Boston-born and bred, John Wieners was a queer self-styled poète maudit who was renowned among his contemporaries but ignored by mainstream critics. Join author Michael Seth Stewart for a presentation, reading, and discussion of Yours Presently: The Selected Letters of John Wieners. Wieners was a voluble letter writer, maintaining friendships with contemporaries, including Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Amiri Baraka, that spanned decades and tackling a range of complex issues that resonate today, including drug use, homosexuality, subcultures of the East and West Coasts, and the differing treatment of mental patients based on their economic class.

 7pm, Thursday, February 17^th, 2022, via Zoom.  

RSVP on Eventbrite, link to the Zoom will be sent out the day of the event. Email andrew.elder@historyproject.org with any questions. For security purposes, Zoom meetings require an authenticated Zoom account, so please be sure to register with Zoom prior to the event.

This event is free and open to the public, any donations made will benefit The History Project. Thank you for your support!

About the Author:

Michael Seth Stewart, Ph.D. teaches English at the University of Alabama. He is also the editor of Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners.

About John Wieners:

Born in Boston, poet John Wieners was a Beat poet and member of the San Francisco Renaissance, Wieners was also an antiwar and gay rights activist. His poetry combines candid accounts of sexual and drug-related experimentation with jazz-influenced improvisation, placing both in a lyrical structure. In an interview with his editor, Raymond Foye, Wieners stated, “I try to write the most embarrassing thing I can think of.” As Robert Creeley observed, “His poems had nothing else in mind but their own fact.”

(Biography excerpted from The Poetry Foundation)