The Blind See Only This World: Poems for John Weiners

This handsome volume is a conscious cross between anthology and tribute: more than 70 poets are represented by one poem each, ostensibly written to celebrate the vast, strange and irreducible spirit of Wieners' poetry and person. Wieners, who studied as a young man with Charles Olson at Black Mountain College before being championed by Ginsberg and O'Hara, has influenced a wide range of writers over the last 45 years, and the list of contributors to this book has an impressive range--John Ashbery, Fanny and Susan Howe, Thom Gunn, Nathaniel Mackey, to name a few--with a tilt towards Boston-area poets (Pressed Wafer is a new Boston-based publishing venture and Wieners is a longtime denizen of that city), and various New York School incarnations (Guest, Mayer, Godfrey, Padgett). Wieners has long been recognized in fugitive poetry circles as one of the first poets to take on homosexuality and mental illness as direct subjects (see The Hotel Wentley Poems, or Wieners' Selected Poems), and it shouldn't be a surprise that the poems that resound the most with Wieners' spirit are those written directly for him: ""I am not a poet/ because I live in the actual world I have no protection against/ the real evils and money/ which is the world/ where most lives are spent"" (Peter Gizzi's ""Poem for John Wieners""), or those written out of his influence: "" we dwell outside the city wall this winter/ stone cold in feeble sun, warmed/ only by the friction of world strife and embattled history"" (""Rome,"" Ed Dorn). The eclectic array of writers serves Wieners well, despite the somewhat disconnected arrangement of the work alphabetically by poet, and the inclusion of several poems, mostly by younger writers, that seem oddly out of sync with Wiener's assessment of his own poetics: ""I try to write the most embarrassing thing I can think of."" Nevertheless, this brisk, entertaining collection should point readers towards Wieners's own luminous and underappreciated body of work. (July)