The Mesmerizing Apparition of the Oracle of Joy Street: A Critical Study of John Wieners’ Life and Later Work in Boston

Abstract

My study examines the later work and life of Boston poet John Wieners, whose work and achievement as a poet were neglected later in his life. My thesis contextualizes his life and his work in relation to his hometown, Boston, reclaiming his rightful place in several seminal poetry movements of post-World War II America, such as Black Mountain College, the Beats, and the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Boston Occult School of poets. My analysis situates his later work properly in relation to select earlier poems, and in relation to his life struggles with mental illness, poverty and drug addiction, addressing the seismic shift in his work that occurred in his politically charged last book of poems, Behind the State Capitol. My thesis also focuses on the importance of the visual aspect of his collages in BTSC, and the tension between madness and clarity in his later poems that reverberate in the visual collages that accompany his poetry. His freedom of reference and flights of language in his later poems reveal a poetics that takes his mentor Charles Olson’s idea of projective verse further than any other poet influenced by Olson. Wieners’ uncompromising vision was years ahead of his time.

His deliberate disengagement of his poems from meaning, in creating an epic book of poetry, his magnum opus, is as varied and ambitious as any poetic work of the 20th century. Wieners engagement in the political and social activism for gay and mental patient’s rights in Boston in the 1970s was a major influencing factor in the creation of his radical work and his personal poetics of the time. My work is essential in restoring Wieners’ literary reputation to its proper place, by placing his later life and his work in proper context of literary history.

My primary source for this evaluation is a close reading of his last book of poetry, Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike (BTSC) and his later works. I compare and contrast his later work with his earlier lyrical work to investigate the radical shift that occurs in his later work as his published works diminished and he faded from the literary limelight. I also examine later work that scholars have not previously considered, such as his on line poetry cluster, “Lisbon Indian Summer”, published in 2000 in Big Bridge Magazine. As a poet myself, and a close friend of Wieners in the last 10 years of his life, I source my own archives of notes, poems and journal entries as well as the letters and various journals of Wieners, both published and unpublished, to further investigate his later work.

Wieners’ last and lost poems reveal his singular talent. My analysis proves he was still creating challenging, masterful work in his later years that deserves renewed attention. Later in his life, Wieners was marginalized economically and artistically in Boston, but he remained ever faithful to his hometown. When he died in Boston in 2002, he came full circle from Boston College to Black Mountain, to San Francisco, New York, Buffalo, Gloucester and finally back to Boston. Beyond all the schools and movements of which he was a seminal member, he was one of Boston’s most daring, innovative and underappreciated poets.