John Wieners

John Joseph Wieners, poet: born Boston, Massachusetts 6 January 1934; died Boston 1 March 2002.

John Wieners was a key figure in the American poetic renaissance of the late 1950s and 1960s. In his work a new candour regarding sexual and drug-induced experience co-existed with both a jazz-related aesthetic of improvisation and a more traditional concern with lyric form.

Of Irish descent, John Wieners grew up in Milton, Massachusetts. He graduated from Boston College in 1954, though his education as a writer took place over the following two years at Black Mountain College, North Carolina. Here the composer John Cage, painters such as Robert Rauschenberg, the poet Charles Olson and other dissidents who are now considered grand masters had kept alive through force of will rather than any more tangible resources the most liberal of arts colleges. Although Wieners always depicted Olson as his mentor, he shared more common ground at Black Mountain with Robert Duncan, the overt Romanticism of whose work, in stark contrast to 1950s orthodoxy, would find an echo in Wieners's more perfumed and occult pieces.

In 1958 his first book, The Hotel Wentley Poems, appeared. Taking its title from a bare-bulb flophouse in San Francisco's Polk Gulch, this rhapsodically Bohemian début begins by quoting the title of an album by Bud Powell – "the scene changes". In pieces such as "A Poem for Tea Heads" and "A Poem for Cocksuckers", the poet presents a mental world at once kaleidoscopic and imprisoning.

An unexpurgated edition was not available until 1965, by which time Wieners had embarked on the most publicly successful phase of his career, becoming a teaching fellow at the State University of New York, Buffalo, an actor and stage manager at the Poet's Theater in Cambridge, and the author of three plays performed in New York. However, he struggled with mental illness for much of his life, and was institutionalised several times. Although Asylum Poems (1969) makes reference to this burden, Wieners never exploited his condition, as had Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath in their more smoothly turned declarations of suffering.

Nerves (1970), his first publication in the UK, shows Wieners at the height of his powers. Imagist snapshots such as "Times Square" are set alongside longer meditations such as "Feminine Soliloquy". Words such as "tomb" and "bomb" are half-rhymed in the same line, a sense of loss balanced by a growing anger at social isolation.

Returning to Boston in 1970, Wieners became involved with publishing and education co-operatives, political action committees and the burgeoning movement for gay liberation. A fifth-floor, walk-up apartment in Joy Street, in the winding Beacon Hill area, would be home for the rest of his life. But settled quiet and conventional success were not on the agenda. Behind the State Capitol; or, Cincinnati Pike (1975) is one of the great books of the 20th century, a 200-page whirlwind of paranoid fury, hilarity, outrageous theatricality and ventriloquism. In one poem "Gerald Ford" writes to Wieners following his confirmation as Vice-President, of

the penalties of Ezra Pound inflicted upon a younger member of another generation. . . As the piano died out, and its

accompanying voices, while a car motor started up inside.

Elsewhere Wieners asks "Where was I as Greta Garbo? Where had / my house gone, my clothes, my books . . ." Here the damaged self turns itself into a laboratory for future understanding, a position of acute vulnerablity, but one with precedence in the English Romantic movement, and the poetry of Walt Whitman. Treated with silence or alarm by those American writers of Wieners's own generation who were now winning prizes and producing their "Collected Poems", Behind the State Capitol was read carefully by British poets such as John Wilkinson. Wieners' punishing and punished refusal to control his lyrical flights became a bequest to younger writers.

His poetic career effectively finished at this point. It was not a case of unfulfilled promise but of a life's work that developed rapidly and led with its own determined, internal logic to a natural conclusion. In the 1980s Wieners's editor Raymond Foye embarked on a quest to gather unpublished poems. With the help of Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, who remained unswerving in their support, the results were published as Selected Poems 1958-1984 (1985) and its successor Cultural Affairs in Boston (1988). In an interview with Foye, the poet had answered a query as to his theory of poetics in eminently practical terms: "I try to write the most embarrassing thing I can think of."

In person he was a shy and gentle man, courteous in an old-fashioned way, though with the same verbal flights and gifts of the poetry. A book of tributes, The Blind See Only This World: poems for John Wieners, was published in 2000, and included contributions by John Ashbery, Paul Auster, Amiri Baraka and Thom Gunn.

Geoff Ward