John Wieners — USA: Poetry, NET Outtakes Series: July, 1965

The Poetry Center presents John Wieners, reading his poems from Ace of Pentacles (James F. Carr and Robert A. Wilson, 1964) and The Hotel Wentley Poems (The Auerhahn Press, 1958), and engaging in conversation with Robert Duncan. The poets appear in front of the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park, then in the fire-scarred room of the former Hotel Wentley, on Polk Street, in which Wieners eight years before had written in one week his series of poems bearing the hotel's name. Wieners was in San Francisco to attend the Berkeley Poetry Conference at UC Berkeley this same month, and the film marks his first return to San Francisco after leaving for New York, then Boston, shortly after composing the poems of that first brief book. 

Note: This film was previously incorporated into a 2015 presentation at The Poetry Center by Robert Dewhurst and Michael Seth Stewart. It appears here on its own as streaming video for the first time. 

The "Second Edition" NET Outtakes Series programs were made in 1978 by The Poetry Center's American Poetry Archives staff. Assembled from unused 16-millimeter black and white film footage shot during production of the original 15-minute USA: Poetry television programs (produced in 1965–66 for National Educational Television by Richard O. Moore of the film unit of KQED-TV, San Francisco), the outtakes footage is arranged here in the original shooting sequence. Note, some silent footage appears among the outtakes. Funding for The Poetry Center's NET Outtakes Series was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Publisher
American Poetry Archives
Location
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
The Hotel Wentley, San Francisco
Date
1965-07-XX
Event Run Time
00:29:52
Contributors
Robert Duncan
Rights

©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.

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John Wieners reads his poem "Cocaine" and speaks in response to Robert Duncan on the provenance and sources of the poem. He then reads a portion of "Ode on a Common Fountain," which opens his book Ace of Pentacles. Wieners remarks: "It's hard to find a poem to read in the daylight. In this volume anyway." 

They discuss John Keats, Charles Baudelaire, and Wieners' desire to write songs, including his attempt to sing Billie Holiday songs onto tape and his disappointment with the "keening voice" he heard. 

"I was warned in Rome not to go to the East," says Wieners. They go on to speak of Charles Olson and his sense of "how to dance sitting down." Wieners speaks of the "reinforcement of faith" he found in Rome. They return at intervals to ideas of "the East" and its regard in the romantic imagination.  

Wieners speaks of his visit to Italy (to attend the Spoleto Festival of the Arts, with Charles Olson and others). Duncan speaks of "the lure of language...and the feeling of being carried away by things" and to Wieners' former presence in San Francisco, his idea of the city echoing the poet's loneliness. Wieners proposes a poem that "has loneliness in it that doesn't have that darkness" and reads: "Let the heart's pain slack off..." 

Wieners notes that the actual Hotel Wentley has been burned ("now the windowshades blow in the wind") and says in response to Duncan's querying that "the disclosures are up to us to make, and if we don't we become wrecks, or structures." Wieners proposes he read "At Big Sur" and does so.

The scene changes, with the two poets presented in Wieners' former room, now wasted by fire, at The Hotel Wentley. He reads from "A Poem for Painters" and describes the scene of artist Robert LaVigne drawing Wieners in that room. Wieners speaks of the "night palace, where psyche comes to dwell...." and further illuminates that key poem of his first book. 

The audio portion of the film concludes with Wieners reading a fragment, concluding with "the world revealed in a word." 

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