“A Reading for Hannah Weiner’s Open House” at St. Mark’s Church was an unprecedented tribute for a most unprecedented person. Though many of the presenters and audience members persist among poetry communities embattled by lacks of funding and support by mainstream culture, the event was also a reminder that Weiner’s work is irreducible to poetry culture alone. That a relatively small group of poets continue to read and devote themselves to Weiner’s work within and without “the academy” is a blessing. But for me Weiner’s legacy raises a larger problem of why poetry and visual art in particular do not make better friends these days. Weiner’s colleague Vito Acconci, for one example, started his career as a poet, and successfully forayed into visual art, and eventually architecture and design as well. Likewise, Carolee Schneemann might be considered a text-based visual artist, if not a poet, as her engagement with a poet as antithetical to her own project as the hyper-masculinist Charles Olson suggests (see Schneemann’s “‘Maximus at Gloucester’: a Visit to Charles Olson” in her 2002 MIT Press book, Imaging Her Erotics). While Weiner’s work must continue to be studied and paid tribute to by poets, it also deserves the attention warranted by an Acconci or Schneeman after recent retrospection by curators, critics and art historians. Personally, I tried to link-up the St. Mark’s tribute to Weiner with the recent PERFORMA biennial, but to no avail. That my own efforts failed as a writer “commissioned” by PERFORMA (I wrote for PERFORMA’s Writing Live initiative this past November) attests to a considerable disjunct between poetry and visual arts cultures, a disjunct undoubtedly damaging to both. As Weiner’s work intends to be read on and off the page, made “live” and “seen,” I only hope that more tributes to Weiner will crop up in the near future, in any variety of hybrid forms, venues and contexts.

––T.D.


*Note we had similar problems as Patrick Durgin spoke of in laying out Weiner's text here. Apologies, but the way our admin is designed, some of the quoted text will not come out correctly. Gaps become removed (as in the poem "Romeo and Juliet"), etc. And we have also italicized the text to show it's a quotation, and that may also give an unitended effect. Just wish to point the reader to the illustrated texts that we have included to get the sense of the way the actual text looked as she inteded. There are more scanes here at Orpheus and more info on Weiner here.

Note on Images: Pg 1 combines the cover from Open House on right with text from Clairvoyant Journal. Pg 6 image "Hannah Weiner Silent Teacher"** is not from the original.