JACOB’S PILLOW: America’s longest-running dance festival is also one of the country’s most respected, and its 70th season offers up an even better-than-usual mix of world premieres, superstar performers, and cutting-edge surprises out in the Berkshires. The opening gala, with guests including Al Hirschfeld, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Ann Carlson and David Parsons, gets things started on June 15; Baryshnikov sticks around to open the regular season with his White Oak Dance Project (June 19-23). Also look for a "Tribute to Katharine Dunham" (June 24); the New England premiere of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan (July 3-7); a world premiere by Rio de Janeiro’s Grupo Corpo (July 10-14); France’s Lyon Opera Ballet (July 17-21); old faves the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (July 25-28); Urban Bush Women (July 31–August 4); and the Mark Morris Dance Group (August 6-11). All performances take place at Jacob’s Pillow, 358 George Carter Road in Becket. Tickets for the season go on sale this Monday at 10 a.m.; call (413) 243-0745.
GLOBE JAZZ & BLUES FEST: The annual broadsheet-sponsored blowout returns June 15 through 23 with an excellent line-up highlighting newer tastes. The freebies include Luaka Bop’s Latin-tinged drum ’n’ bass group Si*Sé (outdoors at Copley Square on June 17); Delta-flavored electric-country-blues kids the North Mississippi All Stars (Copley Square, June 18); Medeski Martin & Wood sideman DJ Logic and his Project Logic (Copley Square, June 19); young-lion pianist Brad Mehldau (Copley Square, June 20); and a festival-closing Hatch Shell gig with Branford Marsalis and Nnenna Freelon on June 23. Also look for old faves Harry Connick Jr. (June 15) and Natalie Cole (June 21) at FleetBoston Pavilion; tickets for the Pavilion shows are on sale now through Ticketmaster. Call (617) 931-2000, or (617) 929-8756 for festival info.
NEXT WEEKEND:
John Wieners, 1934–2002
John Wieners, master American poet, died at Mass General Hospital late on the afternoon of March 1, and a memorial for him will be held at MIT next Thursday. Because John lay comatose and unidentified for five days and because he lived alone on Beacon Hill’s Joy Street for 30 years, it is tempting to write that he died a poet’s death, alone and neglected. But that would be wrong. John Wieners’s life ended in triumph. In his 1969 poem "Supplication," he asked poetry to "take this curse off/of early death and drugs." And poetry did just that.
John was born in Milton in 1934 and is buried there today. He had an Irish Catholic boyhood and a Catholic education through Boston College, from which he graduated in 1954. He sinned and suffered for it as only a religious man can, and he strayed from his church as only one who is indelibly marked with its traditions and beliefs can. He learned well the cursive script taught in St. Gregory’s grade school, and he wrote with a beautiful hand throughout his life poems imbued with his working-class origins and Boston, "the old brick city by the Atlantic." Actually, he wrote two very different kinds of poetry, both intensely lyrical, but as if he heard first one kind of music and then another.
After studying at Black Mountain College with Robert Duncan and Charles Olson in 1955 and 1956 and making a brief return to Boston, John settled in San Francisco. There he wrote his stunning first book, The Hotel Wentley Poems, a mere 17 pages, poems from 10 days in late June. His subjects are romantic — drugs, love, and madness — and he fulfills his pledge that "The poem/does not lie to us. We lie under/its law, alive in the glamour of this hour. . . . " In New York, Frank O’Hara recognized John’s achievement: "everybody here," he wrote in the poem "Les Luths," "is running around after dull pleasantries and/wondering if The Hotel Wentley Poems is as great as I say it is. . . . " Over the years a consensus built that O’Hara knew what he was talking about.
John’s writing life ran from 1958 to 1986 with comet-like brilliance and duration, at least as far as we know until a future editor looks over the sheafs of paper that he left behind at his death. The lyrics that began in the Hotel Wentley, a San Francisco haunt of the Beat Generation, continued hitting their Chet Baker–like soft, heartbreaking notes through the 1970 book Nerves. Then his work changed radically. Beginning with Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike, his poems became jangled and jittery and moved to a new logic. Readers had to follow him in "Looking for jazz, hearing love’s bellows/Beauty is mine, perhaps some day you shall find it." He said he wanted to write the most embarrassing things he could imagine. His early work liberated many readers into new realms of feeling; his late work gave them a fresh set of antennae through which to receive the world. Thanks to the exceptional editorial labors of Raymond Foye, both aspects of Wieners are on display in the Black Sparrow books Selected Poems 1958-1984 and Cultural Affairs in Boston: Poetry & Prose 1956-1985. The latter volume ends with the lines "I am curt by nature and dolorous./But I knew that if I worked hard I’d eventually make it." That John Wieners "made it" will be evident when 32 poets and musicians of widely different tastes and approaches to their art gather to salute the man and his example.
A memorial for John Wieners will be held next Thursday, May 2, at 7 p.m. in MIT Room 6-120, just off the Infinite Corridor that begins when you enter the Institute at 77 Massachusetts Avenue. Among the readers and musicians will be Ed Barrett, Frank Bidart, Damon & Naomi, James Dunn, Gerrit Lansing, Gail Mazur, Askold Melnyczuk, Ed Sanders, Charley Shively, Joseph Torra, Anne Waldman, and Elizabeth Willis. For more information, call (617) 253-7894.
BY WILLIAM CORBETT
