I secured a detail watch over my body and then continued. In the groin area I saw a whole picture superimposed on my body. Red and green and black lines and dots going from one side down the urinary tract and the ovaries. It was a cartoon superimposition in the same place I months later saw the clock image which I interpreted as meaning this will take time. I was pretty impressed with that diagram and kept asking the so-called I myself spirit, a light outline of a face smoking a pipe, what to do. I had previously seen a picture of my spine superimposed on a drawing on the wall. The other things I saw images of on me were the instruments of my lingerie trade, a plastic ruler, a stapler, staples (in the knotted muscles of my hands), scissors and pins. This amused me and I made them go away with my mind or with the little words my mind taught me. (The Fast, 36)

Following Tardos, I read a statement I’d written specifically for the tribute, addressing my sense of Weiner’s privileged status as an “innocent,” one who “undergoes” the sensations and feelings of others in her world towards ethical and political consequence. To support this intuition, I read specifically from Weiner’s early 1980s book, Spoke, published by Douglas Messerli’s Sun & Moon Press. In a statement Weiner wrote for Poetics Journal (ed. Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten), Weiner explains that Spoke is a work of “transference”. The transferential environment that is Spoke is underscored by Weiner’s use of the personal pronoun “I” to identify with everyday objects (toilet paper, blankets, etc.) as well as with contemporary personages as opposed to each other as Ronald Reagan and Leonard Peltier. Through such uses of the “I,” Weiner presents a field created by words where things become their opposite, opposing energies interrelate, conflict, and, indeed, transfer. In consequence, Weiner brings a “psychoanalytic” phenomena (transference) to political-ethical tragedy—the further destruction of American politics by Reagan’s presidency, the ongoing plight of Native Americans under the thumb of the U.S. federal government.