John Wieners, “PENTE: a book of woe” and “Solitary Pleasure: Selected Poems, Journals and Ephemera” reviewed by Jaap van der Bent

John Wieners, PENTE: a book of woe, eds. Patricia Hope Scanlan and Libby Musso Dacre; Artery Editions, 2023

John Wieners, Solitary Pleasure: Selected Poems, Journals and Ephemera, ed. Richard Porter; Pilot Press, 2023

On October 8, 1966 John Wieners was the first poet to present a selection of his work in a series of poetry readings at the English Department of Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montreal. Held between 1965 and 1974 the aim of these readings was to give local poets a chance to get in touch with avant-garde poets from the rest of Canada and the United States. Ultimately more than sixty North American poets would take part in the readings, including Beat and Beat-related poets like Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Robert Creeley and Ted Berrigan. Luckily, all sixty-five readings were recorded and are now available on the internet, together with transcriptions of the introductions and comments made by the poets during their readings. (SpokenWeb Montréal – SGW Poetry Reading Series)

In the case of Wieners, one observation he made in the course of his reading turned out to have special relevance, shedding new light on his 1964 volume of poems, Ace of Pentacles. Introducing his reading of a poem in that collection, “The Imperatrice”, Wieners explained that the title of that poem refers to a card in the Tarot deck, like the title of the book itself. Most likely to the confusion of his listeners, he went on to say that Ace of Pentacles should be called “Pente”, a word that came to him in a “hypnogogic vision”:

Hypnogogic is the state between waking and sleeping. It’s what Jung practiced and his Marie Louise Franz would take down the things that came to him in the state between waking and sleeping and the letters ‘pente’ appeared in my – in that state and I didn’t know what they meant, so I kept hunting around and I made the word ‘pentacles’ out of it, and somebody said why don’t you call it “Ace of Pentacles”? And we made a whole thing about the Tarot deck, but that’s not the title of the book. It should be ‘pente’ and that’s from the Greek which is ‘woe.’ And I’d like [to] have as a frontispiece for the book William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweep[er],” the second version of that from the Songs of Experience.

It is only last year, almost sixty years after the publication of Ace of Pentacles, that the book came out with Wieners’s preferred title, PENTE: a book of woe, edited by the British poet Patricia Hope Scanlan (whose Artery Editions also published the book) and Libby Musso Dacre. In his highly informative introduction Michael Seth Stewart, the editor of Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners (2015) and Yours Presently: The Selected Letters of John Wieners (2020), relates how already shortly after the publication of Ace of Pentacles Wieners had started to consider changes to the book. As becomes clear from a September 1964 letter to Robert Wilson, co-publisher of the book, he had “re-written some of the poems and made it more a craftsman’s job,” which included the elimination of a number of definite articles. According to Stewart, in November 1964 Wieners wrote to Wilson that in case of a second printing the title should become PENTE, with the subtitle “a book of woe”: “When we do reprint Ace of Pentacles, I want to call it PENTE – with a facsimile poem of William Blake serving as frontispiece – The Chimney Sweep Poem ending with the words, WOE, WOE, which is what PENTE means […].”

During the next year and a half Wieners continued to work on the book, using his own copy of Ace of Pentacles for revisions. In July 1966 he gave this unique copy to arts patron Panna Grady, with whom he was romantically involved at the time. By then, as Stewart writes in the introduction, the book was “heavily marked up with longhand revisions, with changes made to most of the poems, ranging from the minor (the addition or deletion of a comma, a word removed and then replaced) to the major (whole stanzas crossed out with new text written in), the later poems more heavily revised than the earlier ones.” Not knowing what to do with the book when their short-lived love affair had ended, Grady almost immediately sent the book to Stuart Montgomery, the publisher of the London-based Fulcrum Press, with whom Wieners was in touch about the possible publication of a Selected Poems. At the request of Panna Grady (who in the meantime had become Panna Grady O’Connor) in 2017 Montgomery gave the book to Patricia Hope Scanlan.

Michael Seth Stewart’s introduction helps to make PENTE a very rich book. Of course it is that already because it reprints many poems that are among Wieners’s best. But apart from the introduction the book contains a wealth of more secondary material. It opens with the laudatory review of the book which Denise Levertov wrote for Poetry in 1965 and ends with an afterword by Jeremy Reed which sheds more light on Wieners’s life and work, providing details which even Wieners’s devotees may not always be aware of. Reed’s contribution is followed by a number of appendices. In the first of these Tim Fletcher provides helpful notes to many of the poems in the book. Fletcher’s second contribution makes a case for Wieners as a poet to whom mutability was inherent, with the result that he sometimes found it hard to decide on the final version of a poem. The book ends with a number of bibliographies which have been devoted to Wieners’s work, from George F. Butterick’s checklist of work by and about Wieners which ends in the early seventies to a recent checklist compiled by Robert Dewhurst, which decribes Wieners’s work up to the present, and an equally recent critical bibliography by Michael Kindellan, assisted by Alex Rose Cocker.

Tim Fletcher’s remarks about Wieners’s mutability are especially relevant to this second edition of Ace of Pentacles. As has been pointed out by Robert Dewhurst, who is preparing a biography of Wieners and his Collected Poems, in The Floating Bear no. 31 (1965) Diane di Prima published three versions of the poem “Procrastination”, also published in Ace of Pentacles, which are presented as being of equal value. Comparing these three versions with the version which was published in Ace of Pentacles, it turns out that the second version is the one which Wieners decided to use in the book. However, that version is different again from the poem as it appears in PENTE. For reasons known only to the poet, in the PENTE-version of “Procrastination” Wieners has added a comma after “fire” in the third line of the poem, “o letters of fire, fall on my head”, and a hyphen in the word “interlock” in the line “The traceries of feeling inter-lock the chest.” To get a better idea of the changes made in PENTE it is helpful to compare the last nine lines of the poem as it appears in Ace of Pentacles with the PENTE-version:

The eyes become onyx and pearl.
The night falls at noon.
Too soon leaves break from their branches.

They whistle in your ears.
The spirit is near, and the mind
grasps upward to the full sun

wheeling in the heavens.
At one with the cosmos, you are a star shining
In the blue of the day-time sky-light.
(Ace of Pentacles)

Their eyes become onyx and pearl.
Too, night falls at noon.
Leaves break from their branches –,

their whistle in your ears.
The spirit is near, and the mind
grasps upward to the full sun, which

wheels in the heavens.
At one with the cosmos, you are a star shining
in the blue of the day-time sky-light.
(PENTE)

While many of the changes in PENTE are less drastic than the ones in “Procrastination”, some of the alterations are quite revealing. For instance, in one of the first poems in the book, “The Woman”, Wieners has replaced the first time he uses the personal pronoun “he” in the lines “Who is he, what is he / that he should mean this much to me?” by the name “Dana”, thus making it clear that this poem is inspired by his lover Dana Durkee, the “tall blonde volunteer firefighter” who also figures in Wieners’s slim but groundbreaking debut volume, The Hotel Wentley Poems. On the other hand, in “An Anniverary of Death” Wieners apparently preferred to give the poem a more general meaning by replacing “he” by “it” in the line “[…] my heart’s gone blind / to love and all he was capable of […]”. Many other alterations in PENTE are less thoroughgoing. In a number of cases Wieners has deleted or replaced prepositions and pronouns, perhaps in an effort to make the poems more compact, and sometimes a plural noun has become singular – or the other way round. A few poems in PENTE are placed in a different position than they have in Ace of Pentacles and in four cases Wieners has added the information when (and twice also where) a particular poem was written. Because Wieners first used pen and later pencil for his mark-ups, it is also interesting to see how he would sometimes make changes that he would go back on slightly later. Thus the last line of the last poem in Ace of Pentacles, “And wonders wherever you go”, was changed by pen in “And wanders wherever we go” on January 19, 1965. Two weeks later, on February 6, Wieners decided upon the original line after all.

Here the editors have taken the liberty to retain the phrase “lucky charm” and the lowercase “a” which opens the second line, while in the clearly legible handwritten version of the poem (now called “This Love That Moves the World, Sun and Stars”) “lucky charm” has become “charm” and the lower case “a” a capital “A”. One could also wonder whether that small dot in the middle of the handwritten third line is really meant to suggest a comma, or whether it is simply an accidental mark made by Wieners’s ballpoint pen.

In spite of a few possible errors like these, PENTE is a striking record of a poet at work, even after having already published the poems in question; and of course Wieners is not the only poet who felt the need to return to work that had already been printed. One thing which the book is not, is the definitive version of Ace of Pentacles. This seemed to be suggested in publicity material for the book, which claims that it is the second edition of the 1964 volume, “amended according to John Wieners’ wishes as expressed in a letter dated 10 July 1966.” It is, for instance, not the version which was considered for publication when Raymond Foye edited Wieners’s Selected Poems 1958-1984, which came out in 1986 and which contains Wieners’s earlier volumes in their entirety. And while that book may have been “compiled with some initial reluctance on the part of its author,” as Foye writes in his editor’s note, Wieners worked close enough with Foye to insist on his removing from Ace of Pentacles “three brief poems deemed best forgotten.” These are of course to be found again in PENTE, two of them with revisions.

In the end one can only agree with Michael Seth Stewart, who concludes his introduction like this: “PENTE is not a replacement for Ace of Pentacles. It’s not a return to some original version, or a correcting of the record. It’s something different, an almost-lost vision. The ghost of a book. ‘A blue car through the / stars,’ still going.” It is certainly a welcome addition to the Wieners canon.

The same can be said about another book with work by Wieners, which came out earlier in 2023, also from a British publisher, Pilot Press: Solitary Pleasure: Selected Poems, Journals and Ephemera. As the website of the publisher explains, Pilot Press is “the imprint of artist Richard Porter. It was started in 2017 to shed light on contemporary queer lives and help retrieve a philopsophy of artist’s publishing lost to AIDS and capitalism.” Therefore it is no surprise that Porter, also the editor of the book, has selected poems and other texts which relate in particular to Wieners’s homosexuality. However, in the introduction poet and queer/trans activist-scholar Nat Raha also stresses the fact that Wieners “experienced five psychiatric incarcerations in state and private mental hospitals between 1960-1972, spending many months as an in-patient in these institutions.” As a result of his gay and mental experiences in the early 1970s Wieners joined the Gay Liberation Movement, “in the orbit of radical gay newspaper Fag Rag and Good Gay Poets press in particular, and the Mental Patients’ Liberation Movement, who had strong ties with Gay, Lesbian and Women’s Lib.” Not surprisingly, Solitary Pleasure contains not only work by and about Wieners from Fag Rag No. 5, but also Asylum Poems, a collection of eighteen poems which Wieners wrote in a relatively short period while he was incarcerated in Central Islip State Hospital (Long Island, NY) in the summer of 1969. Later that year Asylum Poems was published as a pamphlet-like volume by Anne Waldman’s and Lewis Warsh’s Angel Hair Books and reissued not long afterwards; between these two editions a pirated edition was published by Press of the Black Flag Raised as an unbound collection of eighteen multi-colored broadsides housed in an envelope. A fourth edition was contained in the volume Nerves, published by Cape Goliard Press in Great Britain in 1970.

 As in the case of PENTE, the various editions of Asylum Poems (incorrectly called The Asylum Poems in the table of contents of Solitary Pleasure) raise a number of questions. In the introduction Nat Raha refers to the book as it was published by Angel Hair Books, quoting Michael Seth Stewart’s description of it as “a large, thin book, hand-stapled,with a cover drawing by George Schneeman of a hand proffering a flower, a stylized umbel with stalks ribbing upward”; a reproduction of the drawing precedes the Asylum Poems-section in Solitary Pleasure. However, when one compares the poems themselves with the Asylum Poems in Nerves, it turns out that Solitary Pleasure reprints the Cape Goliard-edition of the poems, which Raymond Foye in his introduction to Selected Poems 1958-1984 calls the “first European edition”. While the differences between the two Angel Hair editions are negligible (I have not seen the Black Flag Raised-edition), about half of the Asylum Poems in Nerves were revised. Most of these changes are not very substantial, but some of them are and one wonders if the editor should not have pointed out that Solitary Pleasure, in spite of highlighting the Angel Hair-edition, reprints the Nerves-version.

Besides Asylum Poems,most of the other work in Solitary Pleasure has also been published before. What most readers will not yet have seen are a number of illustrations. Apart from a few pages from Fag Rag No. 5, Solitary Pleasure contains a reproduction of a handwritten letter to Robert Wilson which is not found in Yours Presently: The Selected Letters of John Wieners, and one of a letter to Barbara Guest which is included in that book. From Wieners himself there is a photo of the manuscript of a poem. Richard Porter also chose to reprint from the July 1965-edition of Fuck you: A Magazine of the Arts an advertisement for “John Wieners’ Orgasm Tonic”, probably made up and drawn by Fuck You-editor Ed Sanders. It is rather unfortunate that one needs a magnifying glass to make more sense of the advertisement and the pages from Fag Rag. The poems in the book were chosen from various volumes of Wieners’s poetry, including the little-known A New Book from Rome (2010) and an earlier Wieners volume published by Patricia Hope Scanlan, Strictly Illegal (2011). Solitary Pleasure also reprints passages from Wieners’s journals which were first published in 707 Scott Street (1996) and Stars Seen in Person. Still, some of these publications were rather ephemeral and are now out-of-print, which makes Solitary Pleasure another welcome publication.

Jaap van der Bent, 28 January 2024