Kathy Acker
in Seattle

I didn’t know anything about her. She came in and she kind of said, ‘I don’t want anybody to sit in these pews, come up near me and sit down on the floor, because I’m a performance artist, I’m not going to just read from my book.’ And we were kind of like, ‘What’s that?’ This was 1977. It was all new to me. But I thought, ‘What does she mean? She’s going to perform and not read or she is going to read, but it’s going to be a performance?’

I’ve been thinking a lot about that, since you’ve been putting together this conference. And I realized it’s all of a piece with Kathy. She kind of drew us all in and she said that she felt a kinship with people in New York City, who were doing performance art. I realized she was calling into question some of the issues that you talked about on the last panel, which was amusing in a way to read Kathy Acker’s work for the truth. Because she was not going to tell the truth. That was the point. Her point was, in every medium she worked in, to interrogate the integrity of the truth or the possible integrity of the truth one was able to convey in this medium.

So it was the first time I was published and it was also the first time I got a bad review for opening for Kathy and it was so funny that she challenged me. She was not like, “oh, cute little feminist girl–you’re just mini-me! I want to help you!” She was not at all like that.

Kathy Acker: Well writing’s something different. (When you write) are you just a woman or are you also a person? Where do you come from when you write? Where do you take your tradition? … I mean, that’s truly self-defeating-- you can’t be simplistic about what a human is. As women, we’ve been taught to be less, not to think well of ourselves, not to try for certain things—so you try to learn other things-- other ways of moving, other ways of thinking, you have to unlearn a lot of your environment.

I should point out that Kathy didn’t make any distinction among these topics. She wrote from life, and she also wrote from books. She rejected those all-too-common clichés that would oppose life and art to one another. She was, among so many other things, a voracious reader; she knew a much wider range of books than I did, or than I ever will.

Daniel Schulz: I’m interested in what specifically led you to her workshop. How her work impacted you, not necessarily your work, but you.

Stacey Levine: That’s a big question. I don’t know. You’re supposed to find your voice. And we prize individuality and those who find their own voice. And she was the model who did that to the extreme and in that era...I mean we are still puritanical, but it was more puritanical then. And there were writers that were kind of shocked. Readers were really shocked by her work, how sexual it was, and how cruel it was. And to her – she makes it clear– to her this is just part of it. This is not some put-on or some fake thing or some fake scam she was doing to get attention. It was a real – it was truly organic to her and something that really came from her. So I think, she was sort of a model that was good for all the younger writers in that audience. Does that answer your question?