I liked this admission of fortuitous miscalculation, as it attests to the special care Durgin gives to whatever he publishes. This admission also seemed significant since Weiner herself was involved with design through her employment by the lingerie trade and publishing industry, and was especially subtle and careful in the ways she typed her manuscripts where words sprawl across the page in three different type faces, forming less a linear prosody than a total visual field felt in its typographic immediacy. As Durgin also recognized, “when we encounter Weiner’s work, we are met with the shocking recognition that the autonomy of lived experience is a pernicious hoax”. This observation, characteristically well-put by Durgin, may sum up Weiner’s position as she continuously acted as a medium for perceptions, information, encounters with other people, communities, free-floating signs, signals and “intermedia”—the stuff of “lived experience”!—throughout her career.

Taking the mic after Durgin was Laura Elrick and Roberto Toscano, poets currently residing in New York. They staged an early poem from Weiner’s Code Poems entitled “Romeo and Juliet”. In “Romeo and Juliet,” the Shakespearian couple’s amorous encounter is retold hilariously through “code,” specifically the semaphore alphabets used by the British and American navies. On the cover of Weiner’s original book the words “Not Yet. By and Bye,” “Never,” “Not Often. Seldom,” “Soon. Shortly,” “Ago. Since,” and “At Once. Now. This Time” appear spinning around a Mandala whose center reads “When Does It Or You Begin?”
In Elrick’s and Toscano’s staging of the poem the couple paced around the audience at St. Mark’s speaking their lines through walkie-talkies. Through this staging the audience could feel the quirky effects of Weiner’s version of Romeo and Juliet, as the sexual foreplay of the couple is imagined as two ships meeting at sea, sheepishly negotiating their gam through “friendly fire”:

TU Romeo: Have you a clean bill of health?
GHI You are in a very fair berth
GIA Juliet: This is my best point
SHJ Some swell
XOR Romeo: Thank you
GDS May I begin to?
GIT Juliet: The sooner the better
MFO Romeo: Entrance is difficult
MFD Juliet: Try to enter
KZU Romeo: I am in difficulties; direct me how to steer
OOX Juliet: You should swing and enter stern first
HBK Romeo: What is the nature of the bottom or what kind of bottom have you?
HAY Juliet: Double bottom
FHR Romeo: Stern way. Going astern (Open House, 38)