Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal (1978) opens into an aporia. “I SEE WORDS,” reads her forehead on the cover, and the preface reads: “I SEE words on my forehead IN THE AIR / on other people on the typewriter on the / page These appear in the text in CAPITALS / or italics.” The words we see on Weiner’s forehead on the cover represent the words that she sees (see fig. 1).
Cover of Clairvoyant Journal, used with the permission of Charles Bernstein for Hannah Weiner in trust.
But they are not the words she sees; as Jackson Mac Low remarks in the blurb on the back cover, Weiner sees the words “on her own forehead (in such a way that she can perceive them from within).” We see the words she has drawn on with marker, an act of Weiner’s writing. By the time we open to the first page, we are already reading from this doubled position.
The start of the journal itself is filled with contrasting orders, from the menacing (“GET OUT”) to the textual (“leave more space”) to the mundane (“get linoleum”). Sometimes these orders seem to argue for their own priority (“BEGIN / BEGIN WITH ME”); elsewhere they function as secondary reminders of authority (“YOU HAVE ORDERS”); and they even turn upon themselves. When “GO OUT” is quickly echoed by “GO WORDS,” we wonder to whom the words are speaking. When “dont underline that’s an order” appears in italics (that is, underlined on the typewriter) we wonder how the transcriber of these voices can negotiate these contradictory demands (see fig. 2). But the space of this negotiation, both for the writer and for the reader, can never be separate from their textual space.1 As Judith Goldman writes, “To read Weiner’s poetry is . . . 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” (122).
Opening page (partial) of Clairvoyant Journal, used with the permission of Charles Bernstein for Hannah Weiner in trust.
Weiner’s work is at once excessively open, and excessively opaque. She presents to us the words that she sees, but the means by which she sees them are not repeatable by her readers. And this problem is, I will argue in this essay, an interpretative problem that is foremost a political problem. How do we recognize a voice from the outside that insists upon its irreducible otherness, and yet demands to be heard? Can the poem, as Paul Celan writes in “The Meridian,” “speak in the cause of an Other—who knows, perhaps in the cause of a wholly Other” (180)?
Weiner’s Language poetry context might not at first seem apt for this consideration. As Marjorie Perloff, whose criticism has unquestionably had the most important role in Language poetry’s entrance into the canon, has written:
Language poetry provided a serious challenge to the delicate lyric of self-expression and direct speech: it demanded an end to transparency and straightforward reference in favor of ellipsis, indirection, and intellectual-political engagement. It was closely allied to French poststructuralist theory, later to the Frankfurt School, and hence it was, by definition, a high-culture movement. By the late ‘90s, when Language poetry felt compelled to be more inclusive with respect to gender, race, and ethnic diversity, it became difficult to tell what was or was not a “Language poem.”
(“Poetry on the Brink”)
In Perloff’s view, Language poetry is a “high-culture movement” that is defined by its theoretical alliances. Its “intellectual-political engagement” is specifically opposed to “inclusiv[ity] with respect to gender, race, and ethnic diversity”; the politics of difference appears here as a threat to Language poetry’s theoretical-poetic undertaking.
Compare, on the other hand, Lyn Hejinian’s essay “Barbarism” (1995), which asserts that “racism, sexism, and classism are repulsive,” and that this was one of the premises of Language writing’s “utopian undertaking” (Language of Inquiry 323, 321). Hejinian identifies Language writing with anti-racism through its embrace of “the barbarism of strangeness”: “the poet must assume a barbarian position, taking a creative, analytic, and often oppositional stance, occupying (and being occupied by) foreignness—by the barbarism of strangeness” (326). Language writing’s critique of “the romantic, unitary, expressive self” (329) through difficult poetry is positioned as occupying an outsider position, identifying with the (racialized) other whose speech marks their strangeness.
Weiner’s late 1960s performance poetry, particularly the “code poems” based on the International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations semaphore dictionary, was an early example for Language writing. When the Code Poems appeared as a book in 1982, Jerome Rothenberg provided this blurb: “Weiner’s explorations of the visual-verbal possibilities of coded language came early in our history and they persist & ring true up to the present”; this work clearly aligns with the theoretically motivated considerations of the role of language on the page that would come in the 1970s. But Weiner’s work would change dramatically in 1970: as she wrote in a brief autobiography for her 1994 book Silent Teachers, Remembered Sequel, “all this glory ended in 1970 when she became extremely psychic / and hiding out in a cheap apartment wrote about nothing else in / almost 100 notebooks.” Weiner’s clairvoyant experience of seeing words (and later, hearing voices) would become the focus of almost all her writing until her death in 1997.
Though infrequently discussed in accounts of Language poetry, Weiner’s social association with the group is clear. She appeared in the foundational Language anthologies edited by Ron Silliman and Douglas Messerli, and she contributed to the journals that constituted its bicoastal circulation system: Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews’s L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Hejinian and Barrett Watten’s Poetics Journal, and Silliman’s Tottel’s, among others. Weiner’s poetic alignment with Language poetry seems more in question: and we might query the way some language poets read Weiner. Bernstein describes her clairvoyance as if it were simply the general condition of being a Language poet. “We all see words,” his review of Clairvoyant Journal begins: “To ‘see words’ is to be inside language and looking out onto it” (“Making Words Visible” 266). Similarly, Silliman claims that reviews of Weiner “focused largely on the claim to clairvoyance . . . obscure the essential fact that these works are writing, literary productions rigorously following all the demands posed by the questions of their composition to a unique and rich result” (New Sentence 185). Weiner herself resisted some of this skepticism. In a 1995 interview with Charles Bernstein, after he repeated the claim that “we all see words, in some sense,” Weiner replied: “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” (“LINEbreak” 158–59). In a letter to publisher Douglas Messerli dated December 6, 1982, Weiner wrote:
Its been a little hard on the language scene PLEASE
DONT DROP ME JUST BECAUSE IM A WOMAN OR ILL. Im not ill
But the clairvoyance is weakening, and menopause, which
the boys laughed at, is over, thank god after 7 years 8,
of sweats chills and fevers . . .
also charles. sis
Im getting older 54 and he knows it and he wont say COMPETITIVE
anything. Charles says poetry is a competitive field and Ive
always tried FAILED so hard not to make it so.
(2)
Weiner worried about her inclusion among the Language poets—in the same letter she describes herself as “only half of a half a not language OR CHURCH poet” referring to the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, the node of the continuing generations of New York School poetry (1). This concern about her own placement was never far from Weiner’s political concerns, as she writes in another text, “Meaning Bus Halifax to Queensbury”: “The most disturbing things associated with poetry are that poets are read mostly by each other and that a poet who writes one way often opposes a poet who writes another” (Open House 167). In the same text Weiner weighs the political capacities for disjunction, writing that she prefers texts “breaking down the authority of syntax and sentence. . . . Linguistically inevitable historically this work as a new way to alter consciousness bus Halifax to Queensbury brings with it some (spiritual) power This can be used to change the culture.” In turning from questions of group identification to questions of political power, Weiner suggests that Language poetry’s most prized techniques might be judged in their capacity to alter the consciousness of others. Weiner’s marginality in Language poetry notwithstanding, then, the political capacity of her clairvoyant work seems well placed to serve as a test case for the kind of “barbarism” that Hejinian calls for in poetry. What would it mean for Language poetry to follow Hejinian, and to speak in the voice of another?
Weiner’s clairvoyant writings from the start brought into writing strange and other voices that manifested themselves in words seen on the page, in the air, on Weiner’s body, and in the room. While this might be enough to fulfill Hejinian’s demand of “occupying (and being occupied by) foreignness,” Weiner in fact went further. Beginning in the late 1970s Weiner’s interest turns to the American Indian Movement, in what Jennifer Russo has called a “politically-directed clair-style” (64). Clairvoyance becomes, for Weiner, both the means by which the political struggles of Native Americans could be represented and the source of responsibility that impelled that representation. For Weiner, this responsibility became her work’s only motivation. She wrote this to her friend Bernadette Mayer in 1982:
what good is poetry and how do you get to change the world—if you dont care whether i read in oct or not than you cant have respect for my work or my life as i have made the commitment as alex did to oh you poor bore dear shes overcome—many indian people dead in the yrs i knew them, their families incl children burned and all i could do was speak when i read—you are a dear friend and may you have the power to grant me something will do that seems important.
(4)
The standard for success as a poet, for Weiner, is her capacity to “change the world”: to respect her work is to respect that commitment. As such, critical approaches to Weiner must take her political aim to represent the struggles of Native Americans in her poetry community—a political aim that was the ethical motivation for Weiner’s writing—with the utmost seriousness.
Weiner’s poems may not be successful in their task of witnessing for and giving voice to AIM—that ethical work is persistently figured as impossible. But in their utopian extension of Language poetry to speak in the name of ethnic others, Weiner’s poems work through important difficulties in understanding that writing’s politics. An occasion to reconsider Language poetry’s commitment to text over voice, free play as opposed to representation, and textual politics instead of identity politics, her poems urgently probe whether these commitments can produce politically powerful writing. I claim in this essay that Weiner’s clairvoyant writings offer an alternative to the democratic utopianism imagined for Language innovations like Ron Silliman’s “New Sentence”: these writings instead figure translation between voices as a utopian textual practice. The ethical aporias of translation are the ethical aporias that Weiner’s writing demands we dwell with, and perhaps they reflect more general circumstances for writers attempting to witness across boundaries of race and experience.
I begin by assessing the political aims of Language writing from the point of view of that writing’s racial politics; the typical understanding of Language writing’s political capacity is, I argue, an unlikely source of cross-ethnic solidarity or anti-racism. I then turn to Alcheringa, the journal of “ethnopoetics” where an early Language “sampler” appeared in 1975. While Alcheringa’s primitivism seems in some ways continuous with Language writing’s ethnic myopia, certain translations by Jerome Rothenberg offer more promising attempts to bridge gaps in representation through textual experimentation. Examining these “total translations” enables us to see Hannah Weiner’s clairvoyant work as participating in this attempt to come to terms with an untranslatable other through writing. Indeed Weiner’s own work (and in particular, her claims to clairvoyance) offers an irreducible otherness that reproduces the political problem she hoped to solve in her writing. While we may not judge her attempts to speak on behalf of Native Americans to be successful, engaging with Weiner’s work allows us to consider the difficulties and possibilities of mobilizing poetic form toward the translation of a resistant alterity.
The Anti-Racist Critique of Language Poetry
To understand how Language poetry’s utopianism could coexist with its problematic racial politics, we need to consider the political and poetic context for its interventions. Perloff’s identification of Language poetry as a “high culture movement” might lead us away from understanding its aesthetico-political interventions in historicist terms. Later in “Poetry on the Brink,” Perloff praises conceptualist writing as the most vital contemporary avant-garde; the implication is that we should read Language poetry as part of an aesthetic history of modernism that leads from Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein through Donald Allen’s New American Poetry (1960) and beyond, to the conceptualism of Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place. Purely aesthetic histories of Language poetry read its critique of “ego psychology” (Silliman, In the American Tree xix) and “highly distinct individuality” (Perelman 12) as emerging out of a theoretical critique of the New American Poets. For instance, Charles Bernstein writes in the introduction to a 1982 “Language Sampler”: “The work collected here can be characterized in the negative as writing that does not privilege any single mode, including the expository logic and speech-derived syntax that dominate contemporary writing practice” (76). This reading of Language poetry describes its innovation as a critique of aesthetics, emerging from a theoretical critique of individual human speech allied with French post-structuralism.2
While aesthetic and theoretical concerns were clearly paramount to the way Language poets marked their difference from predecessors—witness the theoretically weighty pages of The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book and the essays of Bernstein and Silliman—the aesthetic critique cannot be disarticulated from a vision of politics. Barrett Watten put it this way:
The textual politics of the Language school are commonly opposed to the expressivist poetics (Black Arts, Chicano, feminist, gay/lesbian) that emerged in the same decade, for good reason. With the former, the self-presence of the expressive subject is put under erasure, while for the latter the formal autonomy of modernist poetics is rejected as a politics.
(139)
Language poetry, in Watten’s description, represents an alternative to both voice-based poetics and the politics of identity. These demurrals mark out an aesthetico-political orientation that cannot be disarticulated: for Watten and others, expressivist and voice-based poetics and a certain form of political engagement were two sides of the same coin.
In his discussion of Language writing’s relation to questions of race and ethnicity, Timothy Yu suggests that we read Language writing against the grain of Watten’s description of the refusal of expressivist, ethnic poetics. While similarly locating Language poetry in the politics of the 1960s, Yu argues that Language poetry is another form of “ethnicized” writing. For Ron Silliman, writes Yu, “Language writing is the form of avant-garde practice particular to politically progressive white men” (39). This reading certainly captures some of Silliman’s most striking (and troubling) comments regarding race and Language writing. For instance, this in 1988:
Progressive poets who identify as members of groups that have been the subject of history—many white male heterosexuals, for example—are apt to challenge all that is supposedly “natural” about the formation of their own subjectivity. That their writing today is apt to call into question, if not actually explode, such conventions as narrative, persona and even reference can hardly be surprising. At the other end of the spectrum are poets who do not identity as members of groups that have been the subject of history, for they instead have been its objects. The narrative of history has led not to their self-actualization, but to their exclusion and domination. These writers and readers—women, people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the “marginal”—have a manifest political need to have their stories told. That their writing should often appear much more conventional, with the notable difference as to who is the subject of these conventions, illuminates the relationship between form and audience.
(qtd. in Scalapino and Silliman 51)
And two years earlier, in a letter to Peter Glassgold of New Directions:
I am not a language poet.
I hope, in choosing your title, that you are aware of the comparability of
the phrase “language poetry” to epithets such as nigger, cunt, kike or
faggot.
(qtd. in Yu 58)
As Yu’s reading emphasizes, these statements position Language writing as at once “ethnicized” and unmarked by ethnicization— both the unique province of white male heterosexuals and capable of a universalist perspective not overdetermined by identity. The two are united in Silliman’s belief that a certain kind of critical thinking of “narrative, persona and even reference” can come only from a privileged location.
The paradox here seems unsustainable: if the major characteristic of language writing is its aspiration to a universalism that overcomes identity politics, it cannot be an identity politics itself. Even if we try to look past Silliman’s chauvinism, though, other language thematizations of political intervention are suffused with a critique of identity politics. The kind of political intervention imagined for poetry is abstract and textual rather than voice-based and expressive: “language is not something that explains or translates experience, but is the source of experience. . . . Writing . . . becomes . . . a political action in which the reader is not required merely to read or listen to the poem but is asked to participate with the poet/poem in bringing meaning to the community at large” (Messerli 3). The political work occurs entirely at the level of the text, not what the text signifies. Politics comes neither before the text (as its motivation) nor after the text (in the form of an action it demands): the political action of a language poem is the experience of reading that instantiates a participatory, egalitarian community.
The belief that poetry can serve as “an exact instrument to create a utopian textual politics” (Perelman 75), then, challenges the politics and poetics of expressivism and representation even if the creator of that instrument is not a white heterosexual man. This ideology of Language poetry, most clearly exemplified in Silliman’s work, believes that conscious and intentional experimentation has the potential to engage critically with capitalism and the subject. Silliman writes:
By recognizing itself as the philosophy of practice in language, poetry can work to search out for the preconditions of post-referential language within the existing social fact. This requires (1) recognition of the historic nature and structure of referentiality, (2) placing the issue of language, the repressed element, at the center of the program, and (3) placing the program into the context of conscious class struggle.
(“Disappearance of the Word” 131)
The problem with such a conception is that it drifts into voluntarism: the belief that the operating poet can escape the structures of determination enough to challenge them. The poet’s epistemological confidence emerges from ontological security—the poet has the capacity and knowledge to create a utopian instrument to overcome alienation because he is not affected by the systems he hopes to critique. I use the pronoun “he” advisedly: Silliman’s statement, quoted in full above, that “white male heterosexuals . . . are apt to challenge all that is supposedly ‘natural’ about the formation of their own subjectivity” while “women, people of color, [and] sexual minorities . . . have a manifest political need to have their stories told” indicates that the capacity to create such an instrument is, in his view, unequally distributed.
While this perspective seems irredeemably centered in whiteness, its critique need not be limited to these grounds. In his discussion of Language writing, Rod Mengham notes that Language poets are overstating the political potential of text by “supposing that the alteration of textual roles leads directly to the alteration of social ones” (122). Mengham goes on to note the “distance across which the analogy [between textual roles and social roles] has to work.” Mengham’s critique is applied to Language poetry’s most significant apparent goal—the critique of the commodity structure. It seems perhaps even more trenchant when we consider this “distance” as that between the poet and the “barbarism of strangeness” that, according to Hejinian, the poet “occup[ies] (and [is] occupied by).” For poetry to “speak in the cause of an Other” (Celan 180) seems to require the traversal of distance for which Language experiments might seem insufficient.
What would it mean to traverse that distance? In a forum on “the politics of poetic form,” Hannah Weiner said: “I think that disjunctive and non-sequential writing can change states of consciousness, awakening the reader to reality, and thus the need for political change” (Bernstein, Politics of Poetic Form 226). We should note, from the start, that Weiner (unlike Silliman) does accept the distance between the text and its political consequences. The text itself does not constitute the political change, but rather it inspires the reader. However, it does this through “disjunctive and non-sequential writing”—we are not in the territory of voice-based poetics or identity politics.3
Locating Weiner
It is understandable that the major theoretical accounts of Language poetry by Perelman, Perloff, and others do not prominently feature Weiner: far easier for criticism to privilege polemics and manifesto-type texts as saying what the poetry is doing, and Weiner was not as critically profligate as the likes of Silliman and Bernstein. However, as Emily Critchley has noted, this priority might occlude some of Language writing’s most interesting work:
The proliferation of manifesto-like essays and talks by a handful of the male poets—despite numerous protestations against such a mode—has, it seems, been partly responsible for falsely hegemonising the movement. It has also meant that Language work has come to be viewed with suspicion . . . as a form of writing with overreaching claims to positive interventions in society of a political (anti-capitalist) order. Meanwhile, the movement has overlooked many of the women whose “alternative” aesthetic and political (and often feminist) interests importantly overlap with Language writing and at times in significantly more subtle and innovative ways.
(9–10)
Weiner’s writing (though not treated by Critchley) belongs in this category, alongside poets like Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, and Rae Armantrout.
The challenge of Weiner’s work seems slightly different, though: How could the imagined utopian community of readers on equal footing with writers come to terms with writing based on the personal authority of clairvoyance? While Bernstein praised Weiner’s “openness to the triviality of thought, to the shifting of thought” (“LINEbreak” 149), if we take Weiner’s claim of clairvoyance seriously, it is based equally on an opacity that bars the reader’s entrance. Weiner’s special access, however, never becomes the humanist form of lyric personality. Helen Vendler has written that lyric “presumes that the reader resembles the writer enough to step into the writer’s shoes and speak the lines the writer has written as though they were the reader’s own” (xliii). Voicing a Weiner poem offers no such feeling of shared humanity: Weiner’s poems offer instead an interruptive set of voices. In Weiner’s early clairvoyant journals—Pictures and Early Words (1972) and Big Words (1973), unpublished in her lifetime—seen words interrupt the narrative’s readability and even Weiner’s control over it:
Now they won’t let me out. THEY on window. I mean I was all dressed except for my slippers. I got no’s on boots, sneakers & rubber boots, so what else is there? I gave up & sat down to write about whether I should write or eat. Black & white on a of eat. Now I’m hungry. Be Here Now on U. I wish I never had that book. OK, I’m going to try it again. This has gone on 2 HRS. 8 on E, I guess it’s time. NO on shelf. Pinkish green light on GUESS IT’S TIME.
(Pictures 20–21)
Weiner seeks guidance from the words but faces repeated prohibition and this interference leaks into the text—and back into her experience. Shortly after Weiner describes the words as “they,” that word repeats on the window. When the words seem to stop her from leaving the house, Weiner attempts to sit down to “write about whether I should write or eat,” putting the act of writing into a strange relation with itself. The clairvoyant experience Weiner attempts to record in her journal supervenes onto the literal page on which she continues to record, or attempts to record.
As Weiner learned to live with the words, she developed a form for recording their interventions into her consciousness: “I SEE words on my forehead IN THE AIR / on other people on the typewriter on the / page These appear in the text as CAPITALS / or italics.” Weiner describes her formal intervention as follows:
I bought a new electric typewriter in January 74 and said quite clearly, perhaps aloud, to the words (I talked to them as if they were separate from me, as indeed the part of my mind they come from is not known to me) I have this new typewriter and can only type lower case, capitals or underlines . . . so you will have to settle yourself into three different prints. . . .
It turned out that the regular upper and lower case words described what I was doing, the CAPITALS gave me orders, and the underlines or italics made comments. This is not 100% true, but mostly so.
(Open House 127)
Jackson Mac Low, in his blurb for Clairvoyant Journal, praises Weiner for “having developed a specific literary form through which to convey her remarkable experience.” But Weiner’s explanation makes the voluntarism of the poetic instrument an insufficient explanation for her formal innovation. The specific literary form emerges as a mode of confronting an experience that resists narration or description: Weiner’s form is not only a tool to confront that experience: it is that experience.
While we might question Mac Low’s ascription of intentionality to Weiner’s texts, his attention to form is certainly not misplaced. The words that Weiner sees and reproduces are more than simply sources of experience transfigured into writing: as Weiner makes clear, the experience appeared as form. Alongside Clairvoyant Journal’s success as a performance text, its self-commentary includes specific attention to the appearance of words on the page (see fig. 3).
Page from Clairvoyant Journal, used with the permission of Charles Bernstein for Hannah Weiner in trust.
This page begins with a complaint about the difficulty of coming to form: “How can I describe anything well when all these interruptions keep arriving and then tell me I dont describe it well.” Throughout the page the interruptions gain force, coming faster and eventually, figuring in a kind of movement that, to the reader, appears as a disruption of Weiner’s “journal” narrative. Toward the bottom Weiner’s attempt to render them on the page is addressed directly by the words. “CAN’T GET THE SPACING” appears as a command—or is it a reproach for Weiner’s arched (and arch) “IT WRITES ITSELF” (also a command)? Weiner replies to the words, “it’s a nice arc”—a gesture that could be seen as defending her own formal attempt to render what the words say, or praising how the words present themselves.
Weiner’s rendering of consciousness, then, defies any lyricized understanding of it on two levels: first, it is not the putatively universal and accessible “voice” of the lyric subject; second, its form emerges out of a negotiation with an intractable experience that is always already formally determined. As such, Weiner’s journalistic writing stages the questions most urgent to Language writing’s critique of voice. In so doing, Weiner also calls into question the voluntarism of form characteristic of Language writing’s problematic claim to political trenchancy. Weiner’s form is neither entirely given nor entirely created: it is a coming to terms with experience that resists form and emerges through a grappling with that resistance.
When Weiner turned to address politics explicitly, then, it should be no surprise that this writing traverses the boundary between expressivism and formal play. Her interest in the American Indian Movement begins to appear in her Little Books/Indians, written in the 1970s and published in 1980. From the first appearance of AIM figures in Weiner’s letters and writings (a 1976 letter to Bernadette Mayer), they appear almost in dialogue with her voices:
I have fallen in love with Wallace Black Elk, one of the two Sioux medicine men who were in NY the last few weeks. The other is Leonard Crow Dog POLITICAL PRISONER out on bail and his wife Mary and their 3 yr old son Pedro I COLLAPSE. They were all staying at Richard and Jean Erdoes and I went to help Jean with chores, etc. and there they were. Boy are they good healers. I got a lot stronger and Wallace started to flirt but never PROMISED came through. What a life. . . . I saw your astral form lay down on top of me after I first met Leonard Crow Dog saying DONT LISTEN TO Leonard. So when he started THINK DIFFERENT to talk about his upcoming death I figured he was just doing some theater and listened to my voices instead which said he was SAFE FOR A WHILE . . .
(Letter to Mayer, June 1976)
Immediately we might wonder if there is something appropriative about Weiner’s approach here: Native American politics appears to her first in the form of an attractive person, a love object, and perhaps even the object of consumption. But already this becomes a writing crisis for Weiner: Leonard Crow Dog’s voice, and “my voices,” represent alternate possibilities that she must consider. Thus we can read Weiner’s dramatic turn to figuring Native American voices alongside her own as a choice not to shut out the other.
However erotic the initial motivation to welcome these voices may have been, in Weiner’s later writing they lead her to closely consider the nature of political representation through voice and text. What seems to be the first appearance of Weiner’s “INDIAN friends” in her writing comes after a discussion of how to figure voices in general, in a poem entitled “LITTLE BOOK 115 VIRGIN Feb 12–13 78.”4 Early on in the book Weiner asks herself:
Why am I writing
a BEFORE READING
this new book
HANNAH CLARIFY
write statements
in this book
I ams worried
Sometimes stupid
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Where are we in
consciousness state
POLITICAL
(Little Books/Indians 24–25)
Weiner’s clairvoyance pushes her consciousness to “CLARIFY” toward “POLITICAL” in response to a crisis in writing. This is both a worry about Weiner’s capacity (“Sometimes stupid”) and a concern about form: “write statements / in this book.” The concern about form returns a few pages later:
Hannah it doesnt
think just by
itself you know
you are discussing
procedures
S-T-R-U-C-T-U-R-E-S
people read this book
they want to know
whats happening
INS YOUR SCRIPT mind
(34)
The hyphens are perhaps a friendly jibe at L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (whose first issue appeared earlier that year), but Weiner moves from writing “procedures” for which she takes ownership to a broader representation (and breakdown) of “S-T-R-U-C-T-U-R-E-S,” perhaps hinting to Weiner’s move toward politics here. “Whats happening” will be more than just a formal set of procedures; clairvoyance links Weiner’s writing to a greater truth:
Fear is almost absurd
you are giving away
some of your secrets
by TELLINGS TRUTH
no it isn’t
psychics
responsibility
I AMS A WRITER TOO
that places us
you are talking
about psychic
responsibility
YOU MUST BE SURE
(34–35)
Weiner’s clairvoyance gives her a “responsibility” but she is still required to “choose.” As Russo remarks, transforming “truth telling” into “TELLINGS TRUTH” “implies that the very act of telling creates a truth for the reader” (60). Weiner situates herself in a community where the voices demand an agency—”I AMS A WRITER TOO”—and eventually turns to more specific demands, with which the poem ends:
writes like Im an
Indian please
under the water
under the trees
under the forests stupid
and the underground
railway of course
u n d e r s t a n d
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Hannah I mustnt quit
writing I must avoid
situations I dont like
THATS THE OFFICIAL RECORD
writes more like my
Indians I WANTS ROADS
I WANTS MY LANDS BACK
I don understand
Nebraska especially I
profitted from
guess whats there
a chaste woman
I just want my treaties
signed BEFORE 1980
I just wants my backs
I MEANS RUSSELL NAME
I ams speaking a little
like him THESE DAYS
3 MORE YEARS
AND I WINS
I am just like Russell
Means insist
s t o p d r i n k i n g
(35–36)
The AIM demands of land and respect for treaties are figured as intimately as Weiner’s own consciousness, because they take the form of her consciousness. (In a later work, Spoke [1984], Weiner would extensively quote from the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, in the midst of a clairvoyantly composed text.) This is an effort to transfigure a political demand, as consciousness, into a textual presentation, and its political difficulty is always already a problem for form. Weiner’s punning on “I MEANS RUSSELL NAME” raises the particular challenge of incorporating the voice of a particular other (AIM leader Russell Means) whose ability to “mean” and his status as a “name” risk collapsing in Weiner’s attempt to invoke his voice.
As Judith Goldman puts it, the problem that poems like this raise is whether Weiner’s “extreme identification” drifts problematically into “ventriloquizing the subaltern” (152). But, as Goldman emphasizes, these poems “maintain[ ] a painstaking awareness that speaking requires a rhetorical position from which to speak.” While Weiner seemed to want for her “extreme identification” to be more successful, it is important to recognize the gaps between Weiner’s text and the reader’s understanding that are present in all her clairvoyant writings. The “extreme identification” is aligned, then, with what Dominick LaCapra calls “emphatic unsettlement”: it “involves a kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself in the other’s position while recognizing the difference of that position and hence not taking the other’s place” (78). Weiner’s empathy is even more unsettled and unsettling than this: Weiner approaches the other through a clairvoyant poetic practice where the authority from which she speaks, and the form of the text in which that speech is represented, are radically in question. The “difference of position” that LaCapra speaks of is the very space of Weiner’s writing.5
Weiner partly understands that position in the context of her own uneasy status in poetry avant-garde movements. She wrote to Douglas Messerli in January 1990: “Why is it . . . people don’t really care about the clairvoyant origin of my work? Any answer?” Weiner is forever demanding that readers grant the truth of her writing as witnessing to clairvoyance and their failure to do this aligns her “TELLINGS TRUTH” about Indians with her more personal accounts. Her writing asks its readers to approach with sympathy a predicament that is by its nature incommensurable, a problem that is already political: How do we articulate a relationship toward Weiner where we cannot speak her language? In granting the truth of Weiner’s experience, we eschew describing her derangements of language and form in wholly voluntaristic terms, as just another Language experiment. But reading Weiner’s work symptomatically would produce its own problems, as Patrick Durgin has written: “Biographical readings, however, fall short . . . because her work is far too explicitly motivated and aesthetically consistent to illustrate a psychiatrically deranged subjectivity” (“Psychosocial Disability” 134).6 As readers we can neither reduce Weiner’s formal innovations to symptom, nor describe her derangements of language and form in wholly voluntaristic terms.
This aporia that governs our reading of Weiner seems equally Weiner’s aporia. How can she mark the effects of these voices on her language when attempting to speak them directly might drift into appropriation and refusing to speak them at all a dereliction of political responsibility? For Weiner that was an impossible refusal:
early morning endless message—
Bernadette Alex killed himself7
because he couldn’t get through awakening
people as was his d e d i c a t i o n—
I feel the same p o l i t i c a l l y with the
p o e t r y r e a d i n g s—it doesnt
mean much to me to read always if I
cant tie it together with political or
“spiritual” more power with us. Indian
(as I am supposed to be a movement
leader myself) business. Cant you see
I am trying very hard to make the
world work
(Letter to Mayer, ca. 1982 1)
Weiner is aware of her own foreclosed capacity to speak. Her attempt to witness for the American Indian Movement, then, is an attempt at identification that depends on the straitened capacity for identification. Her understanding of what counts as a political intervention, a cross-cultural connection that makes the “world work,”8 seems far from those imagined by Language writing’s polemicists.
Alcheringa
Weiner’s friend Jerome Rothenberg, along with Dennis Tedlock, edited the magazine Alcheringa, a “journal of ethnopoetics,” beginning in 1970. There is no direct evidence that Weiner read Alcheringa, though it is striking that gifts sent via Rothenberg were vital material for her clairvoyance:
When the words first began to appear in August 1972, they appeared singly. . . . Later words appeared in two word phrases some of which, as NO-ALONE, I did not understand. . . . In April [1973] sometime I think I got down my knees and begged or prayed, please let me see a complete sentence. On April 15th I did see one, printed in small letters along the edge of my kitchen table that had come to me from Larry Neufeld via Jerry Rothenberg. It said, “YOU WONT BE ANY HAPPIER.”
(Open House 122–23)
In this section I want to suggest that another set of materials “via Jerry Rothenberg” can serve as an important intertext for Weiner’s clairvoyant poetry.9 These are Rothenberg’s “total translations” that appeared in Alcheringa.
Alcheringa’s “ethnopoetics” is articulated in the “statement of intention” printed in its first issue. “As the first magazine of the world’s tribal poetries,” the statement begins, “ALCHERINGA will not be a scholarly ‘journal of ethnopoetics’ so much as a place where tribal poetry can appear in English translation & can act (in the oldest & newest of poetic traditions) to change men’s minds & lives. While its sources will be different from other poetry magazines, it will be aiming at the startling & revelatory presentation that has been common to our avant gardes” (Rothenberg and Tedlock, “Statement” 1). Nine principles follow, among them:
–by exploring the full range of man’s poetries, to enlarge our understanding of what a poem may be
–to provide a ground for experiments in the translation of tribal/oral poetry & a forum to discuss the possibilities & problems of translation from widely divergent cultures . . .
–to be a vanguard for the initiation of cooperative projects . . . between poets, ethnologists, songmen, & others
–to return to complex/”primitive” systems of poetry as (intermedia) performance, etc., & to explore ways of presenting these in translation . . .
–to assist the free development of ethnic self-awareness among young Indians & others so concerned, by encouraging a knowledgeable, loving respect among them & all people for the world’s tribal past & present
–to combat cultural genocide in all its manifestations.
Without apology, Alcheringa situates “ethnopoetics” in terms of white access to “primitive” cultures. The magazine’s format is no less forgiving: it almost exclusively presents white men’s versions of “tribal” poetries, creating a one-way form of exchange where “primitives” function as objects of white knowledge. The first issue begins with translations from Ezra Pound, thus locating the magazine’s work in a continuing tradition of white artists fetishizing ethnic others for putatively avant-garde ends. An essay in the second issue by Stanley Diamond entitled “PRIMITIVE: The Critical Turn” elaborates this perspective: “The search for the primitive is the attempt to define a primary human nature. Without such a model, or, since we are dealing with men and not things, without such a vision, it becomes increasingly difficult to evaluate, or even to understand, our contemporary pathology and possibilities” (66). The primitive, for Diamond, will provide a “deeper vision of man” (70). This ideology is not unfamiliar, locating an idealized human nature that will revitalize poetry and politics in peoples whose distance from the “civilized” gives them greater access to it.10
The materials in Alcheringa, then, help us understand how a white American poet with experimental ambitions might approach Native Americans. It is of critical interest in the context of Weiner if only because it shows that poets in her scene were thinking about Native Americans in the 1970s (though the nearly total lack of political commentary in its pages is striking). But beyond that, in Jerome Rothenberg’s “total translations” we find a possibly important example for Weiner’s clairvoyant texts. Rothenberg writes:
I’ve been attempting total translations . . . accounting not only for meaning but for word distortions, meaningless syllables, music, style of performance. . . . The idea never was to set English words to Navajo music, but to let a whole work emerge newly in the process of considering what kinds of statement were there to begin with. As far as I could I also wanted to avoid “writing” the poem in English, since this seemed irrelevant to a poetry that had reached a high development outside of any written system.
(Rothenberg, “Note” 63)
This “total translation” leads Rothenberg toward methods that we might associate with concrete or visual poetry.
(“From ‘Shaking the Pumpkin’” 13)
These translations are analogous to methods employed by Weiner in her attempt to translate her clairvoyant experiences into writing. They make use of shaped text and capitals and lower case to account for aspects of the poems that writing is incapable of wholly capturing. Rather than presenting us with poems that translate oral poetries into texts easily legible to readers situated in the avant-garde tradition,11 Rothenberg uses an element of that tradition— concrete poetry—to show the impossibility of that legibility. The vocal element of the original poems, transfigured into an entirely textual form, gestures toward “total” translation by highlighting the incommensurability of textual and oral poetry.
I suggest that Weiner’s clairvoyant attempts at speaking with Native American voices owe something to Rothenberg’s translations. It is fairly safe to assume that Weiner was aware of Alcheringa, both on account of the presence of the Language poetry sampler in its pages, and on account of her friendship with Rothenberg.12 Without asserting a direct lineage, I think there is an interesting homology that might help us understand the politics of Weiner’s texts. If we understand the impossibility of translation, following Walter Benjamin, as a gesture toward a utopian unity where translation would be unnecessary, perhaps we can see Weiner’s clairvoyant texts as troping this very impossibility. Weiner’s texts show the impossibility of assimilating voices from the outside, and yet the urgency of their pressure. From this position of unassimilable speech, Weiner’s texts gesture toward other outside voices and their possibility of assimilation. If this is a poetics of translation, it is not a poetics where what is gained comes from translation’s possibility. Rather, the cross-cultural move gains power from translation’s impossibility, from the moments where Weiner’s attempts to account for the American Indian Movement and her own clairvoyance fall short.
Translation—Returning to the Edge
Reading Weiner’s clairvoyant work as translation seems to have a twofold critical wage: it provides context for the ethical challenge of Weiner’s project (a confrontation with alterity that creates an infinite responsibility) and its political possibility (in gesturing to a utopian unity).
The ethical work of translation mostly seems to be excluded from Language poetry. When translation did occur in Language writing, it was a constructivist game—witness David Melnick’s Men in Aida (1983), a “homophonic translation” of the Iliad. Translation is startlingly absent from the major Language polemics and the “curriculum of events” (Mengham 123) accounted in its journals. The prominent exception is Lyn Hejinian’s long-lasting correspondence with and translation of Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. Hejinian describes this work as follows:
The process of translating these works has had the effect of providing me with something like a life apart from my own, a life led by an other— though that other turns out to be me. It is not that translation involves the assimilation of someone else’s “otherness”—and it does not consist in the uncomplicated making of an American poem out of the raw materials of a “foreign” one. Rather, translation catalyzes one’s own “otherness,” and the otherness of one’s own poetry.
(302–3)
The ethical nature of translation is foregrounded here in terms amenable to Hejinian’s desire, quoted at the start of this essay, to “occupy[ ] (and be[ ] occupied by) foreignness.” Translation, Hejinian writes, “is an encounter and it provokes change” (297). The terms provided here are helpful in understanding the force of Rothenberg’s translations that reject the easier task of “making an American poem out of the raw materials of a ‘foreign’ one”—instead, the process of writing an American poem is “catalyzed” and made other by its confrontation with the foreign.
Hejinian’s discussion seems fruitful for understanding Weiner’s work, not merely in its encounter with Native American voices, but in its attempt to come to terms with the wholly other voices of her clairvoyance. The language that Hejinian uses to describe putting a poem in translation focuses on the uncertainty and undecidability of the passage from self to other: “unsettled” (297), “seeming nonexistence—the coming into being of nonbeing” (303), “suspended between past and future but not quite in the present” (304), “apprehension in the sense of ‘understanding’ but also in the sense of ‘fear’” (305). Hejinian’s discussion mirrors terminology used in an essay by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak that describes translation as an “intimate” act of “surrender” that “permits fraying” and leads to an “uncanny” experience; this language might equally describe Weiner’s encounter with clairvoyant voices (398–99). The ethical challenge of approaching Weiner’s work instills a sense of becoming, untimeliness, and fear in its readers: but that is equally a sense of responsibility. Perhaps ironically, in a pre-clairvoyant essay from 1969 entitled “Trans-Space Communication,” Weiner imagined a more universal version of translation: “I am interested in exploring methods of communication that will be understood face to face, or at any distance, regardless of language, country or planet or origin, by all sending and receiving” (Open House 54). Her later clairvoyant communication belies this attempt at transparency and suggests that lack of understanding may be an equally fruitful vector of communication. Rather than the fulfillment of communication, it is the impossibility of its complete fulfillment—and the infinite nature of the responsibility inherent in this ethical encounter—that motivates translation’s political utopianism. Walter Benjamin writes:
all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages. An instant and final rather than a temporary and provisional solution of this foreignness remains out of the reach of mankind; at any rate, it eludes any direct attempt . . . in a singularly impressive manner, at least it points the way to this region: the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfillment of languages.
(75)
The “provisional” nature of translation’s invocation of strangeness still gestures to the utopian vision of “reconciliation and fulfillment.” The (at present) unbridgeable distance between languages prohibits a full translation, but also allows for translation’s transcendent capacity to gesture beyond what is possible within individual languages toward a realm of “pure language.”
The reader who confronts Weiner’s texts, then, is faced with an experience of alterity brought uneasily into translation. Weiner’s confrontation with the voices is repeated at the level of reading when we encounter the strangeness of her clairvoyance as an ethical imperative to translate. Perhaps this readerly demand might torque the Language understanding of the community of readers coming together to give a text meaning. Lawrence Venuti writes:
In serving domestic interests, a translation provides an ideological resolution for the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text.
Yet translating is also utopian. The domestic inscription is made with the very intention to communicate the foreign text, and so it is filled with the anticipation that a community will be created around that text. . . .
. . . Implicit in any translation is the hope for a consensus, a communication and recognition of the foreign text through a domestic inscription.
(485)
Along these lines perhaps we can use translation to supplement Language poetry’s understanding of the utopian nature of a text. The communicability of Weiner’s texts seems impossible in the present; they do not represent a voluntarist community that has moved beyond practical political action, but instead demand political action for the community they imagine to be instantiated. At every moment, this ethical and political imperative is figured through the formal challenges and strictures involved in rendering words on a page.
I am not saying that Weiner’s “clair-style” is a better “instrument” for utopian imagination than Silliman’s paratactic “new sentence.” For Weiner, form does not function as an instrument. In Hejinian’s words, “Form is not a fixture but an activity” (47); its provisionality and undecidability are what give it utopian force. The provisional nature of Weiner’s writing is an attempt at imagining a form of writing that has the capacity to welcome the other. Studying her work allows us to consider what it means to occupy and be occupied by strangeness, and what it means to figure this textually. Instead of seeing writers like Hejinian and Weiner as exceptions, then, we can see them as pushing the limits of what Language writing can do to welcome the other through a textual practice. If that leads us to abandon a strict dichotomy in readings of Language poetry between the free play of text and the self-presence of voice, that is surely only another benefit.
One of Weiner’s (mostly) non-clairvoyant poems, “Returning to the Edge” (ca. 1986), provides a fitting conclusion in its discussion of the demands of politics and form:
The edge I mean is on the right
She made language in her own eager style
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Have I started to move from the left
A lot of the things are lyrics
words move from left to right
At Big Mountain they are moving the Navajos
(Open House 156)
Form traps words in a politically retrograde motion that is almost cruelly analogized with the forced resettlement of indigenous peoples. The poem continues along this theme, asking whether another kind of political movement is possible:
How can you actually proceed from socialism toward
communism?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The disappearance and assassination of four other union
activists goes all the way to the right hand margin
and back again twice
(157)
It seems that there is no escape from this overdetermination—the trap that captures both language and politics, in the familiar analogy from Language polemics. While at times it becomes darkly humorous—”Politics should move in the opposite direction of / the sentence” (159)—Weiner seems pessimistic about imagining any escape when the words she writes, whether on the emergence of Communism or atrocities in Guatemala, are trapped in the same structure.
The only words that do not (entirely) move from left to right in this poem are the clairvoyant ones: they are identified by a short preface (“The words in capitals are seen” [156]) and appear at the bottom of each page, as a kind of post-script. Here is how the poem ends:
Beginning at the left at the top of the page
The constant reiteration of form
The ending at the right hand edge
The disappearance of many people
The movement to the bottom of the page
Covering blank space line by line
Constitution by military decree
October’s scheduled presidential election
A new tax on non-quota coffee exports
Victims of political violence in Guatemala
Deaths are first to be suffered by rights group
Rights is not right
(Open House 160)
Weiner summarizes the main movements of the poem and the “constant reiteration of form,” its inexorability. But at the same time she gestures toward a kind of escape through clairvoyance—these words move from left to right, when they are captured on the page, but their size and shape indicates that they are not formally restricted in the same way. Here, “the edge” represents not the margin that constricts the movement of words on the page, but a liminal space of translation between incommensurable forces that the horizontal poetic line can only partially capture. While the poem remains cynical about the ability to answer the question “How can you actually proceed from socialism toward / communism,” it nonetheless gestures to the necessary openness to encounter that could motivate this utopian faith. “The edge,” the margin that Weiner’s works exceed on the page, is where Language poetry’s political writing returns.
Footnotes
Daniel Benjamin received his PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019. He is the editor of The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture, co-edited with Eric Sneathen, (Wolfman Books, 2017) and Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry, co-edited with Claire Marie Stancek, (Tuumba/Giramondo, 2016). He has published articles on M. NourbeSe Philip and aesthetic universality and is currently working on a book project titled “On Lyric’s Minor Commons.”
I am grateful to the staff at the Mandeville Special Collections Library at University of California, San Diego (especially Rob Melton and Heather Smedberg) for their help with the Weiner papers. Thank you also to Lyn Hejinian, Steven Lee (and the “Ethnic Avant-Garde” seminar), Drew Milne, Claire Marie Stancek, Anne Stillman, and the reviewers for Contemporary Literature for their helpful comments on this essay.
↵1 If this sounds like a familiar Derridean claim (“there is no outside-text”), the context may fit. In a letter to Charles Bernstein dated September 7, 1989, Weiner thanks him for lending her two books by Jacques Derrida (Glas and Glassary), noting: “When I wrote clairvoyantly ‘Research important conflict two obedient’ the article to appear in WRITING, I wrote it immediately after reading about ten or twenty pages of the introduction to OF GRAMMATOLOGY. I signed that article at various places Hannah in a hurry Weiner, Hannah correct, and Weiner allowed. As it says in the Clairvoyant Journal, the mind is transparent. John Perreault used to say ideas are in the air. Last spring, when I became clairvoyant again, I was able to imitate other people, and my words would say you are working like Philip Glass, you are reading like Charles Bernstein, etc. etc. It is all very interesting to know by mind alone. There is one other book of Derrida’s I might need to borrow from you when you return if you have it. I don’t know the name, but it is a large book, with a white paper cover, cost $30.00. I know this because I bought it from the Brown bookstore in 1983 but opened it to the place where he suggests cutting the tops off t. I had already done that, in LITTLE BOOKS/INDIANS, and then I opened it to another place suggesting something which I had already done also. Being very poor at the time, I returned the book, as you know it was extremely difficult for me to read literature while I was clairvoyant, the words kept interfering. But I would like to read it now. Perhaps you know its name.”
↵2 Two earlier essays by Perloff forcefully establish this reading: “Ca(n)non to the Right of Us” (1987) and “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject” (1999).
↵3 It should be noted that these figures represent the weakest of straw men; it is wrong to condemn the Black Arts Movement, for example, as “merely political.” However, this is the logic that Language writing’s own periodization implies. See Kristin Prevallet’s account of Amiri Baraka’s critique of Barrett Watten.
↵4 These poems were composed in small composition books—each “stanza” represents the contents of a page.
↵5 In another text, Weiner risks ventriloquism by signing a letter by Hopi elders. For a discussion of this text, see Durgin, “Witness.”
↵6 Weiner did not seem to understand herself as being “disabled,” as a political identity category. Nonetheless Durgin’s writing on Weiner in the context of disability offers interesting developments along these lines. Durgin motivates lessons from disability studies toward literary reading practices, asking readers to consider “the full complexity of the dependencies of author, text, and reader” (“Psychosocial Disability” 150). His reading is attentive to the particular aporias that Weiner’s texts produce; yet I am not sure this effort escapes the aporia of symptomatic reading, even one rich with insights from analyses of psychosocial disability that go beyond “schizoanalysis.”
↵7 ”Alex” is Alex Hladky, also mentioned at the beginning of Weiner’s 1983 book Sixteen (Open House 107), a white “movement leader” involved in AIM.
↵8 This phrase recalls Weiner’s early “WORLD WORKS” (1970) performance:
I wrote the word THE over WORLD WORKS
I vacuumed the street. The world works with a little help from us all.
I wanted to do World Works because I wanted to create the feeling that people all over the world were doing a related thing at a related time, although they would be doing it individually, without an audience and without knowledge of what others were doing. It is an act of faith. We have unknown collaborators. (Open House 24)
This performance interestingly prefigures Weiner’s clairvoyant writing in noting the “unknown collaborators” that her work seeks to welcome and mark.
↵9 Rothenberg also featured some of Weiner’s poetry in his Big Jewish Book, contextualizing it in a different ethnic tradition—that of Jewish mysticism. (Bernstein similarly, in the “LINEbreak” interview, compares the words on the forehead to binding tefellin.) For a compelling account of Weiner’s writing in the context of a Jewish traumatic history, see Damon.
↵10 It is a strange coincidence that Ron Silliman’s first attempt at collecting “language centered” writing appears in 1975 in Alcheringa (new series, vol. 1, no. 2). Alcheringa is primarily interested in oral poetry, and Silliman’s selection, as he notes at its conclusion, follows the Russian formalists in moving away from understanding language through discourse: “[b]y effacing one or more elements of referential language . . . the balance within and between the words shifts, redistributes” (“Dwelling Place” 118). While Yu’s analysis allows us to understand Language writing as a “tribal” poetry, through considering it ethnicized in its own right, this collection seems to be far removed from the other materials in Alcheringa. As discussed above, Language writing understood itself as forming a counterpoint to the speech-based poetics of Black Mountain and Beat poetry.
↵11 These appear in Alcheringa, and occasionally make use of the exculpating phrase “English versions” to avoid claims to translation.
↵12 Unfortunately, Weiner’s papers at UCSD include nothing from her library.
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