John Wieners

 

John Wieners died in 2002. This piece was published in the Boston College Magazine in the Northern Fall of 2000. It is reprinted here with permission. The piece is 4,700 words or about ten printed pages long. Photography by Gary W.Gilbert

John Wieners once wrote, ‘I will be an old man sometime / And live in a dark room somewhere.’ Today Wieners is an old man, but his small apartment on the far side of Beacon Hill — on Joy Street, where he has lived since 1971 — is not dark. It is bright and disorderly and crowded with visual evidence of a mind constantly shuffling perceptions: a kind of four-room, lived-in collage. One of his own books, an out-of-print paperback, lies open on a Formica-topped table, spine broken, lines of poetry crossed out and rewritten in pencil as if the literary choices he made 40 years ago still gnaw at him. When he pulls another of his works off a shelf its cover seems a palimpsest. The original artwork — a close-up of a woman’s face from an advertisement that Wieners eerily altered with tiny rips and tears — has been replaced with a magazine clipping Scotch-taped over the top. Peeling back the new image, which depicts a painting of a woman smoking before a mirror, to reveal the one below is like peering into the whirlpool of Wieners’s imagination. For him, publication is not the summit it is for most artists. No work is ever finished.       When asked if he uses his poems as bookmarks to his past, as ways of thinking back about places and people, Wieners squints, furrowing his forehead like a tilled field, and runs his hands through his two thick tufts of pale, graying hair. The motion makes him appear more bird-like than ever: a gentle hawk, perhaps, with narrowed eyes, a sharp, stubble-covered chin, and a paunch, absently smoking a cigarette. He draws a breath and replies that it is too painful to think so deeply. Besides, he says in a slow, thin voice, indicating a table littered with empty eggnog cartons and full ashtrays, stuffed underneath with old liquor bottles, ‘It takes up all the energy I have to save for housekeeping.’