The intensity or, as Bill Berkson would have it in his Afterword to A Book From Rome, “The purity of commitment and intimation is unbroken, true to what one might call informed sources taken at their word.” Joining John Wieners’s inside status to the hyper, untraceable movement throughout Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike is what makes that book so dangerously on point politically. The tone is one of whispering something obvious, almost dumb and chatty all the while the words form a strict alley that is filed to a point as you continue down, “A sense of after dinner addresses much as a mistress of ceremonies at a state smoker might say running down a back stairs to the maid with the head of John The Baptist in a bedpan.”¹

                                                            Love, Cedar


¹Appendix B: "Charley Shively Interviews John Wieners (1973/7)" in Wieners, John. Selected Poems: 1958-1984. (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1998).