‘Poems are my salvation alone’ … John Wieners. Photograph: Allen Ginsberg

‘We exist upon the fringe of the world’: the queer American poets who battled madness and obscurity

Jack Spicer and John Wieners both wrote about their homosexuality – and in 50s America, that made them a threat. Forgotten for decades, finally their strange, anguished work has been unearthed

Ralf Webb

Monday 3 July 2023

In mid-century America, avant garde and alternative poetry was considered subversive, dangerous and hostile. To write and publish poems about drugs and sexuality, or poems with anti-nationalist, anti-war sentiment, was to attract suspicion from the authorities. It may have even landed you in prison: Amiri Baraka and Diane Di Prima were among many poets arrested on obscenity charges. Predictably, such subversive writing was often rejected by mainstream publishers – the result being that a lot of great poets and their work fell into obscurity.