Hannah Weiner

An experimental poet sometimes associated with Language writing, Hannah Weiner attended Radcliffe College and afterward moved to New York City, where she participated in open studios to share her poetry with audiences. In the 1970s, she began to compose poems (her “clairvoyant poems”) based on the words she saw on her forehead and other surfaces.

Reviewing the work Hannah Weiner’s Open House (2007) in the Boston Review, poet and critic Joyelle McSweeney noted that Wiener’s work “continually tests and knocks against the visual boundaries of text as it attempts to create an audial-visionary experience no conventional prose could hold.” Weiner’s published collections include a volume from her pre-clairvoyant period, The Magritte Poems (1970); Clairvoyant Journal (1973); Little Books / Indians (1980); Code Poems (1982); poems based on international maritime codes, SPOKE (1984); The Fast (1992); We Speak Silent (1996); and the compilation Hannah Weiner’s Open House.

Weiner received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1986. She died in 1997.