Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners

"Like Rimbaud in , or Baudelaire with , there's an unguarded spark and trust in John Wieners because impulse and imagination reign supreme. In 1955 he writes, "I shall try the only true thing I want to do. I shall go to my poems." Predating , moving through , and ushering us into his life before , further illuminates John as our future/former best unkept secret."— "Thanks to Michael Seth Stewart’s editorial legerdemain, at long last we have the magnificent John Wieners here before us, in his full undressed splendor: poet, stargazer, philosopher, shaman, flâneur, survivor. His journals––an inspiring monument, filled with taut provocations and purple illuminations––are valuable as cultural history, as lyric performance, as uninhibited autobiography, and as a motley, genre-defying epitome of aesthetic possibilities that seem as fresh and enticing as anything being dreamt up today."— "These pages of notebooks and poetry—so exhaustively exhumed and returned to light and breath—are equivalent to Rilke's , but in reverse. John Wieners (forever young) evolved through his prose notes towards a sustained poetics of adolescence, holding that tormented phase on a long unyielding band-wave, resisting the sop of adult living with all his might and undergoing the inevitable punishments that such persistence brings."— "John Wieners remains one of the best poets of my generation. His work & life continue to influence younger poets. These journals reveal his deep commitment to poetry & the poem; they contextualize his constant questing & devotion to the art. I knew John during many of the periods his journals cover &, as always, remain amazed & moved by his deeply examined honesty & purity."— studied with Charles Olson at Black Mountain College, and later edited the small magazine . He lived for a year and a half in San Francisco, where he wrote his breakthrough book, (1958). In the early seventies he settled into an apartment on Boston's Beacon Hill, where he lived and wrote until his death in 2002.