Aufgabe 7 Richard Owens

Hannah Weiner’s Open House Richard Owens Hannah Weiner’s Open House Edited by Patrick Durgin Kenning Editions 2007

isbn: 978-0-9767364-1-7 $14.95 us

Like the work of contemporaries Jackson Mac Low, Clark Coolidge and others associated with the Language school, the work produced by Hannah Weiner during the last three decades of the 20th-century continues to resonate and announce itself—most notably, as Patrick Durgin has pointed out, in the work of Kevin Killian and others connected to the New Narrative movement rippling outward from the Bay Area. Given this decisive influence on new writing, a widely available trade edition which draws together the full range of Weiner’s written accomplishment has been much needed. Hannah Weiner’s Open House, edited by Durgin and brought out through his own Kenning Editions, is the first attempt at such a collection. But this collection is not a collected or complete works as such. Indeed, the collaborative, intermedia and performance-based nature of much of Weiner’s oeuvre immediately forecloses on the very possibility of such an edition. Rather, as he notes in his introduction, Durgin’s aim is to offer a selection which marks the broad scope of her work, much of which involved radical innovations in form. Among the most well known of these formal innovations are Weiner’s appropriation and repurposing of the “International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations” in Code Poems and, later, those works Weiner identified as “clairvoyantly written.” Publicly performed in the late 1960s but first published by Open Studio in 1982, Code Poems sees Weiner aspiring toward universality and attempting to abandon the discourse of identity and nation embedded in language. What we have in these code poems—and this is important to note—is the written and visual score for conceptual pieces previously performed in Central Park. The case is the same for Weiner’s clairvoyantly written poems. The page or so-called “large-sheet” for Weiner is an active political field—an open space of encounter not only between poet and reader, but also between self and other and

255

the multiplicity of othered, unfamiliar selves residing within but often bracketed out of the work of the poet. Within the frame of her clairvoyant work the page is the principal unit of composition and indeed the measure of the poem as event. Here the page is a privileged space which invites community. On the other hand, the sentence – at least the complete and properly constructed sentence – is a thing to be destroyed as the mark of what is most incomplete in being. It is only the incomplete sentence that can become for Weiner an ontological intervention wherein the shadow cast by subjectivity is shattered on the political space of the page. As Weiner herself writes in what appears to be the most thoroughgoing statement on her own poetics contained in Open House: The sentence is always interrupted. Mind 1 that speaks out loud, or writes, is interrupted by mind 2 that is simultaneously preparing the next sentence or answering a question. Therefore the correct form to represent both minds or the complete mind, is an interrupted form (128).

Although what we encounter in Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal, brought out in 1978 by Angel Hair, is often visually similar to Susan Howe’s highly figured page, the brand of work Weiner’s page performs is radically different. Having wriggled loose from the representational artifice of the finished sentence—“NOON STOP THIS NONSENSE // STOP TH SENTENC” (69)—Weiner introduces us to three personae, none of which can be read as entirely self or entirely other. The relationship between the three, as figured on the written page, is indeed overdetermined and inexplicable: “Especially in the Clairvoyant Journal the person writing is bossed around by voices, and gives up autonomy to other parts of herself. A relinquishing of constant conscious control to let the other part of the mind dominate” (131). Here we might think of similar and indeed prior projects which have addressed the notion of forces exterior to consciousness, whether we think Plato’s Ion, Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Althusserian notion of ideology, or Spicer’s Martians. But in Weiner’s clairvoyant work we have three and these three “voices” or personae are visually scored on the written page. Looking back at her clairvoyant work, Weiner claims “that the regular upper and lower case words described what I was doing, the CAPITALS gave me orders, and the underlines or italics made comments” (127). Here it is crucial to remember that capitalized words and phrases mark authority precisely because Weiner has paradoxically exercised her own agency and allowed that “voice” which bosses and barks to dominate and inscribe its very being on the page. The multiplicity of figures or voices which appear to speak through Weiner can, somewhat lazily, be read as an extension of the prophetic tradition in poetry. We can very easily read her as a poet-prophet of the Blakean sort. After all, if we

256

take her at her word, she does claim to have seen words. We can also read her clairvoyant poems in much the same way we read the incalculable permutations produced through the infinite play of intersecting personae in the modernist long poem, whether Pound’s Cantos, Loy’s Anglo-Mongrels, Eliot’s Wasteland or some other such work. (Here we might recall that Madame Sosostris, too, was identified as clairvoyant.) Yet Weiner appears to be doing something remarkably different in her attempt to account for the myriad voices contained on the complex but uniquely singular plane of being. With Weiner the trick seems to lie in not falling for the easy read. In a brief 1997 essay written on the occasion of her death and appropriately contained in the newsletter of the Poetry Project, who published her first collection of poems, Charles Bernstein wryly remarks: “It is an irony, perhaps, that the writing that Hannah will be best remembered for coincided with a period in which schizophrenia made her everyday life increasingly difficult.” In view of her relation to radical politics, the American Indian Movement in particular, we could very easily enlist Deleuze and Guattari, reading her triple-tiered clairvoyant work as poetry which comments on the capitalist production of schizophrenia. But this too would be something of a disservice to her accomplishment. Perhaps we can look to those readings of her work by Bernstein and Mac Low, both of whom worked closely with her and both of whom view her clairvoyant work not as the byproduct of a medical condition but as the domestication of and triumph over an otherwise debilitating condition. In the blurb for the Angel Hair edition of Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal, Mac Low writes, “Her achievement—& it is a considerable one—lies in her having developed a specific literary form through which to convey her remarkable experience.” That Durgin has opened the house, and delivered an edition which allows readers coming to Weiner’s work for the first time to consider the full range of her accomplishment, is in itself a considerable achievement.

257