Six lines, two stanzas, hardly a complete sentence: John Wieners's "Survivor" reads less like a story than like a file someone has compiled on a person. "Coded; spaced out; / transvestited; in doubt" is a run of tags stuck on from outside. The grammar helps. Past participles like "coded" and "transvestited" suggest things done to someone, or said about them. There is no "I", "he" or "she" anywhere. The subject is just whoever the labels land on, and the title supplies the one fact that matters: this person is still here.
The key words are slippery. "Coded" pulls two ways. To be coded is to be classified and filed, but coded language is also how people speak when they can't speak openly, in signals only some can read. "Spaced out" is slang for dazed, yet in a poem of broken fragments it also describes the page itself, all gaps and stops. "Transvestited" is the roughest of the three: a noun forced into a clumsy verb that sounds like an official's word. The clumsiness seems to be the point. Then "invert" arrives with no article or helper. It is an older clinical term for a gay person, but it also simply means to turn upside down, so the word is both a category and an action. "Emily's skirt" gives it something to work on. The poem never says who Emily is. A reader might think of Emily Dickinson, but that is only a guess. What the text actually offers is a skirt, a piece of clothing that comes with assumptions about whoever wears it, and a hint that those assumptions can be flipped.
Sound sets the first stanza apart as tight and almost chantlike. "Out" and "doubt" rhyme, "skirt" nearly echoes "invert", and every line stops on a hard *t*. The semicolons make the rhythm start and stop, and each label clicks shut like a latch. The second stanza loosens. "Behavior," "border" and "route" do not rhyme with one another, though "felled" and "Travelled" echo each other across the line break. Depending on how you pronounce it, "route" can also swing back to "out" and "doubt," so the poem ends close to where it began.
The second stanza gives the survivor something to do besides be described. "No felled behavior" suggests a tree cut down, and "felled" also sounds like "fell," as in fallen. Whatever conduct is meant, it was not brought low. Then "Travelled the border" breaks in with a capital letter, as if a new sentence has started before the old one finished. The border fits everything the first stanza listed: the line between genders, between being steady and being "in doubt," between private life and public gaze. The last line, "as exhibition's route," sharpens that last idea. An exhibition is a display, and a route is a path or a procession. Survival here is a walk along a course where you are watched the whole way. The poem ends on a comma, not a full stop, so it stops mid-journey.
The poem is significant for how much it packs into so few words, and for what it does with borrowed language. Clinical vocabulary, slang and the vocabulary of clothing all turn up without comment, so the reader has to decide the tone: wound, defiance, or both at once. It never claims that survival is triumphant. It shows someone moving through labels and stares without shedding them, perhaps turning them inside out as they go. Because the last line is open-ended, we are left standing on the route among the onlookers, and that discomfort may be what the poem most wants us to feel.