underplaying the power and beauty of the book. Moreover, the poem in question, ‘The Acts of Youth’, is arguably less representative in tone and syntax than a number of possible alternatives. It is certainly (‘A Series’ running it a close second) the most agitated in the collection.

This lends it to the argument advanced more emphatically in ‘Chamber Attitudes’, that The Hotel Wentley Poems were a unique exercise in lyric perfection of surface. It also posits an early entry for that disintegrative impulse inseparable from modernism and modernist theory and celebrated with a humorous touch of lugubrious glee in the case of the later prose poem, ‘Cultural Affairs in Boston’ (Cultural Affairs 183): ‘a heterotrophic lyric, fretfully integrated and gratifyingly obscure’. ‘The Acts of Youth’ begins:

And with great fear I inhabit the middle of the night
What wrecks of the mind await me, what drugs
to dull the senses, what little I have left,
what more can be taken away?

The fear of travelling, of the future without hope
or buoy. I must get away from this place and see
that there is no fear without me: that it is within
unless it be some sudden act or calamity

to land me in the hospital, a total wreck, without
memory again; or worse still, behind bars. If
I could just get out of the country. Some place
where one can eat the lotus in peace.

_______________

‘The stance is passive yet the verse highly controlled, seeming on the one hand to seek resolution in formal grace and in stanzas of classical impersonality, but on the other hand syntactically threatening always to break the bounds of the verse-form, reducing it to incoherence.’ (Chamber Attitudes)

At the risk of terminal pedantry it seems worth noting the underlying paradox in simultaneously praising the poem’s ‘rhythmic and semantic accumulation...which plays with and against poetic form’. Clearly, it is the flexibility of the verse measure — its inherent ‘play’ — that justifies the phrase ‘plays with and against’, just as the metrical regularity of Millay’s ‘Sonnet XXV’ allows us to speak of a local effect enacted ‘by poetic form against the current of syntax’. If  — as seems reasonable to suppose — ‘playing against’ falls short of ‘threatening to break the bounds’, the status of ‘it’ is clarified. It is the verse content or statement rather than the verse-form. Moreover, it is specifically the verse-form that salvages a coherence out of a drift to incoherence, logical and grammatical, in the self-dramatising statement of the ‘verse’.

For example, the ‘great fear’ of the opening line is at once diffused, assuaged, contradicted and confirmed in the course of the first stanza by the sequencing of clauses. The unstable modality of the first two, hovering between question and exclamation, is — if unresolved — arguably quietened by the declarative force of ‘what little I have left’, itself dependent on ungrammaticality since ‘how little I have left’ is the grammatically correct form. To the extent that it introduces syntactical incoherence as well (alongside countervailing paratactic equivalence with ‘what wrecks...await me’) ‘what little I have left’ sets up a vague transitive expectation. It does so by virtue of the rhetorical power invested in triple structures and through its own ungrammaticality. In the event this transitive expectation is disappointed but would have begun with, ‘are all..’.

The final line of the stanza, by substituting a further question (unambiguously marked to retroact on previous clauses) becomes itself the ‘taking away’ it alludes to. A sudden fear of loss would be in line with fearful afterthoughts elsewhere in the poem: ‘Is my mind being taken away me’...’unless it be some sudden act or calamity’ .... ‘unless he be one of justice, to wreak vengeance’ and its poetic logic is its discursive irrationality. ‘What more can be taken?’ ought to mean ‘what’s left to lose when so little is left?’. Appropriately for a meditation on drug misuse and poetic vocation however, the lines are haunted by the punitive aura of the Parable of the Talents, enhancing the complex of damage, imagination and hallucination signalled by ‘wrecks of the mind’. The parable anticipates Wieners’ identification of divine justice with vengeance, and shares his poem’s thematic collocation of initially unspecified fear and the obstacles to realising personal potential: ‘and I was afraid, and went away and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, thou hast thy own’. (Matthew 25, 25).

In ‘A Poem for Painters’ the phrase ‘his own’ is associated with prospective creative ‘struggle’ — which by ‘taking from god his sound’ exorcises the punitive irrationalism of an entity otherwise capable of throwing one into the outer darkness: ‘Only the score of a man’s/ struggle to stay with/ what is his own, what/ lies within him to do’. (Wentley; SP’86. 29) The phrase echoes Olson’s 1954 essay, ‘Against Wisdom as Such’:

“Contained”. I fall back on a difference I am certain the poet at least has to be fierce about: that he is not free to be a part of, or to be any, sect; that there are no symbols for him, there are only his own composed forms, and each one solely the issue of the time of the moment of its creation...That the poet cannot afford to traffick in any other ‘sign’ than this one, his self, the man or woman he is. Otherwise God does rush in. (CP 261–2)

Wieners’ 1959 journal entry ‘I contain my own kingdom./ “The deific principle in nature and/ the heroic principle in man” (102) ‘ -alongside its riposte to, or paraphrase of, ‘the kingdom of heaven is within you’ — might also be seen to comment on Olson’s words. It may or may not be fanciful to see the plenitude implicitly associated with artistic fulfilment and ‘the scent/ of the finished line’ in ‘A poem for Painters’ (‘Our cheeks puffed with it./ The pockets full.’) as a direct response to the hard-bitten lyric of Billie Holiday’s ‘God Bless the Child’: — ‘Empty pockets don’t ever make the grade’. What is certain however is that the biblical hints in ‘The Acts of Youth’ are filtered through the wry street-wisdom of that song: ‘Them that’s got shall get/ Them that’s not shall lose/ So the bible said and it still is news’.

While such oblique allusiveness might support the view that the earlier poetry makes no ‘disproportionate claims for the social and ideology-changing efficacy of verse’, nevertheless its sociopolitical freight argues against limiting Wieners’ ‘vulnerable knowledge of the material substrate to his transcendentalism’ to alliance with ‘a homosexual trope of tenderness in sordidness...and a self-laceration at the waste of life through use of drugs.’ (Chamber Attitudes) The very degree of self-dramatisation which makes ‘The Acts of Youth’ less than representative of Ace of Pentacles as a whole, allows for a Lear-like interjection, one of several voices in this poem’s anticipation of the ‘ventriloquism’ of Behind the State Capitol: — ‘Woe to those homeless who are out on this night’. This conveys an empathy all the closer to Lear’s ‘I have ta’en too little care of this’ for the thought that the poet contains his ‘own kingdom’.

The equation underwriting the American Dream and carried in Herzog and Holiday’s lyric for ‘God Bless the Child’ — ‘Yes, the strong gets more/ While the weak ones fade’ — is fully reflected in ‘The Acts of Youth’, in the ventriloqual voices and the culminating plea ‘Give me the strength to bear it’. While these voices are a reminder of the poet’s youthful playwrighting ambitions in Boston and New York, they also recall the oscillation between hallucination and hommage in the dedication to Ace of Pentacles- ‘For the Voices’. The ontological fragility of Tennessee Williams’ Blanche Dubois can be heard in the cadence, ‘Oh I have/ always seen my life as drama....’ or ‘If/ I could just get out of the country’.[16]

There is more than a hint of Hamlet’s soliloquies in the sudden, appalled afterthoughts, undiscovered countries and vengefully just God, and the Lear-like evocation of poor naked wretches transmutes through something closer to Greek Tragedy — ‘woe to those crimes...’ — into Eliotic doom-ladenness: ‘Do not think of the future; there is none’. These voices both account for and flourish within an instability of register present in lesser degree throughout Wieners’ work. ‘And with great fear I inhabit’ shifts to ‘I must get away..’ and such transition can happen over a stanza-break: ‘unless it be some sudden act or calamity// to land me in the hospital’. In their plurality, the voices enhance the visionary ending of the poem, while underscoring the poetically disastrous revision made for Selected 1972:

And we rise again in the dawn.
Infinite particles of the divine sun, now
worshipped in the pitches of the night.

[Pentacles]

And we rise again at dawn.
Infinite particles of the divine sun, now
worshipped in pitches of the night.

[Selected 1972]

It is hardly an exaggeration to describe the scale of loss incurred in the reduced perspective of the revised opening line as cosmic. One might otherwise applaud the effort to avoid repetition of ‘in the’, but substituting ‘through’ or ‘throughout’ in the final line would achieve this aim.

Other revisions appear to reflect self-conscious grammatical hyper-sensitivity. There is an old Bette Davis film in which her ‘factory girl’ angel finds married bliss with a socialite after saving him from the bottle, while being coached and educated by a sympathetic landlady. Her language tutoring includes systematically correcting ‘can’ to ‘may’. In revising ‘The Acts of Youth’ for Selected 1972, the same change is made: ‘what little I have left,/ what more can be taken away’ becomes ‘what little there is left,/ what more may be taken away’; ‘Woe to those crimes committed from which we/ can [may] walk away unharmed’; ...’those places where the/ great animals are caged. And we can [may] live/ at peace by their side.’

Regardless of whether, in the first example, ‘may’ heightens foreboding or a sense of Fate’s arbitrariness, the menace and complexities discussed above are lost. In the second case the introduction of possibility simply distorts — and distracts from — meaning. In the final case revision risks comic bathos: if we’re lucky lambs the lions will be nice to us. It seems highly unlikely that John Wieners’ step back from the vernacular (if that is what it is) to meet the standards of an English cultural hegemony that so infuriated his mentor, William Carlos Williams and provided the backdrop to many Hollywood films of his own childhood, was intended as anything approaching conscious mockery or mimicry.

It is more in line with the dust jacket mention that he has received an LL.D. from the National Register of Prominent Americans and perhaps even with the omission of ‘the scratches I itch/ on my scalp’ from a descriptive list of ‘dull details’ in ‘A Poem for Record Players’ [Wentley]. Although to identify a genteel impulse in the grammatical ‘corrections’ would still fall short of establishing Wieners’ true state of mind, they are clearly antithetical in spirit to his 1984 quip, defining his ‘theory of poetics’ as ‘[trying] to write the most embarrassing thing I can think of’. (Cultural Affairs 15) The truth is that he had already written such a (programmatic) poem in ‘Memories of You’ (1965), though it was not until 1988 that it was published in Cultural Affairs. [17]

If emotional lability is registered in the opening stanzas of ‘The Acts of Youth’ through the interaction of rhetorical structure with verse form, then enjambement plays a significant supporting role. The slowing effect of the line-break after ‘drugs’ for example, enhances the sense of ‘await’ and ‘to dull’ in a manner comparable to Keats’s, ‘my heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains/ my sense’. ‘The fear of travelling’, immediately following ‘what more can be taken away?’, has the momentary force of an answer even as it seems to explicate the opening line’s ‘great fear’. The resolution to ‘get away from this place’ achieves a de facto remission of the fear of travelling and of the paralysis implied by the dread of ‘what more..?’.

It is immediately preceded by ‘fear...of the future without hope/ or buoy’ which, through syntactic ambiguity, contrives a telescoping of present and future despair, ultimately an endless, and endlessly hopeless, perspective (or lack of such). Fear of the future is already a future without hope but fear of a hopeless future redoubles the fear. This dramatised emotional turbulence prepares us for what is given the force of insight by the line-break, which might just as easily have led to sights (‘away from this place and see’... Europe? the world?) but instead offers a proposition. The line-break returns us to ‘this place’, resonant in its nonspecificity, whether a state of mind, of soul, a room, town, country, poem.

Simultaneously, ‘that there is no fear without me’ is obscurely recognisable to all Americans as echoing Roosevelt’s national rallying cry in the depths of the Great Depression: — ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’. In language partly echoed in Wieners’ poem, Roosevelt qualifies this fear as ‘nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror’, castigates a ‘generation of self-seekers’, exhorts the ‘clean satisfaction that comes from the stern performance of duty by old and young alike’. Within a shared quasi-religious tone, his phrase ‘In every dark hour of our national life’ also finds its echo in Wieners’ ‘till the dark hours are done’.

While such implicit linkage of personal crisis to the wider social and political sphere could be viewed as simply adding, in presidential shape, another accusatory spectre of divine justice, it alternatively suggests the possibility of reading the poet’s reference to the young as a break-out from the agoraphobia of incipient paranoia in the direction of communal presence and concern: ‘am I a marked man, my life to be a lesson/ or experience to those young who would trod/ the same path, without God’.[18]

Finally, at the juncture: ‘that it is within/ unless it be some sudden act...’, the phrase ‘some sudden act’ articulates a sudden fear so obviously coming from ‘within’ as to reduce ‘unless’ to logical nonsense while clinching its poetic sense. It offers immediate proof of fear’s ontological dependence on personal agency. Yet a countervailing equivocation of ‘there is no fear without me’ suffuses all objective fears with the poet’s presence.

 —    ¶    —

Writing to Denise Levertov on February 10th, 1963 about this poem and two others, ‘The Mermaid’s Song’ and ‘An Anniversary of Death’, it is in large measure this art concealing art that Robert Duncan is responding to in his use of ‘contained’ to designate lack of display (an effortless quality we might associate with certain kinds of jazz performance): ‘I found a poem of Tomlinson’s by the way of looking thru The Poet’s Choice anthology that rang out for me. But I find more wonderful the art that’s contained, not exhibited, in those lovely works of Wieners’ in Locus Solus V. I’ve read them over and over again since they appeard.’.[19]

One of the most memorable examples of ‘containment’ in Ace of Pentacles is to be found in ‘Cocaine’, a nineteen-line poem of four quatrains and a final three-line stanza. Despair that the face of love, associated with ‘the Rose of the World’, has ‘ceased to stare /at me...but lies furled...’ leads indirectly to the closing lines:

One can only take means to reduce misery,
confuse the sensations so that this Face,
what aches in the heart and makes each new

start less close to the source of desire,
fade from the flesh that fires the night
with dreams and infinite longing.

The sensations in reading or listening alike are confused only to the exact degree necessary to underscore the immense authority (aided by alliteration) of the last two lines.[20] The parenthetic thought beginning ‘what aches’, as well as interjecting a ghostly question, registers a momentary confusion (that of heartache) in displacing the grammatically expected ‘which aches’, before revealing itself as appositional to ‘Face’ and poetically more correct than ‘that which’. The rising intonation in the second line is sufficently strong to spark over the intervening two-line parenthesis and stanza break, to connect ‘Face’ with its subjunctive voice in ‘fade’. The sentence has faded only to reignite all the more powerfully. A persistent feature of this book, the scrupulous syllabic discretion — in ‘makes each new/ start less close’ — enhances the sense. The final sentence furls and unfurls like the Rose of the World.

A great deal more might be said, if space allowed, about the Campion-like quality of syllabic and cadential music thoughout Pentacles (‘Just for one glance of her sweet eyes./ Yet brushed aside like dust past ties..’ [‘For Marion’]) some of which is lost in the later revisions. In ‘The Mermaid’s Song’, ‘Know it comes from the rose that does not die’ becomes ‘...from the rose that magnifies’ and the suggestion of wave motion conveyed by assonance in the closing lines (‘until/ my name and thine are erased from sand/ For that substance contrary to belief/ Is as eternal as an ocean’s grief’) is weakened by the revision’s (misprint?) ‘thine past erased’ and ‘Rocks eternal’. In the magnificent ‘Tuesday 7:00 PM’ the single detail that is unaccountably (at least in poetic terms) dropped from Selected 1972, is a sonically memorable image, ‘a mastiff bitch guards the gate’.

This poem’s portrayal of rich and poor in New York is a fitting point at which to round off what has been in part a counter-argument to possible assumptions about the limited political dimension of the earlier poems. Olson’s rubric ‘polis is eyes’ was never truer than in the case of John Wieners. The political force behind the sharp-eyed social observation is all the greater for the touch of cynicism flavouring the poet’s concluding, half-masochistic participation in ‘the hopes/ of the poor’ and is none the less for that participation:

but I am blue for the touch of your hand
who could lead me to the grand ballroom
and the library bookcases eased in oak.

Oh my dreams are there
and I pledge to fulfill them
as they go by in smoke

Ace of Pentacles and Selected Poems 1972 : (b) Embarrassment and Shock.

It is in the context of speculating about the reasons for Wieners’ critical neglect that Wilkinson quotes the quip alluded to above, made in response to editor Raymond Foye’s enquiring if he has a theory of poetics: ‘I try to write the most embarrassing thing I can think of’. (Cultural Affairs 15) Seeing this as evidence that the ‘lack of attention’ was ‘in some degree courted’, he turns to consider Ace of Pentacles, noting that it ‘includes verse composed before as well as after The Hotel Wentley Poems’ and continues: ‘ However, the potential for embarrassment in this book is great. The first few pages run a bewildering stylistic gamut...Across all styles, drug use and gay sex are prevalent’.

He further notes that, ‘The keynote of the sexual references is regret and yearning, their characteristic mise en scène post-coital; a tone distinct from the gay social whirl...in Frank O’Hara’s poetry or the promiscuous abandon of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘. (Tour 99–100) In contrast to The Hotel Wentley Poems, described as ‘a sequence of astonishing accomplishment and elegance’, potential embarrassment appears to be located in style (and its ‘gamut’) at least as much as in subject matter. It would not, in itself, be surprising for a young poet’s assembled work of several years to be stylistically various alongside a sequence written over the course of a few days.

Allowing for the constraints of summary, it is worth reflecting about what a focus on ‘style’ might leave out of account. Initial mention of the ‘exaggeratedly formal’ opening poem — ‘Ode on a Common Fountain’ — chimes with a more general reservation about poetic artifice expressed by Eric Mottram in his 1973 essay, ‘John Wieners: guide through the suspended vacuum’.[21] While appreciative of Wieners’ ‘ability to project a personal condition into a stable form without philosophising it into mere example’ (11) he considers that the most successful poems are those (such as ‘You talk about going’..) which ‘describe his world clearly and personally’:

Throughout Ace of Pentacles this openness to erosion and Eros [evinced by ‘A Series’] is unsteadied by a certain conventionality of rhyme, cadence, lyric impulse, and vocabulary... as if the exhaustion of the experience invades poetic ability in the form of ready-made language, breaking into his main power: that of offering his experience without disguise. (12)

Mottram’s regret at the literary form’s ‘numbing of personal action which should flood the poem’, while a little at odds with his praise for ‘the new detachment and purity’ of Nerves, is consistent with his recognition of the later book’s continued ‘telling of the condition of vulnerability’. It might equally be seen as an uncanny premonition of the ‘spectacular splurge’ of Behind the State Capitol, ‘personal action’ having now become a disturbing enigma.

Robert Duncan however, in a 1965 review of Ace of Pentacles and the reprinted Hotel Wentley Poems, looks beyond the formality of ‘Ode on a Common Fountain’ which, he reminds us, is ‘a very early poem’:

Going back to my first notes...four months ago...I note of [this poem]: “We are aware that for this poet intense experiences are realised as song...Later he writes — whatever his recall of traditional forms — in terms of the musical phrase that [conforms] by grace of more subtle references and resonances. But even here in the very regular meters and rhymes of an apprentice work...it is the grace of liberated and liberating feeling that is communicated, not the rigor (the rigor mortis of so much verse of conformity) of an imposed discipline.”[22]

This ‘liberated and liberating feeling’, which he sees as literally informing the poetry from the beginning, suggests a continuity which calls into question, at an early stage of Wieners’ career, the view that The Hotel Wentley Poems is a prosodically exceptional (and uniquely ‘accountable’) ‘false start’. In fact Duncan implicitly rejects any such suggestion: ‘The two books..stand now as interrelated first statements and evocations of a poet’s life, as testimony.’ Duncan also emphasises the book’s internal continuity, in a passage which at once — in Keatsian spirit — questions the wisdom of revision, offers a further gloss on the term ‘contained’ and (by associating prosodic skill with deliberation) raises the spectre of interaction between such skill and pathological deliberation in the poetry to come [‘More fierce cunning of the mind/ That invents its own breaking..’ (‘Love-Life’, Nerves)] :

Yet 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, he is moved in intensities, by orders that shape and then restrict feeling to the ardent. In certain poems — ‘Cocaine’, ‘My Mother’, ‘Let the heart’s pain slack off’, ‘An Anniversary of Death’, this force is so strong, emotion so entirely moving toward the form of the poem, that no element of putting into words comes into it; he must indeed... listen to an inner voice... (596)

It would be an exaggeration to suggest that in the seven years between Duncan and Mottram’s responses, the ‘inner’ lyric voice of poetry had succumbed totally to a public voice of rhetorical — even oratorical — performance, but the progress of Ginsberg’s celebrity is not the only indication of movement in this direction. Wieners’ friend and fellow Black Mountain student, Ed Dorn, had privileged scathing monologue over lyric in much of North Atlantic Turbine (1967). Robert von Hallberg, in his ‘A Talk with John Wieners’ (1974), also asks if the ‘pressure of political tensions...in the last few years...may [not] push the...lyric poet towards a more public and rhetorical poetry’. (SP’86. 289)

By the mid-sixties, Duncan himself had produced powerfully direct political poetry, harnessing a heightened rhetorical tone. His openness to Wieners’ less public ‘intensities’ coexists with tolerance towards poetic artifice and subject matter alike. This contrasts instructively with Mottram’s very English strain of ethical muscularity and love of plain-speaking, reflected not only in his penchant for ‘experience without disguise’ and ‘personal action’, but also in the claim, with regard to drugtaking, that ‘in much of Ace of Pentacles... Wieners found it difficult to care about the limited range of his experience, sufficient to make fully inventive poems from it.’. (my emphases) (13)

More concerning than just where embarrassment is imputed to Ace of Pentacles, is the slippage from Wieners’ phrase ‘embarrassing thing’ to ‘potential for embarrassment’ itself, with Wilkinson’s implied shift (or broadened perspective) from author to reader. A reader who finds Behind the State Capitol enliveningly unembarrassing and Ace of Pentacles potentially embarrassing is inescapably reflecting a societal transition. The comedian, George Carlin’s assertion that ‘shocking is just an uptown word for surprising’ has its temporal counterpart, and the two decades in question, dating from the unsuccessful legal prosecution of Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), witnessed a shift in the grounds for ‘embarrassment’ on both sides of the Atlantic, unequalled outside the 1920s.

Wilkinson speculates that ‘following the embarrassing impact of [Behind the State Capitol], earlier poems which had read acceptably enough in the literary politics of the time as shocking, belatedly were revealed as embarrassing also’ (Tour 98). Despite leaving something of a lacuna around ‘embarrassing’, the principle described sounds thoroughly plausible. I am in doubt however as to whether Wieners’ late-fifties to mid-sixties coterie readership found his work shocking. Middle-class poets like Denise Levertov were street-wise ‘downtown’ poetically, personally protective towards the poet rather than fazed by the work. Certainly, the reaction to Ace of Pentacles from perceptive readers like Duncan (beneath an unshockable exterior quite capable of ‘surprise’) emphasises the absence of any confrontational desire to shock :

John makes one feel the pathos of the individual ‘right’ to his own life, the desperate unhappiness of being unfulfilled in that life, and feeling the disapproval of the world about him...He so beautifully does not attack or sneer at us who do not ‘eat the lotus’, and at the same time he so desparately [sic] needs that freedom... The poems assert the validity of a great unhappiness and have such authenticity I am ashamed to come back with any criticism that he ought to live a different life.

(Letters 473: Sept 7, 1964.)[23]

Integral to the authenticity Duncan cites here, is an exploitation of the potential of embarrassment, an aspect of Wieners’ writing which — viewed alongside thematic parallels I will discuss later — strongly suggests the direct influence of Keats. An outstanding example is the close of the four-stanza ‘An Anniversary of Death’ and again a comparison with the revised version (‘Anniversary’) in Selected Poems 1972 points up the fineness of the original:

Once he was there, now he is not; I search the empty air
the candle feeds upon, and my eyes, my heart’s gone blind

to love and all he was capable of, the sweet patience
when he put his lips to places I cannot name
because they are not now the same
sun shines and larks break forth from winter branches.

Pentacles

Once he was there, now gone searched empty air
this candle feeds on, find eyes, my heart’s blind

to love and all he was capable of, sweet patience
when he put his lips to places I cannot name
because changed, now not the same
sun shines sad larks break forth
from winter branches.

Selected 1972

In his 1959 journal Wieners writes : ‘The poet works to undo the confusion around him. He should not add to it.’ (81) The key follow-up to the question about his ‘theory of poetry’ in the interview twenty-five years later is ‘Have you a preferred working method?’, to which he replies, ‘Confusion, usually’. (Cultural Affairs 15) While ‘confusion’ offers a single-word paraphrase of the Olsonian principle of immediately successive perceptions and might be considered a precondition for creative ‘negative capability’ (syntactic ‘confusion’, incidentally, a hallmark of Keats’ maturity), the versions above illustrate respectively, an instance where Wieners’ two statements are not contradictory and another where they are.[24]

The removal of the definite article from ‘the sweet patience’, arguably motivated by the wish to reduce a perceived plethora, succeeds only in undermining the specificity of memory, enhancing ‘all’ in the original. The substitution of mere attribute inadvertently delimits and reduces. The central image of the lips picks up the opening line of the poem’s second stanza: ‘A cigarette lit upon his lips; would they were mine’ (revised to ‘Cigarette between his lips, would they were mine’). The original line, despite grammatical opacity, accords better with the fourth stanza than the revision does, also recalling two moments from The Hotel Wentley Poems: ‘as I did/ moving my mouth/ over his back bringing/ our hearts to heights..’ and ‘the woman waiting// with no mouth, waiting/ for me to kiss it on.’

In addition to its Hollywood-reflected glamour, it also gracefully avoids the suggestion of heavy, Hays Code symbolism — not to mention deeper incoherence — in the later version. The original penultimate line subsumes a hint of the pedantic in word order to the authentic cadence of childlike, patient explanation. Incipient coyness — ‘I cannot name’ — modulates towards innocence. The revised version, willingly or not, loses this effect to ambiguity of reference.

The reader’s empathy with ‘places I cannot name’ additionally draws on a sense of locational remoteness established in ‘at far distant time and over endless space’ and strengthened by unspecificity within the idiomatic ‘Once he was there’, which conveys an unspoken ‘there for me’. He is ‘there’, remote. Is this an elegy for a man or a relationship? Once he was here. The dignified precision in the poem’s penultimate line is enhanced in the original by the momentary stutter of the phrase, ‘and my eyes’, which moves forward and backwards syntactically. The root embarrassment or fastidiousness, registered even as it is rationalised, is close in feeling to Desdemona’s ‘am I that name? ... I cannot say ‘whore’:/ It does abhor me now I speak the word;’ (Othello: IV.ii.117), just as the pathos of ‘for, by this light of heaven,/ I know not how I lost him’ epitomises Wieners’ poem. It might not be too fanciful to hear some echo of her words, ‘Or that mine eyes, mine ears, or any sense..’ in ‘and my eyes, my heart’s gone blind’.

The substitution of ‘sad’ for ‘and’ while breaking a long last line reminiscent of Dylan Thomas’s ‘light breaks where no sun shines’, exemplifies one feature of the 1972 revisions in its drive (one generally well worth resisting) to make explicit what is (in this case only arguably) implied.[25] In the opening two lines of the revision, the assimilation of parataxis to ‘syntax’ collapses dramatically into incoherence. In retrospect it is now possible to see that incoherence, in the second half of the first line, as proleptic of the stylistic feature of ‘telegraphese’ so prominent in the later poetry from Behind the State Capitol onwards.

‘Tautness’, ‘Confusion’, Telegraphic Language

Telegraphic language can be associated with ‘desocialization’, one of three categories of schizophrenic speech identified by Louis A. Sass and discussed by Wilkinson in his 1996 article ‘Too-close reading’.[26] He concludes that the second poem in Behind the State Capitol- the extremely impacted ‘Understood Disbelief in Paganism, Lies and Heresy’ — proposes that the book’s ortho-typographic and presentational ‘disorderliness will be programmatic rather than pathological’(121), adding that:

[the poem] yields enough evidence to the focussed attention to support such a presumption, both semantically and in its sustained if unfamiliar formal discipline; yet it is as tonally wayward and difficult to pin down as ‘In Public’ and — in an odd contradiction characteristic of Behind the State Capitol — is simultaneously compressed to the point of Empsonian obscurity, and extremely ‘noisy’ in the sense of high levels of apparent redundancy.

(Tour 121)

In an apposite analogy, the combination of compression and ‘noise’ is associated with the forward rhythmic drive of Frank Capra’s ‘screwball comedies’ and suggestion of real ‘disturbance’ seems to focus — if we hear a faint echo of Gray’s village poet, ‘muttering his wayward fancies’ — in tonal waywardness. Yet even the embryonic version of telegraphic language found in this poem makes a comparison with ‘In Public’ problematic, despite the valid general point that the later poem’s compression is ‘consistent developmentally’ with effects of local elision in the poems of Nerves.

Momentary contortions of phrase apart, ‘In Public’’s dramatised speaker addresses a lover with declarative lucidity. The poetic Rubicon crossed in the interim is one in which the concept of tonal waywardness substantially dissolves in the face of — and into the fact of — tonal indeterminacy. In the case of ‘Understood Disbelief’ of course, the subject matter still encourages us to associate the wayward tone with the author’s voice, rarified as that is. ‘Jail Mata Hari’ however is typical of many other poems in this — and the later — book, which combine an absolute authority of movement with a resolute disengagement from definable tone of voice:

night after night as Venus play bed

horsepowerd to outfox tyrannized legions rippd forment
she could suspend cement, as untendd captains breakwater
a mazebed sabotage a whodone-it weaponless garment.

As receipted, intrigue scandal. These her diet, venom
labour crews, mores wittingly deal in call accusation.

‘Jail Mata Hari’

If such a text has laid down the template for a recognisable ‘tone’ in English late modernism, its influence has not been confined to the ‘younger writers’ of Wilkinson’s generation but is present too in a number of ‘telegraphic’ texts from recent years, by J.H. Prynne. Schizophrenic speech’s unsettling compound of detached authority to some extent clearly displaces the modernist poet in Behind the State Capitol but the avoidance it implies does find an analogue in Prynne’s mediation or diversion of direct address to the reader, through the ‘slips and changes of meaning [of] shifting language’.

When Jennifer Cooke writes of his most recent poem that ‘the language that interests To Pollen is legion-voiced’, she invokes — inadvertently or not — more than simple multiplicity or the military pun. She identifies the poem’s ‘geological landscapes’ as a more surprising element in the ‘legion-voices’ emanating from the horrors of current conflict in Iraq: ‘These geological accretions constitute a metaphorics for the way in which language forms, coalesces, remains but also how it is manipulated, fragmented, ripped out of the seam of its context...’[27]

The passion, scale of reference and ethical depth of Prynne’s poem also demands a carrier medium capable of marrying the imperturbability of ‘geological accretions’ to the frenzy evident in human gesticulation and on human faces in the immediate aftermath of each atrocity. Schizophrenia offers an ideal linguistic model.

 —    ¶    —

In certain poems from Behind the State Capitol, such as ‘Signs of the President Machine’, where a residual subjective speaker has not explicitly dispersed himself into ‘the warp of the star map’ of multiple identity, it seems possible to account for a sense of wayward progression in terms of a pronounced associational ‘drift’, suggestive of ‘automization’ in schizophrenic speech: ‘tendencies for language to lose its transparent and subordinate status and to emerge instead as an independent focus of attention or autonomous source of control over speech or understanding’. (Sass: vide TCR) Such ‘drift’ (the paradoxical effect of schizophrenic ‘chain association’) is presumably also embedded within telegraphic language.

To the extent however, that the ‘tonally wayward’ ceases to be a reliable index of pathology, we perhaps need to examine more closely the nature of the semantic evidence ‘focussed attention’ is said to unearth and even the nature of that focussed attention itself. Take for instance the following example of pellucid, unexceptional statement from ‘Intro’: ‘My father was nonmusical. He could not dance, or sing.’. (Behind the State Capitol 70)

The fact that this is likely to be a sophisticated play on his surname, Wieners — meaning ‘from Vienna’ — and relates to William Carlos Williams’s poem ‘Lustspiel’ (‘Vienna the Volk iss very lustig,/ she makes no sorry for anything!/ She likes to dance and sing!’) attests to a playfulness and wit, even gentle pathos.[28] The teutonic rhythm of the last line is given the finest tweak by Wieners’ added comma. Yet a let’s-see-if-they-get-that-one, self-communing chuckle might easily be present too.

I have in mind here Wilkinson’s very useful distinction between schizophrenic ‘self-referential incoherence, an extreme of attention to its own processes which would yield to madness’ and the benign ‘impersonality’ he sees exemplified in ‘Billie’ (Nerves) ‘achieved by way of an almost unreachable innerness, become impersonal in the readers connection with it...such poetry...always stepping back from madness and bringing away the materials it...struggles to accomodate to the uses of the poem’. (TCR 49)

Morbid ‘self-referentiality’ is likely to inhere in the apparently impenetrable (‘dob-individual/ genied istortes’) and the transparent alike. It perhaps most risks being overlooked when the later poetry is viewed purely as collage, essentially comparable with William Burrough’s aims and procedures and in tune with his belief that the paranoiac is simply the one in possession of all the facts.

A general reluctance to dwell on pathological signs can be separated only with difficulty from the long-established curative claims of modernism. One such — with its incidental reminder of tackling confusion via confusion — is Paul van Ostaijen’s comment on his 1921 Dadaist masterpiece Bezette Stad, a work whose thoroughgoing ortho-typographic and presentational ‘derangement’ finds an echo in Wieners’ book:

Bezette Stad (Occupied City) was a poison, used as an antidote. The nihilism of Bezette Stad cured me of a dishonesty, which I mistakenly took for honesty, and of hyper-lyrical strutting about. Afterwards I was a perfectly ordinary writer, someone who writes poems for his own satisfaction [amusement, pleasure] the way a pigeon fancier keeps pigeons. I lay no claim to the medal of bourgeois morality.[29]

The fact that this statement is in most respects inapplicable to John Wieners did not prevent him half-echoing the same simple ambition: ‘A poet only writes poems. That is all he should have to do. Unless he encompasses more and we do. Universes.’ (Journal 48). For complex reasons he did not have the opportunity (luxury hardly seems too strong a word) to disown either Behind the State Capitol or his later work. Granted all the days he wanted to (and did) write poems, he never wanted to find himself writing those poems.

 —    ¶    —

Nonetheless, Behind the State Capitol certainly has credibility as idiosyncratic but perfect expression of the post-Stonewall liberational zeitgeist of the mid-seventies; temperamentally in tune with the ‘gay social whirl’ (old-style and new alike) and tonally, with ‘promiscuous abandon’, quite apart from its appeal to a younger generation of music-loving readers for whom Clash and Cure go hand in hand. It is not difficult to see how an enthusiastic reception of the book could co-exist with, even strengthen, retrospective embarrassment at old-fashioned ‘regret, yearning.. post-coital’ triste, the stock in trade of Wieners’ unmodernism.

With the spirit of liberation advancing at that time on a broad intellectual front, it is more difficult to see what residual embarrassment that readership shared with those who apparently were embarrassed — overwhelmingly, one would guess, by what they saw as derangement. This divided readership is obliquely visible in the description of Behind the State Capitol, ‘at times lurching into gloriously paranoid arraignments of government agencies, at times pausing for heartbreaking laments...’. (Tour 121) The energy may be wayward but the pathos sounds interludial.

Such oscillation also seems closely related to Wilkinson’s formulation of a ‘further site of resistance and embarrassment’: ‘Wieners’ later poetry is evidently mad. Just as evidently it is not-mad, and its madness and not-madness are as closely entwined as its modernism and unmodernism.’(Tour 97) As already implied, these two pairs of categories are themselves to some extent entwined. Rimbaldian derangement and Mallarméan encryptic zeal are only two of several obstacles to the confident detection of madness.

Any implication that mad poetry necessarily entails a mad poet is undercut by the hyphen in ‘not-madness’ (the very measure by which it would fall short of an unequivocal declaration of mental health outside the poetry) which effectively places speech marks around ‘madness’. This in turn deflects the question of pathological input, whether governed by intent or haplessness, by privileging aesthetic product over process.

The ‘not-madness’ of the poetry posits artistic deliberation on the allusive analogy of literary precession in Elizabethan and Jacobean Revenge drama. This implicitly sanifies all (the madness of) ‘wild and whirling words’, absorbing them into the category of the poet’s ‘antic disposition’ (‘more fierce cunning of the mind’) or alternatively, viewing them as the — in part fortuitous — effects of politically sophisticated collage. ‘Madness’ becomes, in both contexts, solely the judgement of the less percipient onlooker, the entire issue of pathology being subsumed to the terms of performative success mentioned earlier, whereby a distinction between Behind the State Capitol and the frequent limpness of She’d Turn on a Dime can (certainly) be justified.

If, however, pathological input is acknowledged, paradox takes a different form. The loss of control ascribable to discursive waywardness may at first sight seem checked, but is ultimately reinforced, by hyper-control operating within the telegraphic ‘vortex’. This often takes the form of a ‘split figure’, hidden to varying extent, sometimes merging with collage effects, always suggestive of schizophrenia but context-dependent as to whether a signature of authentic active pathology or a less compulsive, more ‘programmatic’ feature.[30]

Before turning to this element in the later poetry, it is perhaps helpful to consider briefly the possible roots of the ‘split figure’ as well as the broader, complex gestation of that ‘odd contradiction’ — Behind the State Capitol’s simultaneous ‘compression’ and ‘apparent redundancy’.

From a modernist point of view, telegraphic language might be considered simply as an extreme expression of the Imagist impulse to pare language down to a minimum, in the spirit of Bunting’s ‘dichten=condensare’ as cited approvingly in Pound’s ABC of Reading. [31] John Wieners’ 1959 term ‘taut’, now seems to carry premonitions of catastrophic snapping or severance, just as ‘the strainer’ conveys more now than a simple implication of art’s refining process: ‘What to do with the definite article. And/ prepositions. How to/ connect/ without them. I want language to be taut/ as the rope/ that holds a teapot over/ the fire/ for hot water./ We pour it. Into the strainer/ thru sweet leaves.’ (Journal 71)

While this accords with his stated admiration for the ‘abbreviation of expression’ in unmodernist female poets, it would also please H.D. It is an image intimately associated with childhood trauma too, as in ‘Insulted’ (Nerves): ‘in bed that noon/ heard shredded thread/ of parentage divided’. This image merges in that book with other indications of fissured unity or lost paradise: — ‘Two splits of casino libation husband/ retrieve one midnight essex.’ (‘WW’, Nerves: SP’86. 135) ; ‘the strength// of single gesture lost/ twin alloy to true counsel/ man’s fault returns original habit.’ (‘Piazza’, Nerves: SP’86. 145)

With regard to the later emergence of the stylistic ‘split — figure’ however, the most significant image is found in the closing words of ‘Desperation’: — ‘borrowed dichotomy/ unmasks its single purpose’. Wilkinson reminds us that the etymology of ‘dichotomy’ is a cutting in two and his extension of ‘borrowed’ to a deeper ‘sense of lineage, persistence and repetition, primarily of [sexual] loss’ is well justified. There may be an additional allusion to the equipoise of borrowed light and shadow at the lunar dichotomy or half-moon. Such overtones would blend with those of Revenge tragedy lunacy and the borrowed clothes of ‘antic disposition’.

In Selected 1972 it is easier to see this abbreviation in terms of compromised poetic power and sacrificed cadence than their opposite. In ‘A poem for Painters’ (Wentley) for example, the line ‘in the bounds of white and heartless fields’ is revised to ‘in bounds of white and heartless fields’, the loss of the opening anapaest to iambic regularity losing both the mimesis of bounding motion and the sense of ‘within the bounds’. The opening lines of the first poem in the sequence, ‘A Poem for Record Players’ , containing an important artistic credo, similarly lose power in the revision. I give the original version first:

I find a pillow to
muffle the sounds I make.
I am engaged in taking away
from God his sound.
The pigeons somewhere
above me, the cough
a man makes down the hall,
the flap of wings
below me, the squeak
of sparrows in the alley.
The scratches I itch
on my scalp, the landing
of birds under the bay
window out my window.
All dull details
I can only describe to you,...

___________

I find a pillow to
muffle sounds I make,
engaged in taking away
from God his sound,
the pigeons somewhere
above me, the cough
a man makes down the hall,
the flap of wings
below me, squeak
of sparrows in the alley,
                            landing
                            under the bay
window out my window.
All dull details
I only describe...

The revision’s loss of parataxis to grammatical subordination, which accompanies ‘tautness’, considerably weakens the momentousness — or enormity — of the creative act, echoed a few lines later in ‘oh clack your/ metal wings, god, you are/ mine’; the poet at his typewriter, usurping the divine prerogative. In the original version, the specificity of these sounds, conveyed by the definite article, is both distinguished from and identified with, the sounding ‘dull details’, whereas inappropriately blurred into the list of ‘dull details’ in the revision.

Perhaps the most telling detail in this revision, in the light of the poetry to come, is the abandonment of direct address — ‘to you’. The subtitle of the poem, ‘the scene changes’, is the title of a Bud Powell album and the headlong rhythm, halted by the three ‘chords’ of ‘All dull details’ arguably depends too on the reiteration of ‘the’. The passing, sonic registration of ‘bay/ window’ is replaced by a static visual equivalent.

Another example is found in ‘A Poem for Painters’ (the original version first):

Let us stay with what we know.

That love is my strength, that
I am overpowered by it:
                                         desire
                                                  that too
is on the face: gone stale.

___________

Let us stay with what we know.
Love is my strength,
overpowered by
                         desire, that too
on the face’s gone stale.

More than discursive cohesion is lost when ‘that’ goes. The emotional power of the original depends on an evocation, however gentle or ‘unintended’, of Handel’s ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’.[32] The discretion of love and desire in the naming of desire intensifies each and unites them. Quite apart from the revision’s contorted last line, desire ambiguously appears to overpower Love. The Hotel Wentley Poems certainly had classic status with their U.S. readership. To view these revisions however in the same light as — for example — Bob Dylan’s recent, untiring performative innovations, is to forget that the Cape Selected Poems was aimed at a new readership.

A further instance is the short poem from Ace of Pentacles (63), untitled as it originally appeared but given the title ‘153 Avenue C’ in the 1972 Selected . I give the earlier version first:

The night is cold
I lie abed,
drugged.

The gas heater is on.
I would it were
Off

And snuff out my life.

___________

The night cold
I lie abed,
drugged.

The gas heater on.
I would it were
Off

To snuff out my life.

The moving simplicity of statement, evocative of the opening scene of Hamlet (‘ ‘Tis bitter cold,/ And I am sick at heart’) is lost in the tautened revision to a notational phrase hovering between latinate structure (the night being cold) and qualified abstract (the nocturnal chill). Though the first predominates, either reading reduces the three-part, paratactic objectivity of the original — with ‘drugged’ an elliptical ‘I am drugged’ — to purely subjective perception. This is underlined when we reflect that ‘Would it were’ would be a proportionate substitution for the line in question.

In ‘Chamber Attitudes’ John Wilkinson concludes a very fine analysis of Wieners’ ‘Larders’ thus: ‘The night is the shape of the self...That gap is the ‘I’ at work in these shapely poems, housed in them. ‘Larders’ yearns for home, for houses, for shaped space to contain the I in its longings’. It is astounding that the loss of the single word ‘is’ effectively deprives ‘153 Avenue C’ of ‘shaped space’; the room in the night, the bed in the room, the poet on the bed. The word is essential too to the sense of drugged confusion at the juncture ‘were/ Off’.

The despair of the final line, straying in the direction of ‘may my life be ended’ catches up an echo of Macbeth’s ‘out, out, brief candle!’ lost in the strengthened agency and causality of the second version. There is however an even greater poetic loss in the fact that the poem begins with a quotation from popular song, so seamlessly integrated it even seems possible that John Wieners himself had lost sight of it in revising the text.[33]

Song titles and lyrics always hover just off-stage in his work and are interwoven with great brilliance into the fabric of many poems. ‘The night is cold’ is a line from the Romberg/ Hammerstein song, sung by Billie Holiday, ‘Lover come back to me’ and also of her own ‘Lover Man Oh, Where can you be?’ (‘The night is cold and I’m so alone’). Either title might itself be Wieners’ theme song and the first reworks ballad verities — ‘You came at last/ love had its day/ that day is past/ you’ve gone away’.

Interestingly, the journal entry on ‘tautness’ is immediately followed by a quotation from Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul:

‘The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression; it freely chooses the men in whom it lives and who proclaim it...Measured against it, the names and forms which men have given it...are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree.’

(Journal 72)

The juxtaposition of these two principles might account for the respective presence in Behind the State Capitol of telegraphese and transcriptional ‘indignities’ suffered by earlier poems ‘ranging from brief incursions of star-chat to full transvestism in swathes of gossipy material’. (Tour 118)[34]

A further implication of the second, organic principle relates to Wieners’ rejection of Olson’s breath-based line (CP 239) with its assumption of unrevisitable perception.[35] ‘Tuesday 7:00 PM’ (Pentacles) is radically re-lineated in Selected 1972 in a way that would be inconceivable for Olson or Creeley, with a loss of movement in the opening lines: ‘There is majesty in rose/ light across the sky’ (cf. ‘There is majesty in rose light/ across the sky’) and similar loss of the marvellous original, ‘When November// night comes up from the ground’ in ‘When November night/ comes up from Central Park’.

Recollecting the way he recommended permanent renegotiation of the line to me in 1965 prompts another memory; his mention of being asked to name his best (or most resounding or memorable) lines or image and selecting the closing lines of ‘Shall Idleness Ring Then Your Eyes’: ‘Covered over/ with the hand of man is the dung of/ the human heart.’ It is troubling to see that inimitable eclipse of the heart itself eclipsed a few years later to ‘Covered over by/ hand of man is dung from human hearts.’

Aspects of Desocialization and Automization in Behind the State Capitol

Just as it is necessary, when using a term such as ‘associative drift’, to acknowledge that poetry works ‘associationally’ in any case, so — in considering a ‘split figure’ with schizoid overtones — we should allow its congruence with modernist juxtaposition without copula; fragmentary cut-and-paste in the musical manner of Pound, Eliot, Williams, Olson, Duncan et al. In ‘Vera Lynn’ for example, the politician’s clichéd desire to be ‘helpful in bringing about...’ is cut to ribbons by authentic street humour:

I trust I have assets that may be helpful

You should be paying me
For looking the other way

When you strike up the band
daisy blond

as real as you can
only make it.

in brining about a truly united America.

(Behind the State Capitol 137)

Similarly, it is possible to view the figure as an efflorescence of the common device of soubriquet (‘Jack ‘Underground’ Smith’s Flaming Creatures’ (109); ‘Miriam “Monty” Arkansas’ (42)), or accept that the first traces of the habit in Wieners’ poetry occur early (1958) in the apparent normality of afterthought: — ‘fellow poet. Traveller.’ (‘2nd Communique for the Heads’, Cultural Affairs 26). ‘Slips of the tongue’ of the sort described by Freud in ‘Psychopathology of Everyday Life’ and to which the poet appears to have been prone (cf. ‘the scratches I itch’ Wentley) can also involve a ‘split figure’ while ‘saying two things at once’: ‘the long at last awaited journey’.

It is also useful to distinguish between the true collage effect (the verbal dimension of the ‘Cinema découpages’ mentioned alongside ‘verse’ and ‘abbreviated prose insights’ in the title-page description of contents) and what, in terms of potential pathology, is a more intriguing version of ‘split figure’. This second category often involves the ‘dichotomy’ of splitting a recognisable name or phrase by inserting other words or phrases.

On occasion, this can go to the extraordinary lengths suggestive of schizophrenic word-games and form exceptions to the general impression of an arbitrary use of capitalization: ‘CARLotta Stoppato Venetian non-negre’ Roi LEvine was born, George Bra  ziller’ (‘The Homecoming ll’, Behind the State Capitol 43). The (apparently) split name, Carl Levine, for whatever reason (or none at all) forever transgendered to Carlotta, ravishing star of ‘Room 96’ and ‘Les Girls’. Leroi Jones enters backwards and ‘non-negre’ takes him back to the previous line’s ‘Steve’s ‘I murraid Huey Newton’’.

Angela Davis, subject of The Rolling Stones’ 1972 ‘Sweet Black Angel’ (rather than the Oakland Hell’s Angels or date of birth) may link the co-founder of the Black Panthers to a 1942 film ‘I married an angel’, or the 1938 musical of the same name starring Vera Lorina, a leading lady in Wieners’ fascicle, ‘Woman’. ‘Steve’s’ — together with reference to ‘my time in Danvers’ (State Asylum) — attributes the phrase to Stephen Jonas, the gay, black Poundian Boston poet for whose 1966 book Transmutations Wieners wrote a preface.[36] The dedication, to Robert A. Costa, quotes from ‘The Lives of the Alchemystical Philosophers’, speaking of ‘such things as Stephen saw’ and ends ‘and his face shone like the face of an angel at his stoning’.

The self-identification with martyrdom echoes Wieners’ ‘Rise shining martyrs’ and seems apposite to Newton’s 1974 travails. The latter’s subsequent three-year exile in Cuba (exilic destination of Davis too) seems to be connected with ‘Havana CUBa’ five lines later, just as the hinted echo in ‘Stoppato’ of Lana Turner’s slain lover, Johnny Stompanato, may have been ‘triggered’ by Newton’s murder trial (murraid?). The police shoot-out at the Panthers’ headquarters could be the ‘raid’ in ‘murraid’.

The title of Angela Davis’s 1971 book, ‘If they come in the morning: Voices of Resistance’, so deeply hidden in the text, establishes common ground between the poet’s personal paranoia and the societal — not to mention global — ongoing persecutions and paranoid politics. Is ‘George Bra   ziller’ the ‘black George’ whose suicide is noted in ‘Signs of the President Machine’?

Another example of this cut-in-two type occurs in ‘The murder of Cheap Waitresses’: — ‘When the Maid of Mistd Orleans vacationed off the Y in/ Room 517’ (27). Here, Joan of Arc’s soubriquet is interrupted by the name of the Niagara Falls boat ‘Maid of the Mist’. There are many cases of split single words or adjective-noun combinations: ‘high, twelve noon’ (52), ‘homo-sapiens sexual’, ‘ill-non-legal’ (53), ‘homo-thanatropicsexual’ (65), ‘underplayground’ (68), ‘grazia response plena’ (107) often of a lameness suggesting active illness, though the coded musical message of more than one reference to ‘high noon’ is not too difficult to decipher.

As in dreams, individuals may be composite: — ‘THEn / Governor Nelson Aldrich’s Student UNIONROCkefeller’ (83), where Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York State, blurs into film director Robert Aldrich and author Nelson Algren. In ‘Bringing me mass food stuffed and sustaining ev’ry/ dream but those of Edreidan Richardollivieran GLAMour’ (37), the clang rhyming associated with some forms of psychosis (‘ev’ry dream’/ ‘Edreidan’) introduces England cricketers Edrich and D’Olliveira to precipitate ‘Richard’ (the christian name of neither) in a coinage — ‘Richardollivieran’ — suggestive of the literary critic’s ‘Richardsonian’.

The purely collagist procedure can be seen in ‘Faren Ferries’ (21):

Float electrified currency city headline,
A mother’s memory should ax pier slaughter,
Together on 10th Avenue twin Caroline star routine
As good as tomorrow’s edition in gold Jenifer.

The headline-like ‘a mother’s memory’and ‘tomorrow’s edition’ suggest the material is mined from a newspaper and shuffled to conceal/ reveal: ‘float currency’,’electrified (the) city’, ‘slaughter on 10th Avenue’ or ‘ax slaughter’, ‘twin star’, ‘as good as gold’.

Variants of both types appear in ‘Signs of the President Machine’ (3):

I’ve got 25c coin on the bureau
or maple mahoganny table, built out of
magnolia limbs, and a persian carpet airing in lawn

yard a baby flood, TELVA magazines with my photograph on
the cover as Mariln Monroe, jack dead mother’s nutty sister
saying Who is She, I’m a Lot of Man, by the late Nancy
Cunard, of course

that pauvre Rose La Rose, Billie Shakespeare, or was it Sanctity’s
Holiday drugged as Moynihan across
behind a red lantern, ask Mme Brenda drinking torpid Gloucester
cyan-
ide dutied United States Postmen, plastic transparent basket.

Poor Benedict posing as a Polish sister
I can feel his dope over the Hedges, wintergardening carol from
the Meirovingian corner besides
the master bedroom,...

Billie Holiday’s name is split up but — somewhat less obviously — the juncture from ‘Mme Brenda’ to ‘Postmen’, while making its own ‘sense’, pulls apart (or off like a mask) to reveal two (almost) coherent halves: ‘Mme. Brenda drinking cyanide’ and ‘torpid Gloucester-dutied United States Postmen’. The proximity of ‘torpid’ to ‘cyanide’ is a shaft of black humour here. John Wilkinson comments that this poem:

[shows] in practice... [the co-existence of a] headfirst, intoxicated response to glamour and a sharp critique of the economic realities of the fashion and film industries and glamour’s cost...[demonstrating] how lyric celebration and nostalgia can hold together a mixture of camp lunacy, paranoia itself guyed as drug-fuelled confusion, fantasies of the glamorous life and reminiscences of Boston queens.

(Tour 122)

I assume that ‘Boston queens’ primarily refers to ‘Pussybile, fresh from black George’s suicide at 86 Charles’, though in ‘Chamber Attitudes’ there is a suggestion that Mme Brenda ‘may perhaps be a drag queen’. This poem’s ‘notation of the present’ begins with an inventory of possessions or ‘assets’, the opening quarter a wry after-echo to the ‘1/4 grain of love/ we had’ (‘Act #2’, Pentacles 17).[37] ‘Poor’ is reiterated in varying senses and forms.

If poor Benedict is less a saint than the quondam pharmacist Benedict Arnold (to reappear in Wieners’ last book in ‘The Charles Manson Death Cult’) he is the epitome of ‘military treason’ for Americans, their less alluring Mata Hari or Tokyo Rose. He blends into the right-wing conspiracy-theorist paranoia so well described in ‘Chamber Attitudes’. An immediate template for all such trans-historical gatherings would be Bob Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’.

The cast’s order of appearance seems to be a much more febrile affair of drifting association however, although in the case of ‘maple’, ‘mahoganny’, ‘magnolia’ it looks suspiciously like a reverse alphabetical list.[38] Magnolia’s Gloucester associations might be sufficient to prompt Olson’s entry ten lines later. (Maximus I.11; II, 83; III, 127, 223) Mention of the burlesque artiste, ‘Rose La Rose’ follows from ‘jack dead’ only by combined association with Rose Kennedy and ‘jack’’s liaison with Blaze Starr, another exotic dancer and prominent Wieners playmate.

‘Rose’ prompts ‘Shakespeare’ but Who Is She in line six has prepared the way, in an associative chain from the identification of ‘that simple song’, ‘Who is Sylvia?’ with his lover, Dana in early versions of ‘The Woman’ (Ace of Pentacles): — ‘Who is my heart, what is he/ that he should mean this much to me?’. ‘The Suicide’ and ‘Address to the Woman’ (Ace of Pentacles), which are a single poem in the Selected Poems 1986, concern Sylvia Plath.

Its sophisticated wordplay (‘and not Sylvia, in the woods’) raises the thought that a different sense of wood(s) — ‘maple mahoganny...magnolia’ — might (together with ‘nutty’) have prompted an unspoken ‘Beech’. This ‘groove of memory’ takes us to literary Paris via Sylvia Beach and Nancy Cunard, an unseen (though sensed in reiterated roses) Gertrude Stein and ‘Shakespeare and Co’, Beach’s joint-venture bookshop. Plath perhaps leads to ‘black George’s suicide’, ‘Cunard’ to Brenda — but I anticipate.

Identifying Olson in the reference to ‘United States Postmen’, Wilkinson points out that the poet’s repeated appearances in the book figure within:

an attribute of repeated and locally unaccountable incursion by figures such as Jackie Onassis, Mata Hari...and Barbara Hutton... [eradicating] any distinction between memories founded in first-hand experience and those derived from saturation in movies and glamour magazines.(123)

Having mentioned Olson’s connection with Gloucester and the fact that his father was a postman, he concludes: — ‘the possible significance of any of this here is indeed a mystery’. Whether critical ‘negative capability’ or resigned acceptance of the qualitative abstraction an ‘attribute of...incursion’ is predominant here, they coexist with a residual curiosity about a formal alternative; a pattern of incursions: ‘Why does ‘parched imbecilic Mata Hari’ appear in ‘Toady’s Singular’ for instance?’. (Tour 123) Such curiosity clearly runs counter to any textual incitement to ‘riposte rather than interpretation’.

In reality Wieners’ insistence on the book’s unity places an arguably unpayable premium on a search for pattern, amongst other places in the ‘gallery of spirits presiding over it’ . Trying to answer the question above in terms of word association alone, leaves the suspicion that she only appears because the previous line — ‘ghoulish Sunday sermon warning’ (my emphasis) — echoes ‘Harry Ghouls’ in ‘Understood Disbelief’ (2) and prompts ‘Hari’ by sound association. Naturally, if Mata Hari’s appearances collocate with other figures instancing one or more of her qualities — beauty, treachery, intrigue, espionage — we do have another point of entry, suggesting deliberation.

Before offering an example of such collocation it is worth noting that the faintness of a chronological footprint in Behind the State Capitol tends to reduce references to personal acquaintances (if the term retains validity) to the categories ‘open’ and ‘secret’, in complex correlation to ‘conscious’ and ‘subconscious’. While this allows for deviousness within ‘openness’, the secret references are by definition harder to characterise.

 —    ¶    —

The complex allusion I have in mind is best approached through ‘Signs of the President Machine’ and suggests an alternative reading to that of a ‘poisonous paternity’ in the case of Olson. It also explains Mme Brenda’s textual proximity to Olson and suggests that she is one instance of a generic Madam(e) who reappears throughout the book.[39] While at first sight appearing to confirm the valid general point about a merging of movie — and ‘real’ — worlds, the deeper (diagnostic) necessity of Brenda and Olson’s linkage here rather reveals a calculated use of the movie world as allegorical stand in for the reality of ‘first-hand experience’.

This term itself needs to envisage saturation in given contemporary literary texts. A ‘self-referential incoherence’, whether or not the self appears in the flesh, is the feeling one takes away from this passage. It concurs with a sense of (barely) suppressed violence.

It seems almost certain that Madame Brenda refers to the English stage and screen actress, Brenda de Banzie (1915–81), who played the role of Madame (or Aggie) in a British film of 1958, Passport to Shame, also known as The Girl in Room 43 and (in the U.S.) Room 43.[40] Although the ‘Screenonline’ plot summary is very brief, she apparently lives in a mansion. The film is described as ‘a typical piece of 1950s (s)exploitation, claiming to expose a pressing social evil while rarely missing an opportunity to show ‘guest star’ Diana Dors parading in basque and suspenders’.

Were one tempted however to see this reference as an oblique expression of the ‘sharp critique of the economic realities of the fashion and film industries’ (Tour 122) already cited, it would be a mistake. The film is set in a Soho prostitution ring from which a girl tries to escape but is drugged and locked up. ‘Red lantern’ and ‘Holiday drugged’ may carry this additional reference. If Mme. Brenda takes poison it will be in the great tradition of literary female immoralists. It is important to note that ‘Postmen’ is plural. Olson himself followed in his father’s footsteps, albeit briefly and possibly ‘torpidly’.[41]

The link between Room 43 and Olson — and hence a Gloucester postman — is to be found in apartment ‘#48’ in ‘The Twist’, an early Maximus poem:

She was staying,
After she left me,
In an apartment house
Was like a cake....

Or was it Schwartz,
the bookie, whose mother-in-law
I’d have gladly gone to bed with

Her room (the house
Was a dobostorte), the door
High up on the wall,
# 48,
small,
like an oven-door

What would otherwise be a very tenuous connection is greatly strengthened by the fact that these two passages triangulate with (or bracket) a third, from ‘Toady’s Singular’ (Behind the State Capitol 8), where Olson’s ‘dobostorte’ (an apartment building shaped like a many-layered Hungarian pastry) is echoed (as ‘dob....istortes’) within a split figure:

For our more future, as parched imbecilic Mata Hari,
beloved up
To barefoot high chieftains of Salerno, not cobblestone
dob-individual

genied istortes, 123.......

Ion Charles stoop

It is clear, from the added (apartment?) number — whatever its occult numerological force — that Wieners is alluding to ‘The Twist’ and is vicariously entering a regressive and overheated Hansel-and-Gretel fantasy, mirrored in Olson’s breathless lines.[42] The tainted love of Rooms 43 and #48 will fulfil every good boy’s worst nightmare and wildest dream. Femme fatale, witch, vampire. ‘Mata Hari was three women un/ questiond. And her name wasn’t faith,/ hope or charity. Nor good neighbour policy towards virtue.’ (‘Jail Mata Hari’, Behind the State Capitol 7)

That it should be a Hungarian cake might be the final twist of a knife glimpsed in Websterian Revenge overtones earlier in ‘Toady’s Singular’: — ‘pregnant Amalfi’… ‘in dagger cloak bearded’. A claim to part-Hungarian ancestry was shared by Olson and the woman involved with both poets in what Olson’s biographer, Tom Clark, describes as a ‘three-way romantic entanglement’, which began in the summer of 1966 and ended with a multiple sense of betrayal for Wieners.[43] As his own relationship unravelled in the following early Spring, Olson complained in a letter to his daughter of being unable ‘to deal with...a human vampire from Transylvania’. At the close of ‘Sunset’, a heartfelt and clearly contemporary elegy-lament for an unborn son, Wieners bitterly addresses a ‘vindictive woman/ Magyar-/ east of the urals/ your father came/ to wreak havoc on Europe.’.[44]

Wieners’ love affair with this rich and sophisticated New York heiress, patron of the arts and socialite, had begun in the Spring of 1966. Pregnant with his child, she decided (apparently supported in this decision by Charles Olson) to have an abortion. The older poet had become a regular visitor to the Gloucester summer house she had rented with Wieners. On October 28, she and Olson sailed from Montreal on the (non-Cunard) Empress of Canada, landing at Liverpool and travelling on to London.

Although the two poets (after the subsequent deep estrangement) were reconciled at a poetry convocation in Cortland, New York the following October, it is almost impossible to overstate the emotional trauma of the whole episode for Wieners. Allen Ginsberg’s introduction to Selected Poems 1958–1984 alludes to it. It appears to have contributed to mental breakdown three years later and no doubt to the blurring of inward and ‘objective’ reality evident in Behind the State Capitol. It is the key to a number of powerful and opaque poems in Nerves and many other poems in the period 1966–69.[45]

The abovementioned knife is not necessarily threatening others. In ‘Sunset’ it suggests both self-harm and association with abortion: ‘and you did die/ as surely as a bud falls from its stem-/ you were scraped from the womb of your mother....and the very woods in voices of aunt Ella/ whispered, Hurt/ yourself,/ hurt yourself in the wind’.

The subtitle of ‘Sunset’ (‘Lieder eines Fahren den [fahrenden] Gesellen’) is the title of Gustav Mahler’s first song cycle and is widely believed to have been inspired by the end of an unhappy love affair. Often mistranslated as ‘Songs of a Wayfarer’, it actually means ‘Songs of a Travelling Journeyman’, the stage between apprentice and master craftsman that might have resonance for Wieners’ antecedent relationship with Olson. The first movement — ‘When my sweetheart is married’ — discusses his grief at losing his love to another.

In the third, despairing movement (‘I have a gleaming knife’) the pain of lost love is compared to a metal blade piercing his heart; he wishes he actually had the knife. The near certainty that this was a shared musical memory for the couple, classical music reference being relatively scarce in Wieners’ work, enhances the poem’s malediction.

I am suggesting that in ‘Signs of the President Machine’, Mme. Brenda is an alter ego for Wieners’ ‘sweetheart’, ‘Christine Kerrigan’ (as Tom Clark calls her); that the text’s surface statement that she drinks ‘postmen’, sublimates a desire for her death to ease the poet’s pain in losing a son; and that the poison spills in Olson’s direction.[46]

An otherwise secondary associative link between ‘Mariln’ and ‘that pauvre Rose la Rose’ — namely oblique connotation of ‘shop-soiled’ originating in the significantly titled 1970 poem ‘Trying to forget’ (72) (‘without a surplus Army/ and Navy Snyder/ secondhd Norma Jean Monroe?’) — obscurely evokes Barbra Streisand’s ‘Funny Girl’ recreation of Fanny Brice’s original Ziegfeld Follies ‘Second-hand Rose’. This suddenly introduces a more vitriolic or ‘cyanidal’ potential to the Brenda-Postmen nexus.

Whether or not Fania Borach’s Hungarian Jewish descent (Brice being a second-hand name) is part of the picture is known only to God and John Wieners but a Streisand/Brice juncture would account for the otherwise puzzling irruption of the anti-semitic, ‘Meirovingian’ scenario of the poem’s third ‘stanza’.

An equally febrile and self-communing anticipation of the Brenda-Olson-(Wieners) reference may lie in ‘I’m A Lot of Man’. Self-reference might be detected in the light of a passage from Eliot’s Choruses from ‘The Rock’, especially the second line’s resonance with that borrowed Ace of Pentacles title, Auden’s ‘shall idleness ring then your eyes like the pest?’: ‘The lot of man is ceaseless labour,/ Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,/ Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant’.

The phrase might also anticipate the ‘mammoth frame’ of Olson who appears a few lines later. In terms of the three-way relationship, Marvin Rainwater’s 1958 pop hit ‘Whole Lotta Woman’ sounds a mischievous possibility: ‘It takes a whole lotta lovin’/ Just to keep my baby happy/ Coz she’s a whole lotta woman/ And she gotta have a whole lotta man’.

Mata Hari, like the ‘real life’ target of ‘The Dietrichs and the Garbos’, is implicated in the pain of this personal betrayal. In the case of ‘Toady’s Singular’ we might ask why Mata Hari is ‘imbecilic’. The answer appears to lie within the split figure: ‘dob — individual/ genied istortes, 123’. It would be in keeping with intense word games throughout the book if the final ‘d’ in genied were being encouraged to migrate to the (deliberately?) mispelled ‘istortes’ — to announce distortion.

Genie is the feral child discovered by California authorities in November, 1970 in a suburb of Los Angeles. She was subjected to severe confinement and ritual ill-treatment when her father took the family doctor’s mention