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.
Pilot Press, an imprint founded to “retrieve a philosophy of publishing lost to Aids and capitalism”, is attempting to remedy this with two publications: A Book of Music by Jack Spicer and Solitary Pleasure: Selected Poems, Journals and Ephemera of John Wieners. Spicer and Wieners were mid-century American poets and their work appeared in the groundbreaking The New American Poetry anthology, published in 1960. This collection defined a post-second world war generation of avant garde poets, from John Ashbery to Jack Kerouac, who were linked by a shared disillusionment with the hierarchies of the literary establishment. Spicer belonged to the Beat-adjacent San Francisco Renaissance, where he presided over an experimental reading group named The Dharma Committee, which, fuelled by narcotics, attracted the attention of the FBI. Wieners was part of an emergent set of peripatetic poets who vagabonded between different artistic spheres, as comfortable among Spicer’s north California coterie as he was alongside the New York School’s “artworld cocktail ballet scene”, as Allen Ginsberg described it.
