A procrastinating weekend webcrawl brought up Robbie Dewhurst’s
enlightening paper on Hannah Weiner’s
Country Girl (which, thanks to
Patrick Durgin, you can read in typescript
here) and the news-to-me that Weiner’s newly discovered last manuscript,
The Book of Revelations, is now
up on her home page at the Electronic Poetry Center. It’s tough reading online, scanned from notebooks written in pencil and crossed into overlapping strips, but if you’ve got more than a weekend surf session to burn, there it is for the electronic ages. “speak so as no one will listen” says page 6, not knowing so many no ones would.
Robbie’s post also got me wanting to spend time with
Page, which he describes as Weiner’s
Behind the State Capitol. Would like to read that too, if I could find it cheap and complete; the sections from it in Wieners’s
Selected are the Tibetan LSD of postmodern American poetry. More weekends, please.
I mean, realistically, what needs to happen to get a Complete HW in our hands?
ReplyDeleteRodney,
ReplyDeleteGlad you got something out of the talk on Country Girl. I wish you could see the text Marta Werner read on the Book Of Revelations -- it was gorgeous. She hints that it might show up in the launch of Jacket2, this winter I think.
BtSC is . . . wow. What the Selected doesn't include is Wieners's "cinema decoupages," these wonderful, oft eerie, hallucinatory (think Jack Smith) collages Wieners did for the text which ornament it throughout. The book's been on my cart at the library here for about a year, still holding out for a buyable copy myself. (I think David A. actually has 1 or 2, but they're about 50 clams, which seems to be the going rate . . .)
I listened to Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's "Raining in Darling" yesterday & thought of Portland . . .
x, Robbie
Weiner & Wieners simultaneous Completes: poetry genius + marketing opportunity.
ReplyDeleteJohn Wieners, Hannah Weiner, & Lawrence Weiner: a genuine "conceptual writing" exhibition. On view circa 2020. (You heard it here first!)
ReplyDelete