John Joseph Wieners was born on January 6, 1934, to Albert Eugene and Anna Elizabeth Laffan Wieners in Milton, Massachusetts. Wieners was raised in a middle-class Irish Catholic household and attended Boston College, where he worked in the library, wrote for the Heights, and was literary editor of the Stylus. He graduated with an A.B. in English in 1954. Feeling that his traditional Jesuit education had not allowed him enough time to pursue his literary interests, Wieners attended Black Mountain College from 1955-1956, where he studied with Charles Olson and Robert Duncan and met Robert Creeley.

In 1956 Wieners returned to Boston and worked as an actor and stage manager for the Poets Theater in Cambridge and as a library clerk at Harvard’s Lamont Library. He also founded and edited the literary magazine Measure (1957-1962). In 1957 Wieners moved to San Francisco with his lover Dana, arriving during the flowering of the Beat poetry movement. In San Francisco Wieners encountered many authors and poets, including Michael Rumaker, Robin Blaser, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer, David Meltzer, and Jack Kerouac. However, his relationship with Dana did not survive the move, and a heartbroken Wieners retreated to a cheap boardinghouse and composed The Hotel Wentley Poems, published in 1958.

In late 1959, Wieners returned to the East Coast. He was institutionalized for a time in early 1960 and again in 1961. With a grant from the Poetry Foundation, Wieners moved to New York in 1961, returning to Boston in 1963. His second book, Ace of Pentacles, was published in 1964. Encouraged by his friend and mentor Charles Olson, Wieners took a position as a teaching fellow at the State University of New York, Buffalo from 1965-1967. Olson and Wieners had a falling out in 1966, possibly related to Panna Grady, a New York heiress and patroness of the arts who was living with Wieners. Grady became pregnant but left Wieners and terminated the pregnancy. That fall, Grady and Olson travelled to London together. Olson and Wieners later reconciled.

Wieners settled in Boston and, despite repeated hospitalizations for nervous breakdowns in the late 1960s and 1970s, went on to publish some of his most well-regarded books, including Pressed Wafer (1967), Asylum Poems (1969), and Nerves (1970), followed by Behind the State Capital, Or Cincinnati Pike (1975). Two collections, Selected Poems 1958-1984 and Cultural Affairs in Boston: Poetry and Prose, 1956-1985, were published by Black Sparrow Press. Wieners died in Boston on March 1, 2002.

Sources

Boston College. Sub Turri, 1954. http://archive.org/details/subturriundertow1954bost

Brady, Andrea. “The Other Poet: John Wieners, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson.” Jacket Magazine 32 (April 2007). http://jacketmagazine.com/32/brady-wieners.shtml#fn1

Foye, Raymond, ed. John Wieners: Selected Poems, 1958-1984. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1986.

Foye, Raymond. “John Wieners.” In The Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 16: The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, edited by Ann Charters, 572-583. Storrs-Mansfield, CT: University of Connecticut, 1983.

John Wieners collection, MS.1994.032, John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

Mirage: John Wieners issue. San Francisco, CA: Kevin Killian, 1985.

Petro, Pamela. “The Hipster of Joy Street.” Boston College Magazine (Fall 2000): 43-51. http://archive.org/details/bostoncollegemagf2000bost