Articles - December 2012

Projecting Amy Lowell

Olsonian poetics of the body in Rosmarie Waldrop's 'A Form / of Taking / It All'

Anne Dewey

Charles Olson’s body-based poetics becomes an influential source for women poets attempting to redefine feminist projects after the 1960s. As Kim Whitehead’s Feminist Poetry Movement shows, much writing inspired by second-wave feminism draws on liberal models of selfhood and political recognition, viewing women’s “confession” of private experiences as the basis for the empathy and solidarity that form collective public identity.

December 24, 2012

'To find out for yourself'

Maximus at Gloucester High School

James Cook

Eyes in the polis

Where are you from? Where do you live now? What are your haunts? And what do people say about those places? Does it depend on who you ask? What’s their agenda? Who tells you what it means to be from your hometown or to live where you do? What do you know about these places? And how do you know? And what do you have to say about it?

December 24, 2012

'The most beautiful and truest'

Collecting the letters of John Wieners

Seth Stewart

Like many (most?) of us, I fell in love with the poetry of John Wieners the minute I plunged into The Hotel Wentley Poems, its palpable ache and epic scope — I was knocked out by this twenty-four-year-old lyric poet in a rundown hotel making the beyond-audacious declaration that he was “taking away / from God his sound.” I read the poems in rapid succession, then again and again, slower each time.

December 24, 2012

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

Steve Prygoda

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.

December 24, 2012

'Nor … ever some place else': Wieners in Boston

Ruth Lepson
John Wieners at his last public reading in February 2002 (still from a video by Derek Fenner).

To backtrack to the beginning of Robert Creeley’s preface to John Wieners’s “Cultural Affairs in Boston,” which about sums it up:

December 24, 2012