&Now 2019 Conference

Hannah Weiner, an innovative L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, used her unique psychological experience as a foundation for her experimental writing. This panels explores the lessons that can be learned from a deep dive into her papers held in the Archive for New Poetry at the Mandeville Special Collections at UCSD. We want to honor the work of this poet, as well as examine her approach to her schizophrenia (and her quest for wellness) on her own terms in the context of the often-invisibilized frictions between recipients of psychological diagnoses and the structures in place to treat them. We explore the role that her writing practice and her literary community played within that pursuit of wellness, which she traced in a seemingly unmediated manner in her automatic writing practice. Additionally, we are excited about the ways that Weiner developed a narrative form through which to convey her pathologized reality. We approach her work from the vantage of dailiness in her writing practice, her interests in formal rupture, and the role that writing played as a nexus or glue of creative community. What can we learn from Weiner’s practice about using writing to present a reality that rubs up against others’ realities, and how can that be applied to our politically-charged moment? As Patrick Durgin notes, Weiner’s self-identification as clairvoyant “conflates telling and being told.” Using Weiner’s archive as an example, we ask: what role can an archive play in reflecting creative communities and how does an archive serve as an intersection of the past, present, and future? How can an archive embody critical pedagogies and collaborative praxis? We’d like to share what we’ve had access to through the Archive for New Poetry with others who are interested in the relationship between writing, wellness, and political landscapes.