SOURCE: Goldman, Judith. “Hannah-hannaH: Politics, Ethics, and Clairvoyance in the Work of Hannah Weiner.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (summer 2001): 121-33.

In the following excerpt, Goldman comments on how Weiner's Code Poems and Clairvoyant Journal reflect her personal ethics and composition style.

In August of 1972, Hannah Weiner, an accomplished and highly politicized performance artist and poet, began to receive a remarkable form of “dictation.”¹ Printed words of all sizes bombarded Weiner; she saw these words in the air, on every available surface, on people, on the page before she wrote them, and on her forehead from within. Weiner called her “psychic” ability to see words “clairvoyance.” She developed a mode of poetic writing, “clair-style,” that incorporated words and phrases clairvoyantly seen, eventually composing through these seen elements exclusively. In such groundbreaking works as Clairvoyant Journal (1978), LITTLE BOOKS/INDIANS (1980), Sixteen (1983), Spoke (1984), and silent teachers remembered sequel...