Silent Teacher Remembered
A Reading for Hannah Weiner’s Open House
November 28th, 2007
St. Mark’s Church

In the early 1970s poet, “live” artist, lingerie designer, friend to Downtown fellow travelers and self-professed “clairvoyant” journalist and “silent teacher” Hannah Weiner began to have hallucinatory visions of words. The first page of Weiner’s 1974 book, Clairvoyant Journal, explains the situation succinctly:

I SEE words on my forehead In THE AIR
on other people on the typewriter on the
page These appear in the text in CAPITALS
or italics

Such visionary experiences, shared by few others throughout recorded history, were celebrated this past Wednesday, November 28th 2007 at St. Mark’s Poetry Project during a night curated by Poetry Project director, Stacy Szymaszek. The gathering of poets, artists, friends, acolytes and scholars of Weiner’s work came about around the recent publication of Hannah Weiner’s Open House, a selection of Weiner’s work edited, introduced, designed and published by Patrick Durgin through his distinguished Kenning Editions (kenningeditions.com). That 2007 should mark the tenth anniversary of Weiner’s passing also offered a fitting moment for commemoration, reflection and tribute.

To begin the evening, Szymaszek handed the mic off to Durgin, who proceeded to talk about an aspect of Open House’s publication he hadn’t discussed publicly before: the book’s design. In his address, Durgin spoke specifically about how he and a co-designer, Jeff Clark, were waylaid in their plans only to arrive at a design more fitting the careful errancies of Weiner’s work. As Durgin himself explains in an entry posted to his blog, Da Crouton:

Clearly it requires great care to set the type in a book of Weiner’s work, especially her work from the 1970s; and I address this in the introduction. But I simply didn’t have the mechanical reasoning required also to design the cover. And so I collaborated with Jeff Clark, aka Quemadura. We decided to replicate, at an elegant angle, the invitation Weiner printed for her “Open House” event. That’d be the front cover. We’d use a dull matte gloss on the front cover and the spine, and use what they call a “spot varnish” on the text. The intended effect was to make the text gleam. The back cover, filled with blurb, was printed in reverse—the white background is glossy and the text has a duller matte finish. All of this trickery cost the equivalent of printing a full color cover, so it’d at least be nice to see it pay off somehow. When the books came back from the printer, though, the effect was so subtle that it goes unnoticed—some texture would have helped.
However, I gradually noticed that the ultra-high-contrast black and white, the negative and positive and other bogus oppositions are undercut by the reverse patina, which by chance manages to render the blacks a very dark grey. If you hold it at the proper angle, that is.*