TheEastVillage.com

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TheEastVillage.com

Quick time format of John Wieners reading. Other links on the page .

Doncha just love the way Wieners (the cool old geezer) takes off his glasses as he reads, or really takes them off, and puts 'em
back on.

that gesture is a verse in itself.

who said poetry is word

how about the words between

and

all the other things

we don't say

. Watch those Gestures _


once made a video tape that was broadcast __ in fact I made it in 1979 with my old friend John Pippus __ On some television show on cable __

it was called

WATCH THOSE GESTURES


its about 12 minutes max

it's me walking along some spot
a sort of edge as I walk toward the camera
it jumps two three maybe five times
bouncing me around toward the viewer
in synch sort of with this poem
I was reading
called All the Other Reeds .

Beats beats beats

All the other reeds lie down the street.

I am wearing a sort of blue raincoat
I look a bit down and out.

but not.
later that week we got very drunk
if we were not already very hung-over.

Drinking drunk and Poetry
in them days was commonplace
it was received opinion
you could say.

So many poets have alcoholic fathers __ in Canada. I remember P Lane telling me about all the poets whose fathers were alcoholic.
He forgot to note that so many poets are already alcoholic daddy or not.

But alcoholic or not,
there is a wound and lest the wound
become resentment
, let me call on Jean Genet



Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound, different in every case, which each man bears in himself, which he preserves, and into which he withdraws when he would quit the world for a temporary but authentic solitude.

From Genet's essay about Giacometti . Eng. Trans. 310 Selected Writings of Jean Genet

.

So why then call poetry a way of life,
it is more and less.
It is a way, a way of being, a situating in the world, a tilt of the head the heart, an angle.