Description
Published in November 2014, English edition, 24 x 33 cm (softcover), 56 pages.
Clairvoyant Journal 1974 by Hannah Weiner (1928-1997) is based on the typescripts Early and Clairvoyant Journals and includes the entries dated February 23 to June 10. This new edition of Clairvoyant Journal features an “Afterword” by Patrick Durgin, which completes his study on Hannah Weiner’s “clair-style” writing (“BIG SENSIBLE, Introductory Remarks on Clairvoyant Journal”) previously published on www.f-u-t-u-r-e.org.
With Clairvoyant Journal, Hannah Weiner writes a specific form of diary, using the characteristics of typographic styles (roman, italic and CAPITAL) to present an inner discussion between three separate voices. Clairvoyant Journal also gives an insight into the daily life of a writer living in New York in the 1970s, evoking a poetic, musical, and artistic scene, yoga and a poetical experience.
“Hannah Weiner (1928-1997) was 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.”
“After several jobs in publishing, she became an assistant buyer at Bloomingdale’s. In the meantime she married a psychiatrist; the marriage ended in divorce after four years. Subsequently, Weiner got a job designing lingerie. She began to write poetry in 1963. Her best known work of this period is The Code Poems (Open Studio, 1982), written using the international code of signals (nautical flag signals). These works were also the basis of performances she gave in the 1960s and she was a participant in the downtown performance scene of the time. After 1970, she devoted herself to writing, emphasizing that all her works written after 1972 were based on ‘seeing words’. As she says in an epigraph to The Clairvoyant Journal: ‘I SEE words on my forehead IN THE AIR on other people on the typerwriter on the page.”
