Wednesday, June 18, 2025

John Wieners on PennSound

Today we revisit our author page for pioneering queer poet John Wieners, whose long writing life took him from Black Mountain to San Francisco to New York City to Buffalo, and finally to Boston, where he spent the last three decades of his life. It's also a great opportunity for our listeners to reacquaint themselves with the recordings available on PennSound's Wieners author page.

Our earliest recordings include Wieners' participation in the Mad Monster Mammoth Poets Reading for Auerhahn Press in 1959 and a 1960s appearance on Paul Blackburn's radio program. That's followed by a trio of recordings from 1965: Wieners' July 14th set at the Berkeley Poetry Conference, another July reading possibly in Berkeley, and a brief recording from SUNY-Buffalo that September. Next, we have a October 1966 event from the 92nd Street Y's Unterberg Poetry Center and a pair of long recordings made at SUNY-Buffalo in 1967 and at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in 1968. Following that we have a wonderful conversation with Walter Lowenfels, Lillian Lowenfels, and Alan DeLoach in March 1969 and two recordings from Boston in 1972: two days' worth of visits to Robert Creeley's ENG-1670 class at Harvard and a short appearance on WBCN-FM.

Jumping forward to the 1980s, there are two tracks from The World Record: Readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1969-1980 and three poems recorded at Brooklyn College in 1988. The next decade starts in grand fashion with a pair of recordings from the spring of 1990: the first in San Francisco, followed by an appearance at the St. Mark's Poetry Project. There's another Poetry Project set from the fall of 1996, and an October 1999 reading at the Guggenheim to round things out, along with the recently-added film Hanuman Presents!

I also happily recommend that interested listeners check out the Wieners component of Jim Dunn and Kevin Gallagher's ambitious Jacket2 feature, Mass: Raw Poetry from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts," which we published in December 2012, as well as Wieners' page at the Electronic Poetry Center.