| This dissertation is a study of the poetics of Hannah Weiner, a postmodern American experimental poet who hallucinated words. She believed that these words, though debilitating, life-altering interruptions, were clairvoyantly received directions and commentary from unseen guiding spirits. Weiner created her "clair-style" poetics to record her experience as she struggled to regain control of her life and decipher the instructions for healing, transcendence, and literary success that she believed were locked in the words she saw. I argue that her mission of documenting her life is not mere transcription, but a sophisticated engagement with her disability/gift and reflection on the role of the reader. Her personal agency is diluted, but Weiner trades authority for what she wants more: poetry that leads to enlightenment by facilitating her quest.;This dissertation serves as a reading guide or companion to Weiner's difficult poetry and its use of techniques including polyphony, fragmentation, overlapping type, and raw, diaristic revelations. I situate her inside a larger history of poets and the metaphysical, and explore Weiner's connections to the art communities of New York City's Lower East Side from the 1960s until her death in 1997. I examine her early works, unpublished journals, and manuscripts, tracking her predilection for the linguistic and visual codes that become pivotal in her major work, Clairvoyant Journal. In my study of Clairvoyant Journal, I unravel messages about authorship and dictation and their connection to Weiner's life. I survey her critical reception and address key but uncomfortable questions about her clairvoyance or illness and the reader's conception of it. I probe Weiner's work of the 1980s, in which she turns her focus outward and uses her poetics for political purposes, taking up the cause of the American Indian Movement, claiming to channel the voices of its leaders. I also investigate Weiner's troubled but productive identification with Indians and her own shamanistic roll. I trace, or create, a trajectory that elucidates clair-style's origins and how Weiner arrived at this radical form for her art. This work is a study of Weiner's compromised consciousness, and her process of making art from a difficult experience. |
