Robert A. Wilson John Wieners collection

Wieners was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1934. He received his A.B. from Boston College in 1954. With encouragement from poet Charles Olson (1910-1970), Wieners attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1955-1956, where he studied writing with poets Robert Creeley (1926-2005) and Robert Duncan (1919-1988). Wieners is also identified with the American Beat poets, having spent time in San Francisco at the height of the movement in the late 1950s. Wieners's first collection of poems, The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958), was written in San Francisco and became an instant sensation with the Beats.

In 1961, Wieners moved to New York City with aid from Allen Ginsberg's Poetry Foundation and returned to Boston in 1964. His interaction with Robert Wilson of The Phoenix Book Shop brought about the publication by Wilson and James Carr of Wieners's second collection, Ace of Pentacles (1964), a volume that received much positive critical attention. Wieners studied with his mentor Charles Olson at SUNY Buffalo from 1965 until 1967, during which time he wrote and published Pressed Wafer (1967).

Struggles with substance abuse and mental anguish over the course of his life led to periods of institutionalization for Wieners in 1959, 1969, and at various times in the early 1970s. Yet Wieners continued to write and publish, gaining insight and inspiration from those difficult times, and the early 1970s was a prolific time for Wieners. During his time at an institution in 1969, Wieners composed Asylum Poems (1969). 1970 saw the publication of Nerves , Wieners's first international volume. Wieners was also very active in promoting political causes, taking part in the antiwar movement, speaking out against racism, and campaigning for gay and women's rights. Cincinnati Pike, Or Behind the State Capitol (1975) was another landmark piece for Wieners, and combines a wide variety of media and poetic forms.

Wieners published little new work since 1975 and remained largely out of the public eye. In 1986, he produced a retrospective collection, Selected Poems, 1958-1984 , edited by Raymond Foye and with a forward written by Allen Ginsberg. In 1996, Wieners's previously unpublished journal by was published in an edited form by The Sun and Moon Press; the volume documents his life in San Francisco around the time of The Hotel Wentley Poems . The book, The Journal of John Wieners is to be called 707 Scott Street for Billie Holiday, 1959 , contains Wieners's prose, poetry, and various impressions of the creative atmosphere in San Francisco at the onset of the 1960s.

Wieners died on March 1, 2002, in Boston, Massachusetts.

Raymond Foye, "John Wieners,"Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 16. The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1983. pp. 572-583."John Wieners."Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2007. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007. http://galenet.galegroup.com (Retrieved 2007 March 4)

As the proprietor of The Phoenix Book Shop, Wilson interacted and was friends with many authors whose work he sold, printed, and later collected. Wilson provided encouragement and support, both artistic and financial, to many of the authors who frequented his shop and with whom he formed lifelong friendships.

In addition to selling books by the avant-garde and contemporary writers of the 1950s and 1960s, Wilson also published works out of The Phoenix, including his own bibliographies of some of those writers, Christmas keepsakes, and collections of poetry by authors such as Marianne Moore, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Diane di Prima. The first work published by Wilson and his colleague James Carr was John Wieners’s Ace of Pentacles (1964).

In 1997, several authors came together to pay tribute to Wilson and The Phoenix with the book The Phoenix Book Shop: a Nest of Memories, and in 2001, Wilson published a memoir of his twenty-six-year run as the owner of The Phoenix, titled Seeing Shelley Plain: Memories of New York's Legendary Phoenix Book Shop .

Wilson, Robert A.Seeing Shelley Plain. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 2001.