Hannah Weiner

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Hannah Weiner (November 4, 1928 – September 11, 1997) was an American poet who is often grouped with the Language poets because of the prominent place she assumed in the poetics of that group.

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[edit] Early Life and Writings

Weiner was born in Providence, Rhode Island and attended Radcliffe College, graduating with a B.A. in 1950. She began writing poetry in 1963 and published her first book, The Magritte Poems in 1966. In the late 1960s, she participated in a number of artistic events in New York, where she had been living for some time.

[edit] Mature Work

In the early 1970s, Weiner began writing a series of journals that were partly the result of her experiments with clairvoyant or automatic writing and partly a result of her schizophrenia. She influenced a number of the Language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets after the magazine that bears that name). Weiner was included in the In the American Tree anthology of Language poetry. Her books include Clairvoyant Journal (1978), Little Books/Indians (1980), The Fast (1992), Silent Teachers Remembered Sequel (1994), And We Speak Silent (1996).

Interest in Weiner continues into the 21st century with the recent publication of Hannah Weiner’s Open House (2007). a "a representative selection spanning her decades of poetic output" [1] This volume was edited by Patrick F. Durgin, who provides an overview of Weiner's art:

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 Schneemann, John Perrault, David Antin, and Bernadette Mayer. Like fellow-traveler Jackson Mac Low, she became an important part of the Language poetry of the 70s and 80s, and her influence can be seen today in the so-called "New Narrative" work stemming from the San Francisco Bay Area. 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.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Poetics Archives SUNY Buffalo, Feb 2007.

[edit] External links