For Hannah Weiner's Birthday, A Guide to Her Work

Happy Birthday, Hannah Weiner! The poet, performance artist, and probable clairvoyant would have been 83 years old today. Let's celebrate with a little reading:

1. Robert Dewhurst's talk on Country Girl, with links to the Wild Orchids issue dedicated to her work as well as her EPC page.

2. There's of course Charles Bernstein's memoir of Weiner, first published in The Poetry Project Newsletter in 1997, and reprinted in Jacket.

3. Kenning Editions has done wonders for the continued presence of Weiner's work, particularly with the publication of Hannah Weiner's Open House. Here's a review of the book by Joyelle McSweeney for Boston Review. The basic facts:

Hannah Weiner’s influence extends from the sixties New York avant-garde, where she was part of an unprecedented confluence of poets, performance and visual artists including Phillip Glass, Andy Warhol, Carolee Schneeman, John Perrault, David Antin, and Bernadette Mayer. Like fellow-traveler Jackson Mac Low, she became an important part of the Language movement of the 70s and 80s, yet her influence can be seen in the “New Narrative” work stemming from the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as in contemporary poetics. With other posthumous publications of late, her work is being discussed by scholars in feminist studies, poetics, and disability studies. But there does not yet exist a representative selection spanning her decades of poetic output. HANNAH WEINER’S OPEN HOUSE aims to remedy this with previously uncollected (and mostly never-published) work, including performance texts, early New York School influenced lyric poems, odes and remembrances to / of Mac Low and Ted Berrigan, and later “clair-style” works.

4. Ron Silliman also wrote about the book here. He writes:

In the past I’ve characterized Weiner as a militant & precise realist of a distinct reality, one conditioned by her schizophrenia. Nothing in HWOH makes me want to step back from that description, tho this volume does a far better job than any of her previous books in placing Weiner’s writing and its development into a larger framework, one that includes the downtown Manhattan performance scene of the 1960s & ‘70s, and the New York School, particularly its second generation.

One might have expected Weiner to have been closer, in fact, to the first round of the New York School poets, born as she was in 1928, just one year younger than John Ashbery, two than Frank O’Hara. But with the exception of Barbara Guest & Bunny Lang & a few painters, that was never a generation particularly open to women as such. And Weiner appears to have been a late bloomer, first performing her Code Poem works at the age of 40. A Brandeis grad who had gone through a marriage to, I believe, a psychoanalyst, Weiner was a successful lingerie designer when she performed the first work documented here, “Hannah Weiner at Her Job,” at the A.H. Schreiber Company on West 33rd Street, room 1200. She was successful enough that Simeon Schreiber, her boss, participated in the event, which included one pair of bikini bottoms “made especially for this show by August Fabrics and A.H. Schreiber.“

Weiner was even slower to begin publishing, with her first book, Magritte Series appearing in 1970. Clairvoyant Journal, the volume that made Weiner famous (or at least notorious) with its claim to have had portions of the text transcribed from language Weiner saw on people’s foreheads, on walls, or simply hovering mid-air, at times in elaborate textures, such as dog fur, is published by Angel Hair in 1978. It’s only her second book – Weiner was already 50.

5. A good listen: The full LINEbreak interview with Charles Bernstein and Hannah Weiner, recorded in Hannah's apartment on New York City's Lower East Side in 1995 and preserved at PennSound.

6. For more audio, Weiner's PennSound page.

7. You can still find copies of Code Poems and Clairvoyant Journal if you've got fifty to two-hundred clams to spare on some transformative poetry.