Andrew Spragg Reports on Birkbeck's Therapy and Experimental Poetry Symposium

Mary Barnes, Hannah Weiner, and Emma Hauck, "born in Ellwangen 1878, died in Wieslcoh asylum in 1928," are all explored—with interventions from Charles Bernstein, John Wilkinson, Julia Kristeva, Blanchot, and others—in this report from UK poet Andrew Spragg on the Therapy and Experimental Poetry Symposium, held at Birkbeck in London in September. An excerpt:

Hannah Weiner produced an exceptional body of work, including Clairvoyant Journal (Angel Hair Books 1978). Her writing was influenced by a series of psychotic episodes she experienced in the seventies. She began to see words physically manifest about her. She describes this in ‘Mostly About the Sentence’:

“When the words first began to appear in August 1972, they appeared singly. The first word, WRONG, appeared about an inch long, neatly printed at a 45 degree angle to my pant leg. Later words appeared in two word phrases some of which, as NO-ALONE, I did not understand…In April sometime I think I got down on 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 would have come to me from Lenny Neufeld via Jerry Rothenberg. It said, “YOU WONT BE ANY HAPPIER.”[3] (Our House p122–123)

Weiner in an interview with Charles Bernstein, available on PennSound:

Do you think of your work in terms of a tradition of the avant-garde, of experimentalism?

Yes, I’ve always felt that the best thing . . . I mean, how can you not be avant-garde if you’re the only person in the world who sees words?

[Laughs.] But I thought we all see words, in some sense.

No, it isn’t the same at all! If you saw words in colour 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, and at the beginning it was in colour. The colour has disappeared. And at the moment I don’t see words on my forehead. It’s a little tiring for me now.[4]

Hauck, Kafka and Weiner tender dialogue in two directions. The first, towards the source of psychosis, the deep emotional state, the threatened or paranoid, is an act of clairvoyance. This state alters all experience, it brings something forth that feels external. Frequently, the experience of illness, both physical and mental, is of something external to our innate self, but also something secret, internal. Something only we can hear...

Read all at Medium.