‘In August of 1972, Hannah Weiner, an accomplished and highly politicized performance artist and poet, began to receive a remarkable form of “dictation.” Printed words of all sizes bombarded Weiner; she saw these words in the air, on every available surface, on people, on the page before she wrote them, and on her forehead from within. Weiner called her “psychic” ability to see words “clairvoyance.” She developed a mode of poetic writing, “clair-style,” that incorporated words and phrases clairvoyantly seen, eventually composing through these seen elements exclusively. In such groundbreaking works as Clairvoyant Journal (1978), LITTLE BOOKS/INDIANS (1980), Sixteen (1983), Spoke (1984), and silent teachers remembered sequel (1994), Weiner did not so much experiment with existing literary models to document the experience of clairvoyance as she created a number of startlingly raw and enormously complex poetic forms, becoming a heroic figure at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in Manhattan and in the bicoastal school of Language writing.
‘Weiner let no representation of herself circulate that did not take her status as a clairvoyant into account, as, for instance, her introduction to Nijole’s House (1981) demonstrates: “ALL WORDS BELIEVE IT SEEN / I ams a clairvoyant”).2 To read Weiner’s poetry is thus to confront her claim to clairvoyance, which makes the critical reception of her work an incredibly complicated matter: her emphatic experiential claims and the terms on which she makes them at once legitimate her poetry a priori as testimony and overtly perform as a persuasive strategy within what are extremely self-consciously literary works. Either set of terms requires that we read clairvoyance other than as a symptom of schizophrenia, an illness with which Weiner had been diagnosed.
‘I want to suggest, however, that in naming the phenomena by which words were given to her to be seen “clairvoyance,” Weiner alerts us to the peculiar status of her texts without allowing us to medicalize and dismiss them. For her poetry, arriving from elsewhere in ordinary language, can only become deviant if we decide to make it so from the outset. Indeed, Weiner creates not only an enabling, but a strikingly innovative and important position from which to write: she engages the occultations entailed by linguistic abstraction and signals that she is enabled to do so through a banalized version of the occult. However nonvolitional, clairvoyance is a technique for estranging the normalcy that mystifies us. And Weiner’s tactic of reverse discourse, one that appears to trade the blindness of a delegitimized epistemological position for the insight of an idealized and rarefied psychic state, also opens onto paradoxes of reading and writing that her radical, language-centered poetics confronts.
‘As testimony, clairvoyance does not avow the transparency of its medium, but rather makes the coercion of mediation evident. Openly declaring her solicitation of belief through a trope only figuratively removed beyond belief, Weiner exposes belief itself as the strange but mundane sine qua non of reading. Her strategy illuminates writing’s demands on us as it gainsays a credibility it has already hooked in the very act of soliciting credibility. Straining against the transcendental quality of language even as she points to it as a foregone conclusion, Weiner not only disrupts the normative transparency of what is to be read but also erodes the normative rationality of the figure who reads.
‘For Weiner emphasized that she was not the frictionless vehicle for messages from another scene, but rather the recipient of language that formally and thematically implicated its resistance to meaning. This seen language also revealed that the very recognition of language as such subjects us to a meaning that can neither be averred nor denied. An exteriorized, nonintentional form of writing, the seen words not only provided a unique means of encountering language as an indeterminate, opaque materiality that we ourselves enliven with belief, but also as a form of mediation that announced itself as being curiously existentially indefinite, both there and not there. Thus, even as she anchored these phenomena in her cognitive experience, clairvoyance was for Weiner not a traffic with the spirit, but a near miss with the letter. Reflexively signifying on clairvoyance as “quaint phrase” or sedimented term, Weiner turned this familiar figure of heightened vision against itself.
‘In fact, the reversals of Weiner’s discursive practice take place on a number of levels, constantly spoiling assumptions about and built into language, yet conscious that our escape from these assumptions is comprised and compromised by language itself. In taking the unusual dictation of clairvoyance, Weiner inverts the apostrophe of lyric poetry and externalizes poetic agency, locating it in mediation. Seeing words clairvoyantly illustrates the mediating tension in language that plays out in syntactical structures, disciplinary mechanisms that echo institutional relationships. Further, rather than performing as a privileged, gendered proximity to authentic knowledge or as a vitiation of a gendered position of knowledge, as it has done traditionally, clairvoyance instead functions as a reflexive figure about figures of knowledge. Weiner dissects a grammar of epistemology that presupposes and incorporates differences as differentials in power.
‘Vigilant in denaturalizing her technology of representation, Weiner turns clairvoyance to political use, rendering structural and thus necessarily social inequities historically specific. As the singular witness to clairvoyant phenomena, she is poignantly aware that her testimony can only appear in a recognizable and overdetermined form. For Weiner, this hyper-attentiveness to overdetermination resonates most strongly with the political predicament of Native Americans, whose difficulties in achieving adequate political representation demonstrate the limitations of politics and the need for an ethical relation to difference. Weiner was an ardent proponent of the American Indian Movement, but she found, in a sense parallel to her own situation, that to be a witness for is also to be a witness against: simply to use an officially recognized language is already to be implicated in the structures of power, to exploit alterity as it is rendered recognizable. Weiner puts the paralogical or oblique insight she gains from clairvoyance to work in her nonclairvoyant writings as well, commenting on the deep and seemingly unavoidable violence in any representational framework.’ — Judith Goldman
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Further
Hannah Seiner @ electronic poetry center
Audio: Hannah Weiner readings @ PENNSOUND
Disabled Texts and the Threat of Hannah Weiner
Charles Bernstein on Hannah Weiner
Avant-Garde Journalism: Hannah Weiner’s Early and Clairvoyant Journals
Hannah Weiner: In beloved memory
Witness Hannah Weiner
The landscape of Hannah Weiner’s late work
About What: Hannah Weiner
Hannah Weiner @ goodreads
Hannah Weiner and Basic English
Hannah Weiner and Rammellzee
HANNAH WEINER’S OPEN HOUSE
Spectral Conversions: James Merrill and Hannah Weiner
Playtime with Jacques Tati and Hannah Weiner
“You can transcend this stupid bad girl reality”: A study of Hannah Weiner’s “clair-style”
What Hannah Weiner Means to Me
“‘Suddenly Everything Went Blue’: Late Style in Hannah Weiner’s The Book of Revelations”
Read ‘Clairvoyant Journal’ free online here
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Hannah Weiner on Public Access Poetry 12-29-77
‘From 1977 to 1978 a group of poets were given a broadcasting spot on the New York cable television station where they launched an avant-garde TV format presenting contemporary poets and poetry. The show Public Access Poetry (PAP) aired once a week for half an hour and showcased the then mostly unknown poets of the trendy New York downtown scene, such as Ted Berrigan, Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, Jim Brodem or Charles Bernstein. When Hannah Weiner was invited she performed entries of the 1974 Clairvoyant Journal together with Sharon Mattlin and Peggy De Coursey. Likewise, the recording of the New Wilderness Audiographic Series of Cassettes 1978 was performed with three voices. This first explicit audio art label in the USA specialized on compilations and editions of cross-genre sound recordings, such as experimental and traditional music, poetry, stories and sound art.’ — Kunsthalle Zürich
‘The situation of the voices, and the interruption and overlay, is quite clear if you hear the tapenade by New Wilderness Audiographics wherein Sharon Mattlin is a wonderful CAPITALS and bosses me around endlessly. (…) Peggy (De Coursey) and Regina (Beck) both sound as if they were scolding me. We worked it so that the voices came fast after each other, occasionally speaking unison and overlapping, and occasionally one of us would ad-lib comment.‘ — Hannah Weiner
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Extras
Hannah Weiner: A Film by Phill Niblock (1974)
Rock-A-Bye Rock Lobster
Rita Gonzalez Reads Hannah Weiner
Performing Hannah Weiner’s Code Poem “RJ Romeo & Juliet”
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Hannah Weiner @ Kunsthalle Zürich
Feb 21, 2015 – May 17, 2015
‘This show, curated by young Basel curator Franziska Glozer, portrays the in every sense extraordinary poetry of American writer Hannah Weiner (1928 –1997). Her writing centers on the word in all its variations as it describes, laughs, interrupts, commands and desires to be expressed without drawing a breath.’ — Mutual Art
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Interviewed by Charles Bernstein
from LINEbreak
Hannah, what first got you interested in writing poetry? I think your early work also included performance work; when did you actually start writing poems?
I didn’t start writing poems until my middle thirties. It was something that . . . writing was something I wanted to do as a child. And I won a medal for it in junior high school. But I just couldn’t hang in with writing novels or something. And twenty years went by. And one vacation I just decided to write. And a friend said not to care whether you write novels or short stories or essays or poetry, just write. And I wrote on a legal pad for, oh, ten or twelve pages, and then suddenly I saw I was writing poetry. And that shocked me. And then I went to take classes, mostly at the New School. And I found I couldn’t write New York School poetry. In fact, I can’t.
Who were the classes at the New School with?
Oh, Kenneth Koch, and I believe Bill Berkson.
Bill Berkson. So two poets associated with the New York School.
Yes. And there was a course with Louise Bogan at NYU.
Louise Bogan!
Previously to that, yes.
That’s a great thing to think about, you with Louise Bogan. You seem—
Well, she bored me to tears. [Laughs.]
And I was going to quit poetry entirely, but I had a scholarship to the New School and I went into Kenneth’s class and he . . . Although I didn’t write his kind of poetry, he was a very inspiring teacher. He was just full of it.
I do think the Clairvoyant Journal is a performance work as much as it is a poem. It’s a diary, as much as it is an essay. It’s a work that’s hard to characterize. Could you talk a little about what you had in mind when you started to do that work?
The Clairvoyant Journal? Well, I started to see words in August 1972. And I saw them for a year and they were all over the place, coming out of my hair and my toenails, and god-knows- what. And I nally got the message in the Village Voice . . . at a Satchidananda retreat, to see him. And I wrote a note, or two notes, to him, and he put the big words on my forehead.
So are you saying that the Clairvoyant Journal was partly dictated, in the Jack Spicer sense? That you were recording things, that you were seeing outside you, with your own interventions mixed in?
Well the Clairvoyant Journal has three voices. The capital words, which give instructions, the italics, which make comments, and the ordinary type, which is me just trying to get through the day. And it was a quite wild thing to type.
There is a little bit of a quality I can hear in your contemporary Frank O’Hara. For example, “It’s 6:12 in New York,” and the mentioning of the proper names of friends or people that you know.
Yes, I know . . .
But, also . . .
I cheat in language. [Laughs.]
There’s the lack of a kind of anecdote or anecdotal force that you have in some of O’Hara, or in some of his immediate associates. You have a much fatter tone. This seems to be—if Louise Bogan was here—I imagine she would say that there was a lack of literary quality [in this poem].
Oh, for heaven’s sakes don’t mention her! She bored me to tears.
Because there’s no beginning, middle, or end. It just continues on. And also there’s a lot of very ordinary material. A lot of things that might be considered trivial, where nothing is happening.
Oh yes, it’s a very . . . it’s just a journal. When I became clairvoyant I just started keeping a journal of everything that was happening.
What interested you about the kinds of diaristic materials that would normally be excluded from poetry, that you’ve put in? The things that most people would edit out. Lots of the Clairvoyant Journal consists of things that in a conventional poetic and literary context would be edited out.
It came from conceptual art, when there was an idea in the late 60s and early 70s to document everything. Or to make docu- ments of things. And so that’s what I did. And then I edited out. For example, The Fast, I edited out forty- ve pages from a thou- sand handwritten ones. And there’s another book following that that’s coming out soon.
If the Clairvoyant Journal is based on a diary or a journal, one thing that’s different about it is that it’s not just one single voice, and actually it explodes the narrative by having 3 contrasting voices, and the subject of that narrative is one who is being bombarded by different kinds of information. Are you ever embarrassed by what you write about in the journal, by the openness of it? Not the openness in the sense that you’re revealing kind of scandalous things, but just the openness to the triviality of thought, to the shifting of thought.
Oh, Charles, I don’t have time to be embarrassed! I’m always seeing words! Or hearing voices, or whichever form the clairvoy- ance takes.
Embarrassment could be understood as being kind of a male concern within literature, which women writers have often pointed to. Certainly working within the diaristic tradition, or working with journals or diaries, can be associated with taking a form that’s associated with women. Do you think of your work as being feminist work, in that sense?
No, I really don’t. I don’t really believe it’s either one sex or the other. It’s a daily journal, and it’s gone slightly screwy, and is under control when you read it, with three voices, or when you see it, because of the three different typefaces.
So you don’t feel some association or alliance with some of the feminists of your generation?
Oh, I did at the time. Yes, indeed. But that was earlier in the 70s. This was written in ‘74, and published in ‘78.
Because really you’ve turned a kind of writing or a kind of thought which would be often disparaged as being women’s writing, or female writing, and you’ve made it the center of a very radical literary experiment.
Oh. [Sighs.] Well, I don’t know Charles. I bought a typewriter. And I looked at the words all over the place, and said you have three choices: caps, italics, and regular type, and that settled it, that’s all. The words settled down to three voices.
Do you think of your work in terms of a tradition of the avant garde, of experimentalism?
Yes, I’ve always felt that the best thing . . . I mean, how can you not be avant garde if you’re the only person in the world who sees words?
[Laughs.] But I thought we all see words, in some sense.
No, it isn’t the same at all! If you saw words in color across the living room, twelve or twenty feet long, “OBEY CHARLEMAGNE” or something, or saw them every time you moved, you’d realize that it’s really visual, and at the beginning it was in color. The color has disappeared. And at the moment I don’t see words on my forehead. It’s a little tiring for me now.
Well do you think such a project goes beyond poetry then? Or is it what poetry could be?
I’m really a silent teacher and that’s what I didn’t discover until I wrote Spoke.
What does it mean to be a silent teacher?
What?
What does it mean to be a silent teacher?
A silent teacher is one who trains other people to teach others who work subliminally and they give instructions.
Is that something that comes through in your writing? Or hap- pens to readers when they’re reading your writing?
Well the Clairvoyant Journal is, if you read it that way, a book of instructions. I don’t say so. There are a lot of things I haven’t made really clear, and I have to in the next book or two or . . .
Is there a performative aspect to . . .
Or three books, really. I have three books that will take me god knows how long.
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Book
Hannah Weiner Clairvoyant Journal
Angel Hair Books
‘With Clairvoyant Journal, Hannah Weiner writes a specific form of diary, using the characteristics of typographic styles (roman, italic and CAPITAL) to present an inner discussion between three separate voices. Clairvoyant Journal also gives an insight into the daily life of a writer living in New York in the 1970s, evoking a poetic, musical, and artistic scene, yoga and a poetical experience.’ — les presses du reel
Excerpt
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p.s. Hey. ** CAUTIVOS, Thanks. If I see a Haslett novel in a book store I’ll just rifle through it and see if the prose excites me at all. I can usually tell pretty quickly. I’ll look for the Bernard Quiriny book, thank you. I have a really busy day ahead, how was yours? ** Dominik, Hi!!! ‘DR’ seems important because it gave a lot of people courage, and even though the mainstream isn’t of interest to me at all, it is the entrance for most people into much more interesting ideas and places, I guess. It’s like if people like Radiohead, maybe that leads them to look for music further afield that is genuinely experimental. Or something. ‘Dracula’, yes, I keep meaning to. I just typed it into my little reminder doc. It’s hard to believe ‘Killing Time’ actually works, but I guess it does. Very cool, yeah. Hard to choose — thank you for offering, love — but maybe the Rug one for some reason and maybe the knife throwing one? Love going back in time and convincing Grove Press to let me use his name backwards (‘Evol’) as the title of my novel ‘Try’ which was the title I originally wanted but which they refused to let me use, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. I actually saw that one in person, and it’s even better ‘in the flesh’. I don’t know Lily Savage. I’m on it, thanks to you. Oh, man, I hope the antibiotics have kicked in and are doing their magic. How are you feeling today? ** Misanthrope, Some friends and I did go see an American football game live once out of curiosity a long time ago when the Rams were LA’s team, but we gave up and left after about 45 minutes. Tsitsipas: I’ll peel my eyes for him. 2023 is hot. Let’s gangbang it. ** Jack Skelley, Goodness, what a completely curious dream. Man, I have no clue what that means. Dreams and me, we’re like ships in the night. Seems positive though. Makes me want to get a pipe cleaner/hair transplant in time for our Saturday confab. I guess me wanting to do that means I’m secretly a big attention hog? ** David Ehrenstein, The link didn’t work, but I vaguely remember some sort of motorised something in ‘Holy Motors’, so I’ll concentrate on that. ** malcolm, Hey. That NYE of yours sounds nice. I just watched the documentary about King Crimson and ate some dark chocolate and zzzzz. That is some crazy synchronicity. And yeah, those have to be road signs on the right track. I would love to hear that Dudley Benson EP if it’s no trouble. I like sweet pop, especially when it’s awesome and obscure at the same time. My dad had this brief period of being really into rock polishing, and he had this rock polishing machine in our basement, and I used to go down there and get stoned and sit and watch it tremble and revolve and rattle for hours. Rock your today, and see you in the/my AM! ** Robert, Hi, Robert. Wow, those videos look extremely fun. I am in fact going to line them up and watch them in full after I finish a few meetings I have to do this morning. Wow, thank you. I’m not sure, and it’s a different-ish sort of thing, but you might like the videos of this artist Jon Rafman who I’m showcasing here on Friday. I feel freaked out just trying not to imagine that operating table scenario. But I like being freaked out, no worries. Thanks! Stuff good with you du jour? ** Sarah, Hi, Sarah. I’m glad you came back. You’re a fiction writer, awesome! Me too. Is there anything anywhere I could read? The website project sounds exciting. There’s definitely a need for it. I’ll be all over it when you finish it if that’s any kind of encouragement. I’m big on collaborating too. Finding a conducive collaborator is pretty special. When I feel that connection, I try to make myself jump at the chance. It’s especially rewarding if you’re often writing fiction on your lonesome, you know? I totally agree this year is going to make the previous ones seem puny. Have an inspiring Wednesday! ** ShadeoutMapes:O, Hey! I’m sorry about you missing out on the school day. Are you going to miss the whole semester? You’re a theater kid, cool. Like how? Or I guess I mean are you an onstage guy or a behind the scenes guy or both or other? I haven’t seen ‘The Whale’, but, yeah, I hope Brendan Frasier gets the Oscar ‘cos … yeah. I’ll go find your email. Cool. Stay in your good mood. It’s radiating and infectious. ** Okay. Do y’all know the writer Hannah Weiner? If not, how and why she wrote makes for a pretty unique and interesting story, and the work is super worthy too. Have a look. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 