Yours Presently: The Selected Letters of John Wieners

Boston born and bred, John Wieners was a queer self-styled poète maudit who was renowned among his contemporaries but ignored by mainstream critics. Twenty-first-century readers are correcting this elision, placing Wieners back alongside his better-known peers, including Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Amiri Baraka. Wieners was a voluble letter writer, maintaining friendships with these contemporaries 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. The letters collected in this volume are greatly enhanced by Eileen Myles's preface and Stewart's thorough introduction, notes, and brief bios of the poets, writers, artists, and editors with whom Wieners corresponded. The result is more than the letters of a poet--it is a history that explores the world at large in the mid-twentieth century.

Author: Michael Seth Stewart
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 06/15/2024
Series: Recencies Series: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century
Pages: 360
Weight: 1.22lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780826366351