Yours Presently: The Selected Letters of John Wieners
Michael Seth Stewart, ed.
University of New Mexico Press, $75 (cloth)

“How can a poet be renowned but unknown, adored but elided?” asks editor Michael Seth Stewart in his introduction to Yours Presently, a collection of the letters of pathbreaking queer poet John Wieners (1934–2002).

Wieners wrote unabashedly gay poems while maintaining a devotional commitment to his pursuit of a poetry that rose above professional, gender, and class identity.

Some version of the question is likely to arise in any discussion of Wieners’s legacy. Drawing equally on English Romanticism, French Symbolism, torch songs, and Hollywood glamor, Wieners wrote unabashedly gay, moving lyric poems while maintaining a devotional commitment to his pursuit of a poetry that rose above professional, gender, and class identity. Yet his work has maintained only a limited readership, and finds him in that strange position of being something of a poet’s poet. For Wieners, poetry was devotional object, not cultural asset; life-saving device rather than commodity; necessity rather than optional extra.

Influential activist and publisher Charley Shively, who ran Good Gay Poets Press and Fag Rag, placed Wieners’s work at the forefront of a developing Gay Liberation poetry in the 1970s. Raymond Foye, a fixture of the Downtown scene, edited two still-definitive volumes of Wieners’s work with Black Sparrow Press in the 1980s. Fanny Howe, CAConrad, Cedar Sigo, and Eileen Myles—the latter of whom provides a preface to Yours Presently—have all spoken of the importance of Wieners in their own artistic lives.

In recent years, these voices have been joined by a generation of younger scholars: Nat Raha, Francesca Lisette, and Wieners’s devoted friend Jim Dunn all did graduate work on Wieners; Robert Dewhurst is currently editing his vast Complete Poems; and Stewart, the editor of Yours Presently, previously also edited a collection of Wieners’s journals, Stars Seen in Person (2015).

Yours Presently has been a decade in the making. Scrupulously annotated and edited, it reveals above all the collective dynamics of Wieners’s work, as a figure at the center of numerous literary currents, for whom the love of other poets was paramount at times of crisis. And it makes an argument for the relevance of Wieners in the present moment as well as his courageous and prophetic role in his historical moment.

Wieners wrote in and from communities equally devoted to queer identity and to poetry at a time when state censorship and persecution, as well as police and psychiatric violence, made such open identification a real risk. As a poet, his openly femme-identified, gender-defiant work is a vital precursor to the growing awareness of trans poetry exemplified by recent anthologies such as Trace Peterson and TC Tolbert’s Troubling the Line (2013) and Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel’s We Want It All (2020). Like Billie Holiday, whom he idolized, his poetry is at once desolate and life-affirming; a plumbing of the depths which combines weeping with wit, despair with defiance, reaching the end of the line but going on regardless. He writes for the “children of the working class”, for painters, for lovers, for addicts, for “cocksuckers,” for “those homeless who are out on this night,” inhabitants of “the / poorhouses, the mad city asylums and re- / life worklines,” for “persons who felt they were never given a chance, had n- / o luck and were flayed at suffering.”

His work continues to provide solace and inspiration to those cast out to the margins, for classed, gendered, and racialized reasons; to those who have known the beauty and sorrow of love and loss and loneliness, yet who remain committed to an imagination of a world that might exist otherwise, where “dreams and infinite longing” find their place in a society utterly unlike our own.

Yours Presently also illustrates Wieners’s skill as a prose stylist, as he writes with wit and humor to friends, mentors, and peers, including Charles Olson, Diane Di Prima, Joanne Kyger, Allen Ginsberg, and Michael Rumaker. Wieners is sometimes seen as a sui generis individual—the patron saint of lost love and individual loneliness—his work distinguished from those around him by its intensity of feeling, its combination of ultra-modern subject matter and vernacular with sometimes archaic diction. But this collection of letters shows that he always conceived of his work in dialogue with others, working actively as a magazine editor and a social presence to develop a poetic community that provided an alternative model to the repressive norms of the midcentury United States, whether they be those of a conservative literary establishment, the patriarchal structures of the nuclear family, or the systematic repression of queer identity on the part of landlords, cops, and psychiatrists.


The Occult School turned conditions of marginality and enforced secrecy into tools of power. This is not the queer poetry we’ve been taught to expect: pre-AIDS, pre-Stonewall, yet not in the least way closeted; experimental yet anti-elitist; coterie but defiantly lower class.

Growing up in the Boston suburb of Milton, Massachusetts, Wieners came to poetry through Edna St. Vincent Millay. As he wrote in an early journal, “Millay was a goddess to me. . . . She is not a great poet, but she opened to me the avenues of great poetry.”

On September 11, 1954, at the tender age of twenty, he attended a pivotal reading given by Charles Olson at Boston’s Charles Street Meeting House, the venue which would later become a focal point for the gay activism surrounding publications such as Fag Rag and Gay Community News. Olson read “There was a Youth whose Name was Thomas Granger,” whose description of the execution of a youth convicted by the Pilgrims of bestiality—the first teenager executed in the United States—prompted members of the audience to walk out.

Wieners, along with his friends Joe and Carolyn Dunn, soon followed Olson to Black Mountain College, a short-lived experimental arts institution in the North Carolina hills known for nurturing a generation of midcentury artists, including painters Josef Albers, Jacob Lawrence, and Willem de Kooning; composer John Cage; choreographer Merce Cunningham; and poets Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan—and, of course, Wieners himself. The letters in Yours Presently begin during this time. In 1955 Wieners is twenty-one, brimming with excitement, and, in correspondence with fellow queer student Michael Rumaker, offering searching reflections on gay identity.

HEY—maybe that’s why homosexual love or homosexual sex is SOMETHING—because it’s not a blending but a give and going back, each remaining separate, yet, god knows, in contact. . . . I give all of me, dangerous or not. . . . I get something else added on top of me, whether it be a body or an emotion. I get supplemented.

Against caricatures of queer narcissism, Wieners argues for gay sex as gift. “It’s our duty to each other,” he tells Rumaker, “to remind each other to keep holes open, mostly through our finger-tips.” Such sentiments informed much of Wieners’s early work and shaped his friendships as well as the poetic communities he sought out.

Returning to Boston shortly before Black Mountain’s closure in 1957, Wieners met visiting poets Frank O’Hara and Jack Spicer, reading them his poems while they “wept through the incipient rain and electric-charged air.” His letters also make fleeting mention of the mysterious Ed Marshall: poet, street preacher, and cruising enthusiast, whose long poem “Leave the Word Alone” (1957) was later remembered by Wieners as one of the great poems of the century. Marshall’s work, currently being researched by David Abel, is just one of the worlds opened up by Wieners’s letters. So too, is that of Stephen Jonas, a picaresque character of uncertain origins and a magnificent poet in his own right who had also attended Olson’s Charles Street reading, and whose friendship with Wieners flourished during this time. The two remain friends until Jonas’s early death in 1970, Wieners remembering: “Steve was very close to me. He was as intimate as a buddy. Esp. in vocabulary. No one but fairies could duplicate it.”

Wieners, Jonas, Marshall, Spicer, Joe Dunn, and Robin Blaser formed what their latter-day comrade Gerrit Lansing would dub “the School of Boston . . . an occult school, unknown.” With the exception of Dunn, all were openly gay, and their preferred haunt was Beacon Hill, a historically bohemian district now heavily gentrified but then still clinging to the red-light grittiness that in the nineteenth century had earned it the moniker Mount Whoredom. Its “ass side”—to use Jonas’s term—was home to a thriving scene of gay bars and counterculture hangouts. Here Boston gay patriarch Prescott Townsend owned a series of apartments which gave homes to the younger men he mentored, protected, and sometimes exploited. Toward the end of his life, Jonas lived in one. And here the Occult School published in fugitive, one-off magazines and limited-run chapbooks, envisioning poetry as a zone of mystical knowledge, turning conditions of marginality and enforced secrecy into tools of power. This is not necessarily the queer poetry we’ve been taught to expect: pre-AIDS, pre-Stonewall, yet not in the least way closeted; experimental yet anti-elitist; coterie but defiantly lower class.

Distributed with instructions to its readers to pass it on wherever they saw fit—“an art gallery, a bohemian bar, or a lavatory frequented by poets”—the Boston Newsletter contained bruising and beautiful meditations on queer vulnerability and survival.

In 1956 the poets produced a one-off, the Boston Newsletter, ironically named for the first continuously published newspaper in Massachusetts. Distributed with instructions to its readers to pass it on wherever they saw fit—“an art gallery, a bohemian bar, or a lavatory frequented by poets”—the Boston Newsletter contained Wieners’s tributes to Hart Crane and to a murdered drag queen named Alice O’Brian: bruising and beautiful meditations on queer vulnerability and survival. Determinedly on the margins in a town dominated by conservatism, racial segregation, misogyny, and homophobia, these poems were, as Wieners put it, “dictated to [the city] against its will.”

Following the Boston Newsletter, Wieners envisioned another collectively edited magazine: “BOSTON: a blast from—etc. . . . ‘The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect those of the city.’” But the project rapidly expanded. Though coteries were a necessary mode of social organizing for gay writers as a form of self-protection, Wieners imagined larger forms of community. The resulting magazine, Measure, sketched out a whole “new generation,” from the Occult School to the New York School, offering a sexualized poetics that audaciously broke down the boundaries between writing and life.

Corresponding with other poets for lists of potential contributors, Wieners outlined his plans for the magazine with infectious enthusiasm. Riffing off Allen Ginsberg’s own poem “America,” Wieners wrote to him: “There are other queer shoulders at the wheel. . . . I hope Tangiers is good for the line and that you can choke me with a load of your stuff/ and direct those you yourself are hot on to my stoop.” To leading New York School poet James Schuyler, he jokingly remarks of this new queer poetry: “It cd take us over the precipice. . . . Cd fuck up the sentence as we know it, as W. S. Merwin will never know it.” Such letters are exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure. Thinking up ideas on the fly, there are hits and misses, missed connections and stabs in the dark, suggesting something too capacious to be contained in print.

Only three issues of the magazine ultimately appeared, and they read today as uneven enterprises. In an omission sadly typical of the era, no women appear until the third issue. Yet, in a pre–Gay Liberation era, Measure and the Boston Newsletter take their place alongside nascent gay and lesbian endeavors such as the Mattachine Society offshoot One and the Daughters of Bilitis’s The Ladder: less advanced politically, but more advanced aesthetically, presaging developments in queer experimental writing and publishing that would take decades to reappear.

Quoting Arthur Rimbaud, Wieners wrote to Duncan, his teacher at Black Mountain: “I alone have the key to this savage sideshow. Boston is that now. A show of junkies, cocksuckers, outriders, THIEVES.” Conceiving of the immediate city environment as a zone for Rimbaudian derangement and illumination, Wieners was, as he tells Rumaker, “NOT doing a bit of work but wandering everywhere in the city, dredging, crawling in the gutters baby.” Such immersion had its dangers. The letter to Rumaker continues: “Also got involved with a group of on again off again addicts, who have some glamour I am prone to. . . . w/o [Dana Durkee, Wieners’s boyfriend] I wd be completely lost, a fucking straw on the tide.”


In 1957 Wieners moved to San Francisco with Dana, but the two broke up soon after. This would commence a period of intense creativity but crumbling mental health. To Rumaker again, Wieners writes: “I think of you often, and sometimes wonder, how far a field I am, and become afraid, of those forces driving me.” Rimbaudian “illumination”—the poetic uncovering of occult truths he’d earlier outlined—increasingly occurred in an atmosphere of constant, paranoid surveillance: homophobic landlords, undercover cops, entrapment, drug busts.

Wieners’s personal life increasingly fell prey to the forces he invoked in his poems. Institutionalized at Bournewood Hospital, he received 30 electroshock sessions, and at the Metropolitan State Hospital he was given 91 insulin treatments, causing extensive memory loss.

Wieners wrote his book The Hotel Wentley Poems (1959) during this time, while staying in a rundown room in the queer Polk Gulch neighborhood. Drawing on Arthur Rimbaud, John Keats, and the torch songs he loved, Wieners balances Dana’s loss with the sustaining sociality of “queer bars” and “fairy / friends who do not fail us / in our hour of / despair,” providing a “memory of love” that offers the strength to go on. When he read from these poems aloud, it was the opposite of Beat bombast: a whispered prayer, straight from the heart. Amiri Baraka wrote that the book “almost forced me to my knees.” The Wentley Poems remain defining queer poems of the era.

Wieners’s personal life increasingly fell prey to the forces he invoked in the poems. Arriving in New York under the influence of a drug cocktail, his erratic behavior prompted an acquaintance to call his parents in alarm. Damaging institutionalizations followed. At Medfield State Hospital, his manuscripts were lost and he was threatened with electrical catheter “treatment.” He would also spend time as an inpatient at Bournewood Hospital in Chestnut Hill, where he received thirty electroshock sessions, and later at the Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham, where he was given ninety-one insulin treatments, causing extensive memory loss. Wieners’s drug use played a role in his struggles with mental illness, but this unwilled and brutal “treatment” amounted to medical torture.

Recovering at his parents’ home in Milton, family served both as protection and as cause of pain. Wieners wrote to Beat poet Diane di Prima of the combination of “apathy” and “unrest” that saw him riding “the waves of childhood misery, poverty and insanity. It all runs in the family.” And in a notebook, he observed: “They have divided me with their small talk, with their asylums, prisons and poisons. They have crushed out the beauty.”

Wieners’s great poem “The Acts of Youth,” included in a letter to Olson from January 1962, oscillates between a vision of “pain and suffering” as “the formula all great art is made of” and a dream of resurrection, “Until the dark hours are done. // And we rise again in the dawn.” Wieners seemed to be emerging into the light once more when his second book, Ace of Pentacles, came out in 1964, and Olson engaged him on a graduate fellowship at SUNY Buffalo the following year.

Yet the Buffalo years proved unhappy. In 1966 Wieners began the only significant heterosexual relationship of his life, with heiress and patron Panna Grady: “That the most notorious faggot of our times would fall in love with the most beautiful woman,” as he wrote in a journal. He spent an idyllic summer with Grady and her daughter in a large Annisquam manor she’d rented a few miles from Olson in Gloucester. Olson teasingly referred to the lovers as the “newlyweds,” and Wieners’s letters likewise jokingly call Panna his “wife”, as though he has finally assumed the role expected of him by family and society. But it didn’t last. Grady terminated a pregnancy and began a relationship with Olson, devastating Wieners.

Returning to Buffalo an increasingly isolated figure, he developed paranoid fantasies about faculty member and friend Creeley and his wife, Bobbie Louise Hawkins. As vividly attested in Yours Presently and the journal A book of PROPHECIES, Wieners’s fantasies centered on the family as seat of hidden perversion, coercion, and trauma. They make for disturbing reading, extending beyond literary imagination into hallucinatory delusion, while reflecting the psychic horrors wrought by the repressive structures of heterosexuality and the violence they so often conceal.

In the following years Wieners was hit by a succession of losses: Olson, Jonas, both his parents. With Jonas dead, the Occult School had effectively run its course, the queer Boston from which it had sprung long since lost to “urban regeneration.” Yet in the preface to Jonas’s Transmutations (1966), Wieners imagines the “old haunts of these poems” as “bombs to blow up in the face of the future, they have become the future itself: BLAST; in the face of emblems of the past we live by.”


Soon, though, Wieners found himself at the center of the new currents of Gay Liberation.

Wieners heard about the 1969 Stonewall uprising from inside another institution, Central Islip State Hospital on Long Island, where he was once more held under horrific conditions. Here he received a letter from Shively, a younger representative of the newly flourishing Gay Liberation movement in Boston. For Wieners it was a lifeline. “Your life sounds fruitful enough for a friendship,” he wrote to Shively, joking that the two might accidentally meet on the Fenway, a well-known cruising ground. Wieners’s friendship with Shively would go on to become among the most important of the latter half of his life.

Fanny Howe remembers attending a reading Wieners gave in a gold-lamé bullfighter’s jacket, high heels, and lipstick: “I was under the influence of the great male poets and suddenly there was a woman! And it was John Wieners.”

Shively was at the center of the anarchist collective Fag Rag, a group that campaigned against gentrification, legislative discrimination, violence, and entrapment, as well as calling for prison reform and the disbanding of the police and other state forces. The group put out a militant, brightly colored magazine, also called Fag Rag, which featured essays, letters, reports, poems, and explicit visual art. As a member of the collective, Michael Bronski, puts it, such work “conceptualiz[ed] a new way to be gay.” Seeking to be “a medium for faggot poetry, short stories, history, plays, reviews and art no less than abstract discussions of our oppression or confessions of our misery,” Fag Rag was sex-positive, anti-discriminatory, and anti-essentialist, associating homosexuality not with tragedy but with joy. Here, finally, was the spirit of Measure and the Boston Newsletter come to fruition, the Occult School occult no longer.

Wieners was at the center once again, publishing poems, plays, essays, and mixed-genre texts in Fag Rag. When members of Fag Rag formed the Good Gay Poets Press in 1972, their second publication was Wieners’s long poem Playboy (also known as We Were There! A gay presence at the Democratic Convention), which recounted Fag Rag’s visit to the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami to distribute the group’s manifesto. Good Gay Poets soon began working with Wieners on a full-length book: the result, Behind the State Capitol; or, Cincinnati Pike (1975), was the longest book Wieners would ever publish. Collaging and revising earlier work alongside newer, more experimental material, Wieners set out to challenge his reputation as predominantly a lyric poet in favor of something tonally broader, gender-fluid, and genre-defying. In it, carefully crafted poems of lyric sentiment sit alongside cut-up, fractured narratives in which voices open onto other voice like Russian nesting dolls.

A prominent theme in Behind the State Capitol is Wieners’s defiance of traditional gender roles. Throughout his life, Wieners had always identified strongly with female poets, film stars, sex workers, and singers. Poet Fanny Howe remembers attending a reading Wieners gave in a gold-lamé bullfighter’s jacket, high heels, and lipstick: “I was under the influence of the great male poets and suddenly there was a woman! And it was John Wieners.” Many of the texts Wieners published in Fag Rag appeared under the byline Jacqueline Wieners, and throughout Behind the State Capitol, Wieners stages femme identifications that poet Trace Peterson calls “proto-trans.” Movie stars, politicians, gay porn, and Wieners’s own graduation photo sit alongside texts combining multiple voices, resisting all boundaries. Insisting on fantasy and role-play over confession and autobiography, Wieners later quipped to Raymond Foye that he was “borrowing heavily for my own autobiography” from the memoirs of stripper Blaze Starr.

Wieners was also involved in the Psychiatric Survivor Movement, and a number of poems in the book are strongly political texts concerning the private and state mental health apparatus. In “Children of the Working Class,” he spins lines of Whitmanesque pain and fury at the mental health system for its structures of indebtness, institutional peonage, gender policing, and religious exclusion. The poem was written while Wieners was institutionalized in Taunton State Hospital; he had to surreptitiously finalize edits of it on the phone with a magazine editor after hospital authorities forced him to censor the poem during group therapy.

Unfortunately, Behind the State Capitol, Wieners’s queer magnum opus, was received with hostility, indifference, and neglect. As Geoff Ward has written, the book would be “at one and the same the capstone of Wieners’s career and the book that would sink his reputation.” Duncan disliked it so much that he believed Good Gay Poets was destroying Wieners’s reputation by publishing it. Objecting to its unconventional typography, embrace of error, visual presentation, and departure from Wieners’s previous lyric modes, William Corbett characterized the book as “a record of disintegration” (later, he would revise his opinion). It has since been described, even by its defenders, as “the epitome of a form of ‘outsider writing’.”

The text’s material survival was even imperilled. In July 1982 the office shared by Fag Rag and Gay Community News was firebombed, most likely by a group of laid-off firemen and policemen who had set a number of arson attacks in the city as a way to “protest” cuts to the city’s emergency services. On witnessing the fire, Shively, Bronski, and others suspected a hate crime relating to a recent demonstration calling for the abolition of the city vice squad, in conjunction with real estate developers seeking to redevelop the area. Such fears were reasonable, given the frequent homophobic attacks on the offices. Of that time, Shively recalled, “Mysterious break-ins, bullet holes, phone threats of death and fire so frequent, soon our back windows were totally gone, replaced by aluminium and then iron bars intended to keep out the storms.” Whatever the culprits’ motivations, the result was the destruction of Fag Rag’s and Good Gay Poet’s stock, including the few hundred remaining copies of Wieners’s book. Shively called it the “definitive exegesis” of the text. “Here was revealed the void, the ashes, the destruction, the devastation,” Shively continued. “John Wieners had lived it first in his mind, in his poems, in his body.” For Shively, the very real violence faced by the book’s publishers are of a piece with the violence of erasure and dismissal afforded Behind the State Capitol and Wieners’s later work in general.


AIDS never registers in Wieners’s work: safe in his apartment, he breathed poetry like air, his work increasingly just streams of non sequiturs, a half-whispered monologue he’d keep up alone or in public.

After the lackluster response to Behind the State Capitol, Wieners, long a prolific writer of poems and letters, soon nearly ceased to write them altogether, claiming, “I am living out the logical conclusion of my books.” Hurt by the poor reception, and incapacitated by years of abusive mental health care, Wieners lived frugally in his old neighborhood of Beacon Hill—he had moved to an apartment on Joy Street in 1972—and became largely reliant on the financial and emotional support of friends such as Shively, Raymond Foye, and Jim Dunn. John Mitzel, a Fag Rag member who owned the gay bookstore Calamus near South Station, would cash Wieners’s disability checks for him.

Wieners did continue to give occasional readings in Boston and New York, as well as work on producing Fag Rag. The magazine would publish its final issue in 1987, its front cover a photograph of Wieners and Shively kissing at Boston Pride. Through the 1980s, issues had come out only sporadically. As Bronski notes, AIDS not only decimated the community but put paid to hopes for a sexual, cultural, and political revolution. Immediate survival became the sole task.

Remarkable, then, that AIDS never registers in Wieners’s work: safe in his apartment, he breathed poetry like air, his work increasingly just streams of non sequiturs, a half-whispered monologue he’d keep up alone or in public. Running into Howe on the street in 1992, Wieners told her: “I look around and there used to be a rostrum in Boston. Poets in the limelight. But I don’t see it anymore. For you and me it’s better to be unknown, to do our work.”

A lot of Wieners’s later writing is lost: much was never published, and though his papers are spread across several university collections, from which the letters in Yours Presently are drawn, many later manuscripts were in all likelihood lost after his death. But we know that Wieners continued producing elusive, obscure, often waspishly humorous texts for his own pleasure and sometimes for that of others. Some of these late poems appeared in o·blēk, The East Village, and Big Bridge, and others were mailed to his younger friend and last devoted Occult School member Lansing, and are therefore deposited in Lansing’s archives at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. When Wieners died in 2002, at his side were his longtime supporters Shively and Jim Dunn.

In an online launch event for Yours Presently, poet and scholar Ammiel Alcalay characterized Wieners’s work as emerging from and sustained by a social “outside” that he sees as now shrinking. Alcalay vividly recalled meeting Wieners as a teenager at the Harvard Square poetry bookstore Grolier’s, within a milieu of queer, anti-war, and left-wing activism where a respected older poet and a teenager playing hooky from school could share common ground outside existing social hierarchies. Alcalay stressed the importance of preserving the traces of this lost culture in the face of the social distancing and inequality rendered all the more starkly by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wieners’s life lends itself to certain familiar narrative structures which associate queerness with tragic victimhood: as he put it himself in “The Acts of Youth,” “the formula all great art is made of. // Pain and suffering.” But we shouldn’t simply read Wieners’s letters as a record of a vanished time, nor read his work in general as simply a record of trauma. Rather, both letters and poems are also displays of solidarity, improvisation, wit, tenderness, and vital energy. Indeed, in many ways they serve as prophetic—not simply of our present moment, but of a more just future that might surmount it. “Wraiths cross time,” wrote Wieners in the preface to his 1972 Selected Poems. And, as Yours Presently—along with the shining record of Wieners’s poems—so resolutely attest, there is much to celebrate as well as mourn in his life and work: “Infinite particles of the divine sun, now / worshipped in the pitches of the night.”