John Wieners photographed in Detroit, Mich., in 1966. (Photo by Leni Sinclair / Getty Images)
During the last three decades of his life, the poet John Wieners lived in a one-bedroom walkup at 44 Joy Street, on the back side of Boston’s Beacon Hill. By some accounts it was a drab, minimalist apartment, furnished with wicker patio chairs and decorated with Wieners’s own collages of travel brochures and movie magazines. The refrigerator was empty and unplugged. After he won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1986, grocery bags of champagne lined the walls replaced, gradually, by the empty bottles.