Boston encompasses a broad cartography including sections of western Massachusetts, childhood homes in Cambridge & Somerville, high school in the woods of Southborough, parts of the upper Cape, the highway threading Providence, Fall River and New Bedford, the gravity that’s drawn me back on so many occasions since I first left in 1975. I’ve recently been thinking that my poetry is obsessed with self & place, a register of landscapes and their effect on my language. How locations reverberate with personal significance, the loops in time that bend into each other’s orbits, conflating decades into single points.
I sat at the edge of a forest in Chapel Hill a couple days ago to drink coffee and read Ed Barrett’s new book Kevin White (Boston: Pressed Wafer, 2007). A series of prose poems centered around Boston, it’s populated by various figures from the city’s cultural, political, sports and criminal worlds, including Nomar Garciaparra, Fanny Howe, John Wieners and the title figure, who served as mayor from 1968 until 1984. Virgil and Hölderlin can be found in these pages as well, part of a vivid cast of ghosts and images populating this landscape portrait.
In some ways reminiscent of his previous effort to evoke Boston in the first section of Rub Out (Pressed Wafer, 2003), Barrett writes through the city, as though channeling a wide swath of its history, ghosts and idiosyncrasies. Organized into nine sections of short prose poems, the reader is borne into the city as early 21st century palimpsest, long since faded from its colonial and transcendentalist epochs, weighted with various layers of historical, ethnic and national signifiers. Barrett’s poems draw a city he wasn’t born in but which claims him nonetheless:
“Why did I feel like Boston was the real world when I grew up in Brooklyn in so many different neighborhoods and around so many different kinds of people and felt more Jewish than Irish Catholic? ” (63)
The figures that flow in and out of the poems of Kevin White serve as the equivalent of Catholic saints, sometimes talismanic, at others incomprehensible yet beautiful. An introductory note refers to visions John Wieners had of the Virgin Mary, serving as a psychic map for the reader to consider while navigating. It’s through points in the landscape and specific people that Barrett momentarily conveys a living, contradictory and vital entity:
“The soul is a Boston of spoken words carved inside a chest of tea, sudden languages without information off Dorchester Bay.” (47)
Barrett has chosen his saints well, and they provide a shifting cast of characters whose voices inhabit a dissolving city continuously brought back into focus by the beauty of these poems. For anyone who’s spent time in Boston, an array of specific and recognizable details emerge, transformed into a glowing strangeness. Barret’s Boston isn’t idealized, its essential violence, underworlds, provincialism, its phantasmal quality are all included here. But what moves one to reread the book is the tangible, eloquent blocks of prose mapping the city: mystical (transcendental), graced with common sense and a tough wit. The Burger King down the street from John Wieners’s apartment in Beacon Hill, one of the places he liked to frequent, is alluded to during a moment when the poet has returned to stand with the author and his publisher Bill Corbett next to a dumpster. A city of poets, momentarily:
“Just then the soul of John Wieners stood beside us and when he picked up the Burger King crown and set it on his courtly brow, you could see that it wasn’t paper at all, but the live body of a blue-claw crab, its shell delicately balancing on top of John’s bald spot, its legs in the air like a Boston prostitute, and in each of its needley pincers a birthday candle glowing in the blue smoke of the Virgin Mary’s cigarette. ” (78)
Showing posts with label John Wieners. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Wieners. Show all posts
2.02.2007
"A middle class voice from a telephone book"
I saw John Wieners (1934-2002) read his poetry on at least two occasions in Boston. The first time was at the Old West Church in the spring of 1997. The next time was that fall, at a reading with Fanny Howe that Jim Behrle organized at Waterstone's Bookstore. On both occasions, Wieners read in a distinct manner that managed to alienate some audience members, but completely won me over, combining seemingly disjointed comments about the poems he was reading, interruptions to gloss the weather outside, Massachusetts news, reflections on old friends, Boston characters & places, or observations on the reading itself. I remember him reaching into his pockets and bag to pull out newspaper clippings he read from, pausing to breathe and mumble inaudible comments to himself, pulling his glasses off repeatedly, rubbing his eyes, then returning to the poem at hand, all these interruptions performed as fluid extensions of the poem. At Waterstone's, the poem he began with was "Ode on a Common Fountain" from his 1964 book Ace of Pentacles. Part of the drama of those readings was wondering if he was going to finish the poems or trail off into silence.
At Waterstone's he read for about 15 minutes, and while he read many people in the audience seemed uncomfortable with his interruptions and pauses. At Old West Church, he stopped to comment on Allen Ginsberg's recent passing, and read his friend's late poem "Fun House Antique Store" (from Cosmopolitan Greetings). Both times, I watched him read with the weight of literary history on my mind, knowing of him as the legendary poet who composed The Hotel Wentley Poems, and whose journals from San Francisco in the late 1950s had just been published by Sun & Moon Press as 707 Scott Street (in my view, his best book). So, his anarchic reading style didn't cause any discomfort in me, it merely reinforced my view of his work as being profoundly based on improvisation and performance, allowing for the poet's voice to be influenced by the time and place of composition.
Wieners was kind enough to sit down for an interview with me in the summer of 1997 at his apartment on Beacon Hill's Joy Street. During that hour-long conversation, he employed a similar approach to my questions as I saw during his poetry readings. He never quite answered my admittedly amateurish questions, instead commenting on the sounds coming in off the street, memories he had of fellow poets and friends, or witty observations ("You look like a young Fidel Castro," he said to me at one point), all while smoking an endless supply of Pall Mall cigarettes. One of the friends he mentioned several times was Charles Olson, who he referred to as a "mighty magus stratus," crediting him with teaching him everything he knew about poetry. When I mentioned how much I had enjoyed reading 707 Scott Street, he said he was surprised anyone found value in those old notebooks. He seemed both pleased and startled that I would consider that book anything other than a relic from a distant era. I take that self-effacing attitude toward his own work as evidence of his genuine humility and politeness.
This connection to Olson is clear to me in two ways. One, in that both poets displayed a fierce allegiance to their respective cities, Boston and Gloucester, making them the focus of their poetics. And secondly, Olson's now-famous reading/lecture at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 seems to be a model for how Wieners approached his own poetry readings, at least during the the two times I saw him read in Boston. Poetry was for him a living, dynamic state of being, more important than publication or the recognition of critics & scholars. Poetry should be lived and experienced on a daily basis, unfiltered.
In her book Career Moves (Wisconsin, 2000), Libbie Rifkin devotes an entire chapter to analyzing Charles Olson's chaotic and controversial performance in Berkeley, which was viewed by some as a drunken rant and by others as an original fusion of self and poem via the spoken word. Rifkin quotes the following excerpt from the audio transcript of Olson at Berkeley:
OLSON: No, I wanna talk. I mean, you wanna listen to...a poet? I mean, you know, like, a poet, when he's alive, whether he talks or reads you his poems is the same thing. (SLAPS TABLE)
VOICE: RIGHT!
OLSON: Dig That! (APPLAUSE). And when he – and when he – and when he is made of three parts, his life, his mouth and his poem, then, by god, the earth belongs to us. And like – and what I think has happened is that that's – wow, gee, hmm, one doesn't like to claim things, but god, isn't it exciting? I mean, at least I'm – I mean, I can, I feel like a kid. I'm in the presence of an event, which I don't believe, myself.
You can see this same conception of the poet and his work as an event to be experienced, not merely read, in Wieners's piece "Lisbon Indian Summer," which was composed specifically for a conference he attended in Maine in 2000. What makes Wieners so relevant to me is his dismissal of the protocol that surrounds poetry readings, with their banal and self-serving routines. His approach to reading poetry aloud is diametrically opposed to the careerist self-absorption one finds in so many poets, whether they be self-proclaimed renegades or self-important scholars. I can't think of anything more distasteful than poets who consider their work in terms of its cultural capital, as measured in publications, readings and influence. I find Wieners's humility infinitely more useful and inspiring. In his funny, self-aware millenial poem, "Lisbon Indian Summer," Wieners writes:
Between Diction and Dance
I thought I'd call my reading
A middle class voice from a telephone book
Because I'm old now
and finally attained that grace from the dime.
At Waterstone's he read for about 15 minutes, and while he read many people in the audience seemed uncomfortable with his interruptions and pauses. At Old West Church, he stopped to comment on Allen Ginsberg's recent passing, and read his friend's late poem "Fun House Antique Store" (from Cosmopolitan Greetings). Both times, I watched him read with the weight of literary history on my mind, knowing of him as the legendary poet who composed The Hotel Wentley Poems, and whose journals from San Francisco in the late 1950s had just been published by Sun & Moon Press as 707 Scott Street (in my view, his best book). So, his anarchic reading style didn't cause any discomfort in me, it merely reinforced my view of his work as being profoundly based on improvisation and performance, allowing for the poet's voice to be influenced by the time and place of composition.
Wieners was kind enough to sit down for an interview with me in the summer of 1997 at his apartment on Beacon Hill's Joy Street. During that hour-long conversation, he employed a similar approach to my questions as I saw during his poetry readings. He never quite answered my admittedly amateurish questions, instead commenting on the sounds coming in off the street, memories he had of fellow poets and friends, or witty observations ("You look like a young Fidel Castro," he said to me at one point), all while smoking an endless supply of Pall Mall cigarettes. One of the friends he mentioned several times was Charles Olson, who he referred to as a "mighty magus stratus," crediting him with teaching him everything he knew about poetry. When I mentioned how much I had enjoyed reading 707 Scott Street, he said he was surprised anyone found value in those old notebooks. He seemed both pleased and startled that I would consider that book anything other than a relic from a distant era. I take that self-effacing attitude toward his own work as evidence of his genuine humility and politeness.
This connection to Olson is clear to me in two ways. One, in that both poets displayed a fierce allegiance to their respective cities, Boston and Gloucester, making them the focus of their poetics. And secondly, Olson's now-famous reading/lecture at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 seems to be a model for how Wieners approached his own poetry readings, at least during the the two times I saw him read in Boston. Poetry was for him a living, dynamic state of being, more important than publication or the recognition of critics & scholars. Poetry should be lived and experienced on a daily basis, unfiltered.
In her book Career Moves (Wisconsin, 2000), Libbie Rifkin devotes an entire chapter to analyzing Charles Olson's chaotic and controversial performance in Berkeley, which was viewed by some as a drunken rant and by others as an original fusion of self and poem via the spoken word. Rifkin quotes the following excerpt from the audio transcript of Olson at Berkeley:
OLSON: No, I wanna talk. I mean, you wanna listen to...a poet? I mean, you know, like, a poet, when he's alive, whether he talks or reads you his poems is the same thing. (SLAPS TABLE)
VOICE: RIGHT!
OLSON: Dig That! (APPLAUSE). And when he – and when he – and when he is made of three parts, his life, his mouth and his poem, then, by god, the earth belongs to us. And like – and what I think has happened is that that's – wow, gee, hmm, one doesn't like to claim things, but god, isn't it exciting? I mean, at least I'm – I mean, I can, I feel like a kid. I'm in the presence of an event, which I don't believe, myself.
You can see this same conception of the poet and his work as an event to be experienced, not merely read, in Wieners's piece "Lisbon Indian Summer," which was composed specifically for a conference he attended in Maine in 2000. What makes Wieners so relevant to me is his dismissal of the protocol that surrounds poetry readings, with their banal and self-serving routines. His approach to reading poetry aloud is diametrically opposed to the careerist self-absorption one finds in so many poets, whether they be self-proclaimed renegades or self-important scholars. I can't think of anything more distasteful than poets who consider their work in terms of its cultural capital, as measured in publications, readings and influence. I find Wieners's humility infinitely more useful and inspiring. In his funny, self-aware millenial poem, "Lisbon Indian Summer," Wieners writes:
Between Diction and Dance
I thought I'd call my reading
A middle class voice from a telephone book
Because I'm old now
and finally attained that grace from the dime.
1.05.2007
A poem for record players
I'm honored to find that Jacinta Escudos has written the first review of my Caracas Notebook at her blog. She notes that portions of my texts and my sister's photographs remind her of the San Salvador of her childhood, the conflicted ties one can have with the idea of home. Jacinta's blog is one of the reasons I appreciate the internet, her prose a model of what the Spanish language can enact, whether in her fiction or her autobiographical ruminations and literary criticism.
*
In some ways, the iPod can be for a poet what the radio was for Orpheus in Cocteau's film. I think of this in relation to how John Wieners begins The Hotel Wentley Poems (which I've just re-read today in the marvelous pirate edition recently published in Boston by Joy Street Press):
All dull details
I can only describe to you,
but which are here and
I hear and shall never
give up again, shall carry
with me over the streets
of this seacoast city,
forever; oh clack your
metal wings, god, you are
mine now in the morning.
("A poem for record players")
One hovers and thrives around certain texts, for years and years. When I read Wieners I'm returned to the Athenaeum library in Providence, where I checked out his Selected Poems in 1996. I had read him before then, but for some reason it wasn't until that moment that I suddenly realized the allegiance I feel toward his work.
What sparked me to find his books in the library was a brief exchange I had with a customer when I worked at the (now defunct) College Hill Bookstore. A Brown undergrad came in looking to see if we had any books by Wieners. We didn't carry them so he decided to put in a special order, which I wrote up for him. Unlike so many Brown undergrads who came into the store, he was polite and unpretentious. With his long brown hair and serious expression, he somehow reminded me of myself or my brother. The exchange probably lasted about 10 minutes and I never saw him again. In 2000 I came across his obituary. He had died from a heroin overdose in New York, just barely out of college. His name was Raphael de Rothschild, part of the famous family. His query that evening, for whatever reason, made me go to the library that week and check out Selected Poems: 1958-1984. I'm grateful to him for having led me, unknowingly, to the poems of John Wieners.
*
In some ways, the iPod can be for a poet what the radio was for Orpheus in Cocteau's film. I think of this in relation to how John Wieners begins The Hotel Wentley Poems (which I've just re-read today in the marvelous pirate edition recently published in Boston by Joy Street Press):
All dull details
I can only describe to you,
but which are here and
I hear and shall never
give up again, shall carry
with me over the streets
of this seacoast city,
forever; oh clack your
metal wings, god, you are
mine now in the morning.
("A poem for record players")
One hovers and thrives around certain texts, for years and years. When I read Wieners I'm returned to the Athenaeum library in Providence, where I checked out his Selected Poems in 1996. I had read him before then, but for some reason it wasn't until that moment that I suddenly realized the allegiance I feel toward his work.
What sparked me to find his books in the library was a brief exchange I had with a customer when I worked at the (now defunct) College Hill Bookstore. A Brown undergrad came in looking to see if we had any books by Wieners. We didn't carry them so he decided to put in a special order, which I wrote up for him. Unlike so many Brown undergrads who came into the store, he was polite and unpretentious. With his long brown hair and serious expression, he somehow reminded me of myself or my brother. The exchange probably lasted about 10 minutes and I never saw him again. In 2000 I came across his obituary. He had died from a heroin overdose in New York, just barely out of college. His name was Raphael de Rothschild, part of the famous family. His query that evening, for whatever reason, made me go to the library that week and check out Selected Poems: 1958-1984. I'm grateful to him for having led me, unknowingly, to the poems of John Wieners.
9.26.2006
The Acts of Youth
John Wieners (1934-2002)
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.
For in this country it is terror, poverty awaits; or
am I a marked man, my life to be a lesson
or experience to those young who would trod
the same path, without God
unless he be one of justice, to wreack vengance
on the acts committed while young under un-
due influence or circumstance. Oh I have
always seen my life as drama, patterned
after those who met with disaster or doom.
Is my mind being taken away me.
I have been over the abyss before. What
is that ringing in my ears that tells me
all is nigh, is naught but the roaring of the winter wind.
Woe to those homeless who are out on this night.
Woe to those crimes committed from which we
can walk away unharmed.
So I turn on the light
And smoke rings rise in the air.
Do not think of the future; there is none.
But the formula all great art is made of.
Pain and suffering. Give me the strength
to bear it, to enter those places where the
great animals are caged. And we can live
at peace by their side. A bride to the burden
that no god imposes but knows we have the means
to sustain its force unto the end of our days.
For that is what we are made for; for that
we are created. Until the dark hours are done.
And we rise again in the dawn.
Infinite particles of the divine sun, now
worshipped in the pitches of the night.
Ace of Pentacles (1964)
[To hear a reading of this poem in NYC in 1990, scroll down to # 21.]
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.
For in this country it is terror, poverty awaits; or
am I a marked man, my life to be a lesson
or experience to those young who would trod
the same path, without God
unless he be one of justice, to wreack vengance
on the acts committed while young under un-
due influence or circumstance. Oh I have
always seen my life as drama, patterned
after those who met with disaster or doom.
Is my mind being taken away me.
I have been over the abyss before. What
is that ringing in my ears that tells me
all is nigh, is naught but the roaring of the winter wind.
Woe to those homeless who are out on this night.
Woe to those crimes committed from which we
can walk away unharmed.
So I turn on the light
And smoke rings rise in the air.
Do not think of the future; there is none.
But the formula all great art is made of.
Pain and suffering. Give me the strength
to bear it, to enter those places where the
great animals are caged. And we can live
at peace by their side. A bride to the burden
that no god imposes but knows we have the means
to sustain its force unto the end of our days.
For that is what we are made for; for that
we are created. Until the dark hours are done.
And we rise again in the dawn.
Infinite particles of the divine sun, now
worshipped in the pitches of the night.
Ace of Pentacles (1964)
[To hear a reading of this poem in NYC in 1990, scroll down to # 21.]
9.26.2003
A Visit w/ John Wieners
In 1997 I was living in Providence. My father was working in Quincy that year and I used to come up for the weekends to see him. I'd gotten a chance to go & see John Wieners read at the Old West Church and at Waterstone's Books (w/ Fanny Howe) around the same time. On both occasions I had been amazed and inspired by his approach to reading. In between the lines of his poems he would intersperce comments, memories elicited by certain words, references to friends in the audience, newspaper clippings, pieces of paper and moments of silence as he looked at the audience or took off his glasses & put them on again.
I spoke with him briefly at Old West Church and he told me to stop by for a visit sometime. I took him up on his offer a few months later and showed up unannounced at his apartment on Beacon Hill. I had wanted to talk with him because his poems had revealed so much to me (and still do). I was also there to interview him for a friend's poetry magazine (which ended up never publishing). But all I had brought with me was a pen & notebook, so I wasn't able to keep up with everything we talked about. I remember his kindness as a host and how he patiently answered my dull questions with a smile and plenty of anecdotes about his travels.
The "interview" I wrote up later that month is what follows. Thank you to Julien Poirier and Marisol Limon Martinez for publishing it in New York Nights.
*
In the summer of 1997 I interviewed John Wieners at his apartment on Joy Street. He had windows opened to the rainy gusts off Charles River, offered me a glass of water and wandered in speech over the next hour, smoking Kent cigarettes. I didn’t have a tape recorder & mainly wrote in notebook unable to keep up with divergent stories and black & white film vignettes, Ella Fitzgerald music, newspaper clippings (one photograph showed four Native American children smiling, “they’re angels”), a typed list of graduates from Black Mountain College displayed.
Having gone to Boston College, he received a scholarship for Black Mountain, taking a train from South Station in the summer of 1955 or 1956, his first time out of Massachusetts (other than Cape Cod and New York City): “I loved it there, the lakes and paths and mountain lodges…being away from a too incessant love affair.” He took workshops with Robert Duncan and “the mighty magus stratus Charles Olson”—drama workshops, studio production of plays.
In 1962-1963 lived in New York’s Lower East Side, for a while with poet Stephen Jonas but “we found each other intolerable due to amphetamine.” At that point he was oriented toward modern jazz, while there was much going on in the academic world. He worked at the Milton Public Library. Also had jobs at Filene’s in Downtown Crossing, books at the Lamont Library and Measure’s three issues. Through Olson attended graduate school at SUNY Buffalo for a masters, four years living off campus, reading John Ashbery in Connecticut along with Robert Creeley, Paul Metcalf spoke of “transcendental meditations”—found their work an inspiration. Received a Guggenheim grant, money allowed travel because “yes I always wanted to travel, even as a young boy.”
Did he keep a notebook or journal? He said not anymore, I’m past my prime. I published my best work in the 1960s and 70s. No poems now, just reading is enough. Writing taxes the brain too much. On his bookshelf were poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, H.D., Allen Ginsberg’s Cosmopolitan Greetings, Quentin Crisp, The Postmoderns anthology, his own Black Sparrow Selected Poems: 1958-1984 in hardcover, newspapers and magazines on the table and floor. As he handed me the glass of water he wondered if Shirley Temple had anything to do with Black Mountain College. He referred to “a wild Bob Kaufman poet” living like me in Providence, then said Bob Kaufman’s work was too far out for him to read and that Ginsberg was less obnoxious the older he got: “Of course, Allen overworked himself. He worked himself to death. He never let up one minute.”
I asked him to sign a copy of 707 Scott Street—he said that book reminded him of a time when he was living in various poverty-stricken San Francisco apartments. He had now been on Joy Street for twenty-five years. Having told him about my family’s departure from Boston in 1976, inscribed: “the author / Jacky Wieners/ August 29 Summer / All best wishes and sincerity yours / Home after a long journey.” Of his work he said: “The poem is not the measure of the man, anyway.”
I spoke with him briefly at Old West Church and he told me to stop by for a visit sometime. I took him up on his offer a few months later and showed up unannounced at his apartment on Beacon Hill. I had wanted to talk with him because his poems had revealed so much to me (and still do). I was also there to interview him for a friend's poetry magazine (which ended up never publishing). But all I had brought with me was a pen & notebook, so I wasn't able to keep up with everything we talked about. I remember his kindness as a host and how he patiently answered my dull questions with a smile and plenty of anecdotes about his travels.
The "interview" I wrote up later that month is what follows. Thank you to Julien Poirier and Marisol Limon Martinez for publishing it in New York Nights.
*
In the summer of 1997 I interviewed John Wieners at his apartment on Joy Street. He had windows opened to the rainy gusts off Charles River, offered me a glass of water and wandered in speech over the next hour, smoking Kent cigarettes. I didn’t have a tape recorder & mainly wrote in notebook unable to keep up with divergent stories and black & white film vignettes, Ella Fitzgerald music, newspaper clippings (one photograph showed four Native American children smiling, “they’re angels”), a typed list of graduates from Black Mountain College displayed.
Having gone to Boston College, he received a scholarship for Black Mountain, taking a train from South Station in the summer of 1955 or 1956, his first time out of Massachusetts (other than Cape Cod and New York City): “I loved it there, the lakes and paths and mountain lodges…being away from a too incessant love affair.” He took workshops with Robert Duncan and “the mighty magus stratus Charles Olson”—drama workshops, studio production of plays.
In 1962-1963 lived in New York’s Lower East Side, for a while with poet Stephen Jonas but “we found each other intolerable due to amphetamine.” At that point he was oriented toward modern jazz, while there was much going on in the academic world. He worked at the Milton Public Library. Also had jobs at Filene’s in Downtown Crossing, books at the Lamont Library and Measure’s three issues. Through Olson attended graduate school at SUNY Buffalo for a masters, four years living off campus, reading John Ashbery in Connecticut along with Robert Creeley, Paul Metcalf spoke of “transcendental meditations”—found their work an inspiration. Received a Guggenheim grant, money allowed travel because “yes I always wanted to travel, even as a young boy.”
Did he keep a notebook or journal? He said not anymore, I’m past my prime. I published my best work in the 1960s and 70s. No poems now, just reading is enough. Writing taxes the brain too much. On his bookshelf were poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, H.D., Allen Ginsberg’s Cosmopolitan Greetings, Quentin Crisp, The Postmoderns anthology, his own Black Sparrow Selected Poems: 1958-1984 in hardcover, newspapers and magazines on the table and floor. As he handed me the glass of water he wondered if Shirley Temple had anything to do with Black Mountain College. He referred to “a wild Bob Kaufman poet” living like me in Providence, then said Bob Kaufman’s work was too far out for him to read and that Ginsberg was less obnoxious the older he got: “Of course, Allen overworked himself. He worked himself to death. He never let up one minute.”
I asked him to sign a copy of 707 Scott Street—he said that book reminded him of a time when he was living in various poverty-stricken San Francisco apartments. He had now been on Joy Street for twenty-five years. Having told him about my family’s departure from Boston in 1976, inscribed: “the author / Jacky Wieners/ August 29 Summer / All best wishes and sincerity yours / Home after a long journey.” Of his work he said: “The poem is not the measure of the man, anyway.”
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