Another great book recommendation – Poet John Wieners‘ disjunctive lyrical classic,
Behind The State Capitol: Or Cincinnati Pike, first published by Boston’s Good Gay Poets Collective (most notably, via the energy of the much-missed Charley Shively) and sadly out of print, lo these many years, sees a re-publication by The Song Cave, in a 50th Anniversary edition. Publication day is today.
This new expanded edition is, thankfully, a facsimile edition, and contains valuable new afterwords by Wieners’s friend and scholar James Dunn and the poet’s biographer, Robert Dewhurst
The publishers write:
Behind the State Capitol: Or Cincinnati Pike is the record of a poet whose life has been shattered by poverty, drug addiction, and mental illness.Wieners created a complex schiz-analysis of language, capitalism, incarceration, and state power, while reflecting on unpopular themes of aging and loneliness in the gay world. It is also a paean for his beloved
city of Boston, as he witnessed its destruction by the onerous forces of urban renewal.
Already known as a “poet’s poet” from The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958), Ace of Pentacles (1964), and Nerves (1970), in 1972 Wieners moved to 44 Joy Street on Boston’s Beacon Hill, where he was involved with anti-war and gay rights movements, the Beacon Hill Free School, and organizations devoted to the rights of people with mental health conditions. Out of this milieu emerged Behind the State Capitol, described by its author as “cinema decoupages; verses, abbreviated prose insights.” The book would be John Wieners’s last major poetical statement. He was forty-one.
Behind the State Capitol has long enjoyed cult status. Considered by many to be his masterpiece, the book was met variously with indifference and outrage when it was published in 1975. In 1982, most remaining copies of the book were destroyed in the arson fire of the Fag Rag/Good Gay Poets offices.
David Grundy‘s “A Gay Presence – Publication and Revision in John Wieners’ Behind The State Capitol” gives a detailed account of the forces behind the book
Cedar Sigo‘s 2010 review of the original edition can be found here.
Sigo’s updated appraisal (along with appreciations by Eileen Myles and by James Dunn) is included in the recent Woodberry Poetry Room Boston BTSC celebration
There will be a celebratory reading at the Poetry Project in New York on November 17 – see here. The live feed on You Tube that night will be available – here
Here‘s John, courtesy the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, in 1973, “reading work from the time of Beyond The State Capitol”
& more John readings (early and late) – here
from Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée – Michael Kindellan and Alex/Rose Cocker‘s
Utter Vulnerability: Essays on the Poetry of John Wieners, “the first-ever book devoted exclusively to this extraordinary writer”.
“Featuring work by many of Wieners’ most articulate and passionate contemporary exponents”, the publishers write, “the essays gathered here consider the life, styles, aesthetics, and artistic achievements of one of America’s most original voices. From devoted close readings to socio-historical contextualisations, together our contributors explore a fascinating schedule of ideas and actualities of style, sexuality, queerness, mental illness, resilience, and commitment to continual literary (re)invention..”..(It is, indeed) “a significant moment in the unfinished history of Wieners’ critical reception.”
Celebrating John Wieners today