John Wieners

In 1957 he took a job sweeping floors at a popular Beat hangout in North Beach, where he joined the artistic community in the city.

He then worked as an actor and stage manager at the Poet's Theater in Cambridge, and began to edit Measure, releasing three issues over the next several years.

In 1961, he moved to New York City and worked as an assistant bookkeeper at Eighth Street Books from 1962 to 1963, living on the Lower East Side with Herbert Huncke.

In 1965, after traveling with Olson to the Spoleto Festival and the Berkeley Poetry Conference, he enrolled in the Graduate Program at SUNY Buffalo.

In the early 1970s, Wieners became active in education and publishing cooperatives, political action committees, and the gay liberation movement.

In 1975, Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike was published, a magnum opus of "Cinema decoupages; verses, abbreviated prose insights."

Black Sparrow Press released two collections edited by Raymond Foye: Selected Poems: 1958-1984 and Cultural Affairs in Boston, in 1986 and 1988 respectively.

Wieners died on March 1, 2002, at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, having collapsed a few days previously after an evening attending a party with his friend and publisher Charley Shively.

[6] In 2017 the international quarterly Four by Two magazine, in collaboration with Raymond Foye, ran a series of previously unpublished letters from Wieners circa the 1950s and 1960s, to figures including Diane di Prima and Michael Rumaker.