Carollee Schneemann

Carolee Schneemann on Hannah Weiner

Carolee Schneemann (2007) by Emma Bee Bernstein; Hannah Weiner and and Kitella (1967) by Schneemann

In late January of 2016, I phoned Carolee Schneemann and we talked for an hour or so. I had invited her to share her memories and impressions of Hannah Weiner, part of an oral history I have been compiling. What follows is a selective transcript of her remarks, with some clarifications in parentheses and interpellations in brackets. When I learned that Schneemann had passed away last week, I went back to the recording. She was generous, spirited, and finally thankful that I was working to raise awareness about Hannah Weiner’s work. I gathered from the conversation that she felt a strong kinship with Weiner. Those who have studied Weiner’s career know that its continuities are sometimes overlooked and that she dearly sought to be understood, as much as her work was in some sense a process of understanding. I think Carolee understood it. After all, she was there.
— Patrick Durgin, 3/11/19

Recently in Jacket2

Near/Miss launches

Charles Bernstein

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

On the 'Vietnam is a Seven-Letter Word' Panel at AWP

Anna Maria Hong

“Vietnam Is a Seven-Letter Word” panelists.

On the Thursday of the AWP Conference in Portland, OR, I skipped the long line for badges and made my way through the throngs of people chatting, milling purposefully, and sitting and sipping decent coffee along the corridor floors of the Oregon Convention Center to a panel titled “Vietnam is a Seven-Letter Word.” I was familiar with some of the writers presenting but not all of them, and I was intrigued by the description, which noted that “women of the Vietnamese diaspora [would] offer insight into how writers may elasticize and complicate definitions of one’s various assigned ‘identities’ and lend voice to the silenced, obscured, or overlooked.”

'Voices of continuance'

Words, speech, and memory in Jeannette Armstrong’s 'Breath Tracks' (1991)

Eric Schmaltz

Jeanette Armstrong’s poem collection Breath Tracks (1991) sews the sinew and muscle of the writing hand to the lips and lungs of the speaking mouth. The title of the book gestures toward the entanglement of writing and speaking in the body: tracks, the trace of language upon the page that is left by movements of the hand, and breath, that which comes before, during, and after the act of vocalization — a trace of the body in itself. In its positioning of these enmeshed mechanisms, Breath Tracks is a book about the mouth on the page or, to borrow the words that Armstrong imparts to Kim Anderson, these poems articulate “how sound and body gesture to create an art form.”[1]