Behind the State Capitol: Or Cincinnati Pike

Author: John Wieners

Publisher: The Song Cave (2025)

Available in print for the first time in 50 years, Behind the State Capitol: Or Cincinnati Pike has long enjoyed cult status. It is the record of a poet whose life has been shattered by poverty, drug addiction, and mental illness. Wieners creates a complex schizo-analysis of language, capitalism, incarceration and state power, while reflecting on unpopular themes of aging and loneliness in the gay world. It is also a paean for his beloved city of Boston, as he witnessed its destruction by the onerous forces of urban renewal. Considered by many to be his poetical masterpiece, the book was met variously with indifference and outrage when it was published in 1975.  In 1982 most remaining copies of the book were destroyed in the arson fire of Fag Rag/Good Gay Poets offices.

Already known as a ‘poet’s poet’ from The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958), Ace of Pentacles (1964) and Nerves (1970), in 1972 Wieners moved to 44 Joy Street on Boston’s Beacon Hill, where he was involved with anti-war and gay liberation movements, the Beacon Hill Free School, and organizations devoted to the rights of people with mental health conditions. Out of this milieu emerged Behind the State Capitol, described by its author as “Cinema decoupages; verses, abbreviated prose insights.” The book would be John Wieners’s last major poetical statement. He was forty-one.

This edition contains new Afterwords by Wieners’s friend and scholar James Dunn, and the poet’s biographer Robert Dewhurst.