Remembering and celebrating John Wieners today on his birthday
From his reading at Sir George Williams University (SGWU, now Concordia University) Montreal, 1966 :
Remarks made prior to a reading of “The Imperatrice.“:
“”Ace of Pentacles” is a card in the Tarot deck, but the book should be called “Pente” which are the words that appeared 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 have as a frontispiece for the book William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweep,” the second version of that from the Songs of Experience, when he says that my mother and father have gone up to the church to pray, and they make a heaven of my misery. That kind of thing. But “The Imperatrice” is another card from the Tarot deck. It’s the third card of the deck.”
So Pente. Following disatisfaction with the original publishers (James F Carr and Robert Wilson and The Phoenix Bookstore), Pente – A Book of Woe is an amended (notably amended) second edition, amended according to John Wieners’ wishes as expressed in a letter dated 10 July 1966, which he inserted into his own copy of Ace of Pentacles and presented to his patron and sometime paramour, Panna Grady.
Panna Grady O’Connor (she went on to marry the maverick poet and author Philip O’Connor) gave the book to Stuart Montgomery of Fulcrum Press in London in 1966, who then, at Grady O’Connor’s request, give it to Patricia Hope Scanlan of Artery Editions, back in 2017 (Artery Editions had already published Strictly Illegal Poems (2011), poems by Wieners, art by Gilbert and George – selected and introduced by Jeremy Reed, with a biographical note by George F Butterick). Pente (with Reed’s encomium reprinted and an illuminating and essential introduction by Wieners scholar Michael Seth Stewart, alongside further biographical and bibliographical information), appeared from the press in 2022 (and in the US in 2023).
Stewart, noting the significant differences between Ace of Pentacles and Pente. (revealing Wieners’ “fertile and restless editing”):
“It (Wieners’ copy of Ace of Pentacles) 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 the new text written in), the later poems more heavily revised than the earlier ones”
Stewart again:
“As a long-time devotee of the sublime original, I am thrilled by this spectral edition which brings new sounds and senses into and out of the poems. It is rare to see an entire book recreated this way, not so much a revision, as a reimagining….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.”
Raymond Foye, Wieners’ editor writes:
“John Wieners stands with the greatest of visionary poets, and sixty years hence this book is as vital and important as the day it was released.Wieners always understood that a book of poems was an artwork of itself. The poems are the thoughts, the book is the mind. Pente – A Book of Woe, now restored to the poet’s precise intentions, is as definitive example of occult practice channeled into the medium of poetry as we are likely to have. It is the product of a milieu indelibly captured by Diane di Prima in her autobiography, Recollections of My Life as a Woman – which John Wieners moves through like an elegant specter. In his memorable dedication page, Wieners sets before us the spirit of the book in three of the most haunted and prophetic words he ever penned – FOR THE VOICES.”
Here‘s footage of the book’s October 2023 US (Brooklyn) launch
Ian Brinton reviews the volume – here