Hannah Weiner's Open House - (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A greatly expanded new edition of a career-spanning collection of writer and artist Hannah Weiner's work--including over one hundred pages of new material--on the nature of self, voice, consciousness, and the artist's role in making and rendering reality.

As an artist both steeped in and alienated from the New York avant-garde, Hannah Weiner was critical of the unexamined presumption of a singular, poetic voice. In her case, this critique of traditional poetic sensibility became explicit and literal as her writing life coincided with an emerging clairvoyance. From then on, Weiner's writing consisted as much of "seeing words" as it did of writing them. From her early work associated with New York School poetry to her more conceptual writing, as well as her best known work, Clairvoyant Journal, often read in tandem with Language Poetry and disability or "outsider" poetry, Open House collects decades of performance notes, journals, code poems, and "clair-style" writing that will help readers finally come to terms with the breadth and genius of her legacy.

Review Quotes

"I have seldom felt so welcome in any American poet's oeuvre as in Hannah Weiner's. The softness, the floating, the preternatural feral irony, and the very real freedoms she evokes are here, now and forever, for whoever needs them. I place her together with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Madeline Gins, Yoko Ono, and Adrian Piper in my personal pantheon; she was a brilliant critic of technocracy for whom consciousness itself was sometimes harrowing, who nevertheless offered a glimpse of utopia."--Lucy Ives

"Like recent editions of work by relentless innovators like Cecilia Vicuña and Yi Sang, Hannah Weiner's Open House provides an aperture on a whole cosmos of making, a signal relayed from word to eye to brain to nerve to fingertip to typewriter key to ribbon to paper to page to script to voice to event to transcription to transmission to limitless ambient circulation. As Weiner herself proclaims, 'How have our heads turned inside out, fashioned places for our bodies.' Reflecting decades of exuberant curation and advocacy by Patrick Durgin, this new, expanded edition resonates with the pragmatically expansive impulse of Weiner's own work and initiates an alert and expanded audience to an everyday world alight with radiant potential."--Joyelle McSweeney

"To experience Hannah [Weiner]'s clairvoyant writing as a reader is to be fascinated, overwhelmed, inundated. It's to be involuntarily plunged into an ink-blotty Rorschach test tossing its light-source back, upon yourself, blinding. To be flooded by the presence of objects to touch and taste, by other beings you feel but don't know. It's to be projectively immersed in the colors and energies that make up the texture of Hannah's world, before she slams the door shut in our face . . . How much does she allow you to see, of her or yourself? Which then begs the question: In transcribing life does Hannah Weiner write herself into being? Is it through her writing that we can understand Hannah Weiner's life?"--Trisha Low, Afterword to Hannah Weiner's Open House

"Hannah Weiner's Open House is a vital contribution to a lively, mixed-media conversation that in its multiplicity captures Weiner's own indefatigable zeal for formal inquiry and her effort to reproduce in various media the many voices in her life."--Joyelle McSweeney, Boston Review

About the Author

Patrick Durgin is the author of PQRS (2013) and The Route (2008), a collaboration with poet, translator, and language justice organizer Jen Hofer. From 2015-2017 he co-curated the Festival of Poets Theater in Chicago, and since 2007 he has taught literature, philosophy, art history, and visual culture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.