WANTING THE IMPOSSIBLE: JOHN WIENERS
Return me to the men who teach
and above all, cure the hurts of wanting the impossible through this suspended vacuum.
This quotation turned up today on an old Facebook post of mine, indicating my lasting love of the phrase “wanting the impossible/through this suspended vacuum” and triggering a sudden—I hope irrational—fear that the poetry of John Wieners might be forgotten amid the deluge of change our culture is experiencing now. Coming as the last words of “Supplication,” a three-quatrain invocation to Poetry itself published in 1969, the quote captures the acute pain of isolation we are suffering from today. Indeed, desiring the embrace of distant teachers and loved ones in the midst of the pandemic seems like an instance of “wanting the impossible” through a time of uncertain length, our “suspended vacuum.”
Those not yet acquainted with Wieners’ work should read him for the directness of his language, his passion, and the measured rhythms of his verse. You can feel the excitement that I and other poets of my generation felt by reading the poet’s extraordinary sequence “The Hotel Wentley Poems” in this photo of their first publication in the form of a thin, staple-bound chapbook.
A child of Black Mountain poetry, Wieners brought an intense, homoerotic lyricism to that revolutionary style. One major dictum of the Black Mountain poets was that lines of verse should be as long as the breath of the poet speaking them—that much and no more—and you can see that practice employed to powerful effect by Wieners in this line break: “and above all, cure the/hurts of wanting the impossible.” By halting strangely at the word “the” and then landing heavily on “hurts” (I can hear a short pause between these two words) the speaker expresses the sadness and longstanding pain that’s made it extremely hard for him to reveal his wounds.
The dark power of this bewitching poet can also be felt here and here. Long may his memory last.