Event

Stars Seen in Person: A Tribute to John Wieners

Tue, Sep 8, 2015

7:00 PM

Please note: This event is located at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.

Celebrating the Life & Work of John Wieners and the release of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers’ Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Weiners (a joint venture with Lost & Found Elsewhere) and Wave Books’ Supplication: Selected Poems of John Weiners.

Featuring editors Michael Seth Stewart, Joshua Beckman, and Robert Dewhurst, along with special guests.

A contributor to Donald Allen’s seminal New American Poetry anthology, John Wieners was on the periphery of many of the twentieth century’s most important avant-garde poetry scenes, from Black Mountain and the Boston Renaissance to the New York School and the SF Renaissance. Having achieved cult status among poets, Wieners has also become known for the compelling nature of his journals, a mixture of early drafts of poems, prose fragments, lists, and other fascinating minutiae of the poet’s imagination. Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners collects four of his previously unpublished journals from the period between 1955 and 1969. The first journal depicts a young, openly gay, self-described “would-be poet” dashing around bohemian Boston with writer and artist friends, pre-drugs and pre-fame. By the last book, decimated by repeated institutionalizations (the first for drug-related psychosis, the rest the consequence of the first) and personal tragedies, Wieners is broken down and in great pain, but still writing honestly and with detail about the life he’s left with. These journals capture a post-war bohemian world that no longer exists, depicted through the prism of Wieners’ sense of glamour.

Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners:
Edited and Introduction by Michael Seth Stewart, Preface by Ammiel Alcalay, Published by City Lights

Cosponsored by City Lights Booksellers