Beginzone: 'There's Ridgeway Lane forever' (the message)

Before our January 6 interview with poet John Wieners on Beacon Hill, I called up an old friend, Bill Wellington, the night librarian and all around nice guy of the UMass–Dartmouth Library, to find out if he had a message to relay to poet Wieners … the connection is that of two young Beantown beatniks.

Bill playing his jazz up and down the coast, backing Billie and Bird, eventually having to give up the horn because of personal and medical reasons. The other, a shy young poet with a circle of dear friends in Beacon Hill, and Bill was one of them, scripting down and out scene-verse that caught the spirit of youth, the flailing passionate heartache of it all, moments of time strung together with words like pearls on string.

After the years have rolled into each other, the magical nights on the Hill become these stories, tales told to an attentive English Lit undergrad by a cool and raspy-voiced jazzman-turned-librarian, who returns to the poems of an old friend as evidence of the magic, the time gone by.

(BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MESSAGE?)

It’s a message of creativity, youth, of the human capacity to care deeply about the quality of another’s life, why some still hold the word, the idea — as sacred. Enjoy.