City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2014 "For the Voices": The Letters of John Wieners Michael Seth Stewart Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/292 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] “FOR THE VOICES”: THE LETTERS OF JOHN WIENERS by MICHAEL SETH STEWART A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2014 i © 2014 MICHAEL SETH STEWART All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Ammiel Alcalay___________ ________________ _______________________ Date Chair of the Examining Committee Mario di Gangi___________ ________________ _______________________ Date Executive Officer Ammiel Alcalay____ Joan Richardson___ David Greetham___ Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT “FOR THE VOICES”: THE LETTERS OF JOHN WIENERS by MICHAEL SETH STEWART Adviser: Ammiel Alcalay American poet John Wieners is thoroughly disenfranchised from the modern poetic establishments because he is, to those institutions, practically illegible. He was a queer self- styled poète maudit in the fifties; a protégé of political-historical poet Charles Olson who wrote audaciously personal verse; a lyric poet who eschewed the egoism of the confessional mode in order to pursue the Olsonian project of Projective (outward-looking) poetics; a Boston poet who was institutionalized at state hospitals. Wieners lived on the “other side” of Beacon Hill, not the Brahmin south slope, but the north side with its working-class apartments and underground gay bars. Though Wieners’ work is considered preeminent by many of the second half of the century’s most important poets, the ahistoricizing process of literary canon-building has kept him at the fringes of not just the canon, but the established taxonomy of the all the great post-war undergrounds – the mimeo revolution, the San Francisco Renaissance, Black Mountain, New York, and Boston poetry communities that he moved through. Why was Wieners so disenfranchised? How can we make him manifest within the discourses of twentieth-century poetry? My dissertation, a comprehensively edited and annotated Selected Letters with a critical introduction situating Wieners and his correspondence, will provide Wieners’ readers and literature scholars with an invaluable resource, an autobiography in letters. To quote the mission Duncan urged upon Wieners for his magazine Measure, these Selected Letters will be a “ground of work” for many different kinds of readers, with enough annotation and context iv for the most curious, but edited in such a way that it’s Wieners himself one is reading, a direct address with minimal editorial intrusion. Wieners dedicated his second book, 1964’s Ace of Pentacles, “for the voices,” and that is the title I take for this collection – for all the voices in Wieners’ world, within and contemporaneous with the poem. With these Selected Letters, we can see Wieners’ growth as a poet and as a person, as he cycles through his different selves and relationships. v Preface: Habeas Corpus I was already ten years out an MFA in poetry, focusing in the lyric mode, when I first encountered the verse of John Wieners. A friend handed me a copy of his slim book The Hotel Wentley Poems in the lounge of the doctoral program where I’d come to study 19th- century fiction, and I sat and read the poems in one breath, then read them again. I was enraptured in way I’d never experienced before with poetry, and rapture through poetry had been an ongoing quest for me for decades. At first, after I’d calmed down, I was angry – at myself for never having sought Wieners out, and at the literature programs and anthologies that had never shown him to me. But moving on, looking him up in books and online over the next few days, my frustration expanded outward, to whatever forces there were that kept Wieners virtually invisible. There were no biographies, no collections of letters or essays or collected poems, no books on his poetics, very few articles available online and in scholarly databases. “Official verse culture,” as Jed Rasula calls it, had left Wieners out of the picture almost completely. There were several exceptions to this of course, poets and friends who fought to keep Wieners’ unique, uncompromising work in some sort of public eye – British writers like Jeremy Prynne and John Wilkinson, and Americans like Bootstrap Press’s Derek Fenner, which printed two of his journals; William Corbett, Michael Gizzi, and Joseph Torra, who edited The Blind See Only This World, a poetic tribute to Wieners; Jim Dunn, a longtime friend of Wieners who edited one of those journals and introduced the other; and Micah Ballard, whose Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners remains one of the most perspicacious and sensitive treatments available on Wieners’ verse, though like many of Wieners’ books, it is, sadly, out of print. These friends and scholars – and others – helped keep the flame flickering. The goal of this project, the Selected Letters of John Wieners, is to make Wieners visible, through his own words, previously dispersed throughout dozens of libraries around the country. Together with his Selected Journals, which I also edited parallel to this, and the upcoming Collected Poems of Wieners, edited by my friend Robert Dewhurst, John Wieners is being brought into the poetic conversation in a new way. I consider these projects together as a habeas corpus mission, an effort to “produce the body” of Wieners’ thought, works, and life, liberating him from the institutions that subsumed him, that “official verse culture” that vi could not accommodate a poor, homosexual, visionary poet who refused to be simply one of those things. John Wieners is thoroughly disenfranchised from the modern poetic establishments because he is, to those institutions, practically illegible. He was a queer self-styled poète maudit in the fifties; a protégé of political-historical poet Charles Olson who wrote audaciously personal verse; a lyric poet who eschewed the egoism of the confessional mode in order to pursue the Olsonian project of Projective (outward-looking) poetics; a Boston poet who was institutionalized, but not at the expensive McLean Hospital, where the mainstream confessionals went “gracefully insane” while being showered with awards for their fearless confessions of mental illness. Wieners lived on the other side of Beacon Hill, not the Brahmin south slope, but the north side with its working-class apartments and underground gay bars. Rather than McLean, Wieners – like his friends, fellow poor queer writers Steve Jonas and Michael Rumaker – was put in factory-system state institutions that administered repeated electroshock and insulin coma treatments. Though Wieners’ work is considered preeminent by many of the second half of the century’s most important poets, ranging from Olson, Creeley, and Duncan to Ginsberg, di Prima, and Baraka, the ahistoricizing process of literary canon-building has kept him at the fringes of not just the canon, but the established taxonomy of the all the great post-war undergrounds – the mimeo revolution, the San Francisco Renaissance, Black Mountain, New York, and Boston poetry communities that he moved through. He is rarely anthologized; he’s been claimed as a language poet because of the textual playfulness and challenging obscurity of his later work especially, and dismissed outright by the few academics who have written about him (called “sweetly demented” by one, “destitute of a world” by another). While Wieners’ stature has always been unassailable among his contemporaries, further interest in his work has finally begun to move out of cult status and towards a wider readership. For many years following his death, estate issues held up various publishing projects, but a steady stream of unauthorized work appeared in both the United States and the UK. There are as many communities, or “schools,” of American poetry as there are critics to taxonomize them, and so every grouping must be taken as provisional. However, it is useful to begin with a look at modern American verse through the apparatus offered by Jed Rasula in The American Poetry Wax Museum (1995). In his self-declared polemic, Rasula breaks vii down the post-War American poetry scenes into two basic groups (which are then of course destabilized). The first group is the establishment poets who secured tenured professorships at major universities – Allen Tate at Vanderbilt and Princeton, John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon, Richard Wilbur at Harvard, for example – and the poets they chose for their house organs of the New Critical verse, the non-experimental, formalist, and conservative poetry they favored. The reasons behind this rigidly established poetic hegemony need not be seen as a nefarious plot; rather, their taste was established and maintained by the critical ideology they set up for themselves – namely, the assumptions of New Criticism in the highly politicized context of the Cold War: that the work of art is an hermetically sealed object, the author dead and all critical roads leading to fundamental ambiguity and ultimate artistic unity, all emanating from an authentic “voice.” The off-shoots of this lineage has been usefully called “official verse culture” by critic and translator Eliot Weinberger; such canonization and its institutional buttressing has created the completely ahistorical conditions of twentieth-century American literary history, making it impossible, for example, to encounter a poet like Wieners in any major anthologies or in the curriculum of creative writing or English programs.