Hannah Weiner's Open House - (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An expanded reissue of a career-spanning collection of writer and artist Hannah Weiner's work--including forty 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

"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.