Feminist Solidarity and Experiment in Kathy Acker’s Early Writings

This essay takes up questions of the relation between political forms of solidarity and literary experiment as feminist homage as these materialize in the early writings of the late modernist experimental writer Kathy Acker. Many of Acker’s juvenilia, written in the 1970s, remain unpublished and have therefore not entered Acker scholarship until now. Acker, a self-consciously radical, political writer, uses experimental composition throughout her oeuvre to critique the narratives of late capitalism and American Republican political discourse. For Acker, revolution—the ability to bring about transformation—is intrinsically related to experimental form. This essay explores the relation between experimental composition and radical politics, looking closely at Acker’s early poetic exercises. In 1972, Acker produced a number of experiments that involved rewriting the works of Amiri Baraka, then LeRoi Jones. This essay explores Homage to LeRoi Jones, arguing that it is a textual experiment that is a form of feminist solidarity

Uncollected: Towards a Centre for Contemporary Poetry in the Archive:Project Team Reflections and Recommendations

This project seeks funding to plan and pilot a community-led approach to the building of a Centre for Contemporary Poetry in the Archive. The University of East Anglia (UEA) intends to establish such a centre within the British Archive for Contemporary Writing (BACW) at UEA, expanding our existing networks of authors, researchers, archivists and public organisations in new directions. We will conduct planning activities and pilot community-led archival methodologies that will support the establishment of an archive fit to represent, value, promote and preserve the archives of contemporary poets of colour, queer poets, and other historically underrepresented backgrounds and practices. Our approach to understanding and defining underrepresentation will be alert to cross-cutting forms of discrimination in British and Irish literary culture relating to class, gender and ability. We will also look to critically value and promote innovative formal approaches to contemporary poetic composition – such as the conceptual, the visual, the performed and the digital – as well as the poetic use of dialects and creoles spoken by communities which have been historically marginalised in the UK and Ireland

Publisher Correction: Whole-genome sequencing of a sporadic primary immunodeficiency cohort (Nature, (2020), 583, 7814, (90-95), 10.1038/s41586-020-2265-1)

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper