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

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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

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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.

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