And looking at this, the quintessential Acker work, the turn in the road, the book in which she did everything for the first time, it’s serialized unto itself. Through and through Kathy was a DIY Dickens. Neither the Times nor the Voice was going to serialize her writing so she would do it herself. But where I’m going is that NOT ONLY are the title and the beginning of Kathy’s Great Expectations from Dickens but her way of getting her writing out. I remember a friend being outraged at Kathy presuming they wanted her lousy writing. People didn’t want just anything in their mailbox. That was before my time (by about five minutes) and there were actually people who were genuinely pissed off that she did that. You could actually reach out and touch the inside of all these peoples’ mailboxes.

That list in the pre-internet days was gold. Anyway part of Kathy’s first notoriety in the 70s was that she sent small pieces of “The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula” (her novel-in-progress) out regularly to the entire St. Janis Joplin was probably the only other woman worth saying you had sex with. And Richard is prominent in the short annals of men who have written about having sex with a famous woman (Kathy) as opposed to women always covering them. Richard Hell too “left poetry” to invent punk rock. Patti Smith was kind of one of them, leaving poetry for rock n roll but still saying she was a poet. Lydia Davis is one, Renee Gladman is another right now. You know and we’ve always had fellow travelers, people who move with us as opposed to the sellout fiction world, weird experimental artists and writers.

And it made a baggy loose space, a trans form where poets could meet everybody. Bernadette Mayer was the poet who coined the “writer” term at that time. Kathy was doing what people in the poetry world then called “writing.” Meaning they refused genre, they didn’t not write poems they just didn’t like calling them anything that specific. This poet Mike Sappol who was also in a band said Kathy aka the Black Tarantula is who I should be reading I don’t know I just think you’d like her. I first heard about Kathy in a workshop at St. I’ve already written two versions of this intro and now I think I’m just giving up and I’ll talk to you direct.

Great expectations acker