John Joseph Wieners (January 6, 1934 – March 1, 2002) was an American poet.
Early life
Born in
Milton, Massachusetts
Milton is a town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States and an affluent suburb of Boston. The population was 28,630 at the 2020 census. Milton is the birthplace of former U.S. President George H. W. Bush, and architect Buckminster Fuller. ...
, Wieners attended St. Gregory Elementary School in
Dorchester, Massachusetts
Dorchester (colloquially referred to as Dot) is a Boston neighborhood comprising more than in the City of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Originally, Dorchester was a separate town, founded by Puritans who emigrated in 1630 from Dorchester ...
and
Boston College High School
, motto_translation = ''So they may know You.''
, address = 150 Morrissey Boulevard
, city = Boston
, state = Massachusetts
, zipcode = 02125
, country ...
. From 1950 to 1954, he studied at
Boston College
Boston College (BC) is a private Jesuit research university in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Founded in 1863, the university has more than 9,300 full-time undergraduates and nearly 5,000 graduate students. Although Boston College is classifie ...
, where he earned his A.B. On September 11, 1954, he heard
Charles Olson
Charles Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) was a second generation modern American poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York ...
read at the
Charles Street Meeting House
The Charles Street Meeting House is an early-nineteenth-century historic church in Beacon Hill at 70 Charles Street, Boston, Massachusetts.
The church has been used over its history by several Christian denominations, including Baptists, the ...
on
Beacon Hill during
Hurricane Edna
Hurricane Edna was a deadly and destructive major hurricane that impacted the United States East Coast in September of the 1954 Atlantic hurricane season. It was one of two hurricanes to strike Massachusetts in that year, the other being Hurrican ...
. He decided to enroll at
Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College was a private liberal arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and several others. The college was ideologically organized around John Dewey's educational ...
where he studied under Olson and
Robert Duncan from 1955 to 1956. In 1957 he took a job sweeping floors at a popular Beat hangout in North Beach, where he joined the artistic community in the city. There he became close to painter Robert LaVigne and the collage artist
Wallace Berman
Wallace "Wally" Berman (February 18, 1926 – February 18, 1976) was an American experimental filmmaker, assemblage, and collage artist and a crucial figure in the history of post-war California art.
Personal life and education
Wallace Berman ...
who was involved in the
Beat Movement. He then worked as an actor and
stage manager
Stage management is a broad field that is generally defined as the practice of organization and coordination of an event or theatrical production. Stage management may encompass a variety of activities including the overseeing of the rehearsal p ...
at the Poet's Theater in
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...
, and began to edit ''Measure'', releasing three issues over the next several years.
From 1958 to 1960 Wieners lived in San Francisco and actively participated in the
San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. ''The Hotel Wentley Poems'' was published in 1958, when Wieners was twenty-four. Subsequently, he was a contributor to
Donald Allen
Donald Merriam Allen (Iowa, 1912 – San Francisco, August 29, 2004) was an American editor, publisher and translator of American literature. He is best known for his project '' The New American Poetry 1945-1960'' (1960), one of the anthologi ...
's seminal
New American Poetry
New is an adjective referring to something recently made, discovered, or created.
New or NEW may refer to:
Music
* New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz
Albums and EPs
* ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013
* ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator, ...
anthology.
Wieners returned to Boston in 1960 and was committed to a
psychiatric
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of mental disorders. These include various maladaptations related to mood, behaviour, cognition, and perceptions. See glossary of psychiatry.
Initial psy ...
hospital. In 1961, he moved to New York City and worked as an assistant bookkeeper at Eighth Street Books from 1962 to 1963, living on the
Lower East Side
The Lower East Side, sometimes abbreviated as LES, is a historic neighborhood in the southeastern part of Manhattan in New York City. It is located roughly between the Bowery and the East River from Canal to Houston streets.
Traditionally an im ...
with
Herbert Huncke
Herbert Edwin Huncke (January 9, 1915 – August 8, 1996) was an American writer and poet, and an active participant in a number of emerging cultural, social and aesthetic movements of the 20th century in America. He was a member of the Beat ...
. He went back to Boston in 1963, employed as a subscriptions editor for
Jordan Marsh
Jordan Marsh (officially Jordan Marsh & Company) was an American department store chain that was headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, and operated throughout New England. It was founded by Eben Dyer Jordan and Benjamin L. Marsh in 1841. The o ...
department stores until 1965. Wieners' second book, ''Ace of Pentacles'', was published in 1964.
In 1965, after traveling with Olson to the
Spoleto Festival
The ''Festival dei Due Mondi'' (Festival of the Two Worlds) is an annual summer music and opera festival held each June to early July in Spoleto, Italy, since its founding by composer Gian Carlo Menotti in 1958. It features a vast array of conce ...
and the
Berkeley Poetry Conference The Berkeley Poetry Conference was an event in which individuals presented their views and poems in seminars, lectures, individual readings, and group readings at California Hall on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley during July 1 ...
, he enrolled in the Graduate Program at
SUNY Buffalo. He worked as a teaching fellow under Olson, then as an endowed Chair of Poetics, staying until 1967, with ''Pressed Wafer'' coming out the same year. In 1968, he signed the "
Writers and Editors War Tax Protest
Tax resistance, the practice of refusing to pay taxes that are considered unjust, has probably existed ever since rulers began imposing taxes on their subjects. It has been suggested that tax resistance played a significant role in the collapse of ...
" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. In the spring of 1969, Wieners was again institutionalized, and wrote ''Asylum Poems''.
''Nerves'' was released in 1970, containing work from 1966 to 1970. In the early 1970s, Wieners became active in education and publishing cooperatives, political action committees, and the gay liberation movement.
He also moved into an apartment at 44 Joy Street on Beacon Hill, where he lived for the next thirty years.
In 1975, ''Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike'' was published, a magnum opus of "Cinema decoupages; verses, abbreviated prose insights." For the next ten years, he published rarely and remained largely out of the public eye. In 1985, he was a
Guggenheim Fellow
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
.
Later life
Black Sparrow Press
Black Sparrow Press is a New England based independent book publisher, known for literary fiction and poetry.
History
Black Sparrow was founded in Los Angeles, California, in 1966 by John Martin in order to publish the works of Charles Bukowski ...
released two collections edited by Raymond Foye: ''Selected Poems: 1958-1984'' and ''Cultural Affairs in Boston'', in 1986 and 1988 respectively. A previously unpublished journal by Wieners came out in 1996, entitled ''The Journal of John Wieners is to be called 707 Scott Street for Billie Holliday 1959'', documenting his life in San Francisco around the time of ''The Hotel Wentley Poems''.
At the
Guggenheim Museum
The Guggenheim Museums are a group of museums in different parts of the world established (or proposed to be established) by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Museums in this group include:
Locations
Americas
* The Solomon R. Guggenhei ...
in 1999, Wieners gave one of his last public readings, celebrating an exhibit by the painter
Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente (born 23 March 1952) is an Italian contemporary artist. He has lived at various times in Italy, India and New York City. Some of his work is influenced by the traditional art and culture of India. He has worked in various art ...
. A collaboration between the two, ''Broken Women'', was also published.
Wieners died on March 1, 2002, at
Massachusetts General Hospital
Massachusetts General Hospital (Mass General or MGH) is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School located in the West End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. It is the third oldest general hospital in the United Stat ...
in
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
, having collapsed a few days previously after an evening attending a party with his friend and publisher Charley Shively.
Works
Wieners was a
Beat
Beat, beats or beating may refer to:
Common uses
* Patrol, or beat, a group of personnel assigned to monitor a specific area
** Beat (police), the territory that a police officer patrols
** Gay beat, an area frequented by gay men
* Battery (c ...
poet, and his poems combine accounts of sexual and drug-related experimentations. Like most Beat writers, Wieners included improvised influences of
jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...
in the lyrical structure of his works.
As a Beat writer, he used his writings to express his opinions on certain issues. One of them involving poverty and the working class. His poem, ''Children of the Working Class'' expresses the horror of children working intense jobs in order to help out their families and how these jobs affect them. Wieners' poem can be compared to
William Blake
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. ...
's poem ''
The Chimney Sweeper
"The Chimney Sweeper" is the title of a poem by William Blake, published in two parts in '' Songs of Innocence'' in 1789 and ''Songs of Experience'' in 1794. The poem "The Chimney Sweeper" is set against the dark background of child labour that ...
'', in which they both call out the horrors of child labor.
Though a Beat writer, he isn't well known. In regards to Wieners,
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...
said, "Wieners, in a way, is one of the greatest poets around, or, certainly, the most Romantic, and doomed, poet around, compared to everyone else, and he's not well known."
Legacy
''Kidnap Notes Next'', a collection of poems and journal entries edited by Jim Dunn, was published posthumously in 2002.
''A Book of Prophecies'' was published in 2007 from
Bootstrap Press
Bootstrap Productions is a nonprofit collaborative arts and literary organization based in Lowell, Massachusetts, which is primarily known for its publishing arm, Bootstrap Press, a small-press publisher of contemporary experimental writing.
Begun ...
. The manuscript was discovered in the
Kent State University
Kent State University (KSU) is a public research university in Kent, Ohio. The university also includes seven regional campuses in Northeast Ohio and additional facilities in the region and internationally. Regional campuses are located in As ...
archive's collection by poet Michael Carr. It was a journal written by Wieners in 1971, and opens with a poem titled ''2007''.
His papers are held at the
University of Delaware
The University of Delaware (colloquially UD or Delaware) is a public land-grant research university located in Newark, Delaware. UD is the largest university in Delaware. It offers three associate's programs, 148 bachelor's programs, 121 mas ...
.
In September 2015,
City Lights Bookstore
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected tit ...
& Publishers released ''Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners'', which offers selections from four of Wieners' previously unpublished journals written between 1955 and 1969. These journals capture a post-war bohemian world that no longer exists, seen through the prism of Wieners' sense of glamour.
In October 2015,
Wave Books
Wave Books (established 2005) is an American independent press focusing on the publication of poetry, with a focus on innovative, contemporary poetry and poetry in translation. This independent publisher has published books by CAConrad, Don Mee ...
published ''Supplication'' which was touted, at the time of its publication, as the first comprehensive selection of Wieners' poetry to have been published in 15 years.
[http://criticalflame.org/a-queer-excess-the-supplication-of-john-wieners/ A Queer Excess: the Supplication of John Wieners , The Critical Flame]
References
Books
* Wieners, John. ''Stars Seen in Person.'' City Lights. San Francisco. 2015.
* Wieners, John. ''A Book of Prophecies''. Bootstrap Press. Lowell, Mass. 2007.
* Charters, Ann (ed.). ''The Portable Beat Reader''. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. (hc); (pbk)
* Reed, Jeremy. It Had to Be You: The Poetry of John Wieners (Elysium Press, 2004)
* "John Wieners." ''Poetry Foundation''. Poetry Foundation
* "Allen Ginsberg on John Wieners." ''Allen Ginsberg Project''. Allen Ginsberg Project
External links
Archives
Records of John Wieners are held by Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare BooksJohn Wieners Papers held at th
University of DelawareJohn Wieners holograph poetry notebook held at th
University of DelawareJohn Wieners publisher's files for The Hotel Wentley held at th
University of Delaware* Materials about John Wieners at th
Robert A. Wilson John Wieners collection held at th
University of Delaware
Poetry
"John Wieners" ''Penn Sound''
"John Wieners" ''Electronic Poetry Center''
*
Other
John Wieners resource page by
Tom Raworth
Thomas Moore Raworth (19 July 1938 – 8 February 2017) was an English-Irish poet, publisher, editor, and teacher who published over 40 books of poetry and prose during his life. His work has been translated and published in many countries. Rawor ...
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wieners, John
1934 births
2002 deaths
20th-century American poets
American tax resisters
Beat Generation writers
Black Mountain College alumni
American LGBT poets
LGBT people from Massachusetts
People from Milton, Massachusetts
University at Buffalo alumni
Poets from Massachusetts
Boston College alumni
American Book Award winners
Boston College High School alumni
People from Beacon Hill, Boston
20th-century LGBT people