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Boston Eagles
John Wieners, Lee Harwood,
Lewis Warsh, William Corbett
interviews by Kevin Ring
With the help of writer Iain Sinclair I was able
to contact English poet Lee Harwood who lives on
England’s South Coast. I wanted to ask Lee about a
photograph I’d seen in The Lewis Warsh issue of the
American small press magazine Mimeo/Mimeo,
published by James Birmingham and Kyle Schlesinger.
The photo dates from 1972 and features Lee
Harwood, Lewis Warsh, Bill Corbett and the late John
Wieners. As you can see, it captures Wieners in a
seemingly positive frame of mind. The picture is
taken at Walden Pond. It is a winter’s day, I’m led to
believe. Intrigued, I asked Lee Harwood about his
recollections of the day the picture was taken by
Judith Walker. (Lee Harwood’s second wife). But, let
Lee Harwood relate his recollections, “It was in the
winter of 1972/73. From left to right it’s John
Wieners, me, Lewis Warsh and William Corbett.
We’re standing by a frozen Walden Pond, Massachusetts.
I remember John W had a gold lame jacket. At
that time Warsh, Corbett and I edited a “little mag”
called THE BOSTON EAGLE and included quite a
bit of John Wieners’ poetry in it. We were all living in
Boston then.
Lewis and I used to go round and visit John at
his apartment at 44 Joy Street, Boston. He served us
with champagne and chocolate peppermint cremes on
one occasion! He was a very dear and gentle man, but
also subject to bouts of distressing mental illness.
When he came out of hospital he was fine, but then
he used to slowly go downhill. He organised some
really good things, such as a sort of free open university
at the Stone Soup Gallery where various people,
mainly poets, such as Warsh and me, gave talks and
readings of poets like O’Hara, Ashbery, etc. I think
John W talked about Olson. He also co-edited, with
Jack Powers, in 1973 an anthology/magazine titled
Stone Soup Poetry. The gallery was what you might now
call “left wing,” though at that time there was a lot of
radical thinking and demonstrations going on in the
USA.
That early (Wieners) book, The Hotel Wentley
Poems, just bowled me over when I first read it and
still does. The power and emotion and tenderness of
those poems is, for me, quite exceptional when
compared with a lot of the Beat poets.”
Talking to Lee Harwood let me to both
William Corbett and Lewis Warsh. Both remembered
the time well and gave me a few of their memories.
Bill Corbett: Here’s the photo I have on my
wall. There is at least one other with John resting his
arm against a tree and me in the background.
Were the photo in color you would see that the light
patches on John’s jacket are gold lame. There must be
an accent there! I don’t remember why we settled on
Walden Pond except that it’s such an obvious literary
landmark. It was an unremarkable afternoon but for
the photo.
I asked Bill Corbett why were all four of you
together that day by the pond?
Bill Corbett: Lee, Lewis and I had started the mimeo
magazine The Boston Eagle. One of our reasons was to
feature John’s work. We wanted a photo of the editors
and John for the back cover thus the trip to Walden
Pond. The magazine was the first, and one of a very
few, mimeo mags published in Boston. Lewis, who
had come from NYC to live in Cambridge, came up
with the idea. The magazine lasted three issues. I
doubt that I have a single copy.
From Bill Corbett, I spoke to Lewis Warsh,
with whom I’ve had fleeting contact with in the past.
He features on the front cover of Beat Scene 51 with
Anne Waldman. I asked him - Lee Harwood talks of
you and he going to Joy Street. Peppermint cremes
and champagne. Stone Soup Gallery, The Boston
Eagle, etc. What can you recall of the photo?
Lewis Warsh: Lee Harwood and I first met in
the mid-1960s in New York, and Angel Hair Books,
which I was co-editing with Anne Waldman, published
his book The Man With Blue Eyes in 1967. In
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