The front cover of a notebook alongside a look at the handwritten notes inside
Library, Museums and Press Staff
December 6, 2023

A View from the Vault: Manuscript Poetry Notebook of John Wieners

By Aaron Bisson, graduate assistant for the Poetry as Activism Project

“A View from the Vault” showcases some of the unique, notable or rare items that are a part of the Special Collections and Museums holdings at the University of Delaware. Each month, we highlight a different item and share interesting facts or intriguing histories about it. If you are interested in seeing any of the materials featured in person or want to learn more about anything showcased in the series, please contact Special Collections and Museums at AskSpec or AskMuseums.

 

A notebook with handwritten notes and poetry in itJohn Wieners Manuscript Poetry Notebook

John Wieners

MSS 0099, F0361

This eclectic notebook glimpses the life of 20th-century American poet John Wieners in the spring of 1962. It reflects a two-month period in which Wieners returned to the greater Boston area, where he was born and raised, and he captures the spirit of Boston in transit from page to page.

The notebook’s diverse contents—19 drafts of poems interspersed with city life musings, provocative clippings, and partial facsimiles of the works of William Carlos Williams and D. H. Lawrence—demonstrate Wieners’ many strands of thought at this time.

Following his release from a psychiatric hospital a year prior, Wieners lived in New York City amidst the Beat scene, residing with writer Herbert Huncke and working at Eighth Street Books. His poetic influences stem from both the Beat Generation and Black Mountain College, inflected further by his Catholic upbringing, his sexuality and his battles with addiction. Wieners’ poetry is inextricable from his lifelong activist pursuits. He was outspoken in his antiwar sentiments and closely aligned with gay liberationists like Charles Shively.

The John Wieners Manuscript Poetry Notebook will be digitized as part of the Poetry as Activism Project, a Library, Museums and Press initiative supported by the Mellon Foundation. The notebook is one of many materials in Special Collections that reflect the work of 20th-century American poets from the margins.