Punk literary icon Kathy Acker ‘completely bewitched’ Jason McBride — his book “Eat Your Mind” pays homage to her influence

Revolutionary. Radical. Shocking. Just a few of the words that describe American writer and essayist Kathy Acker and her work. Her books and articles are marked by experimental, fragmented prose; feature sexual fantasies, pornographic drawings and excerpts from other authors’ creations “canonical and otherwise.”

When Toronto writer Jason McBride saw her read in the fall of 1988, he was “completely bewitched by her fusion of sex and literature, the streets and the academy,” motivating him to spend 10 years researching “Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker.”

McBride starts in New York City, where Acker was born Karen Lehman on April 18, 1947. Raised in an upper-middle class Jewish family on New York’s Upper East Side, Acker, we learn early on, did not get along with her mother, Claire, whose husband left when she was pregnant with their daughter.

Acker believed, through Claire’s constant rejection, that Claire blamed her for her father’s abandonment. This tension is threaded throughout Acker’s work, most pointedly, in her 1993 novel “My Mother: Demonology.” Claire remarried, and she and Acker’s stepfather sent her to the respected Lenox New York prep school, where she wrote for the school’s literary magazine. Foretelling her promiscuous life, which she often wrote about, McBride points out that Kathy was the first in her class to have sex.

But it was Greenwich Village that provided inspiration for Acker, where she encountered “gay people, drug addicts, geniuses, provocateurs (and learned) how art could be created in opposition or in parallel to a hegemonic, calcified culture.”

Acker glommed on to the esthetics of New York’s punk scene, with its leather jackets, ripped jeans and spiked hair. Punk’s anti-authoritarian tenets are evident in 1984’s “Blood and Guts in High School,” which features “hand-lettered maps and poems, pornographic drawings — its overall sense of bricolage — was in lockstep with punk’s raw, handmade aesthetic.”

Patti Smith, the Ramones, Blondie, the legendary club CBGB — Acker was at the centre of New York punk life, breaking ground with her innovative work. Her performance of her book “Florida” with artist and musician Jill Kroesen and avant-garde artist and musician Laurie Anderson marked one of the first times a literary event took place in the now legendary Chelsea arts centre The Kitchen.

That work was an example of how Acker recast someone else’s work, in this case Maxwell Anderson’s “Key Largo,” something she learned from poet David Antin at the University of California at San Diego. Antin’s “students were combining Aeschylus with plumbing manuals … creating ‘these wonderful, quickly shifting things,’” McBride writes, a style that proved an inspiration to Acker.

Antin’s influence is also apparent in her critically acclaimed novel “Great Expectations,” in which Acker “steals” from Dickens and mourns her mother’s suicide: “I give Pirrip as my father’s family name on the authority of his tombstone and my sister — Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. On Christmas Eve 1978 my mother committed suicide,” she wrote.

McBride revisits readings and introductions, giving us a sense of her writing life.

As a teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute, she had one rule for her students: write honestly and “You’re not allowed to bore me.” In the mid-1980s she read at San Francisco’s famous City Lights bookstore from her critically important “Don Quixote,” riffing off Cervantes’ work. Acker’s Quixote, however, is a woman, her armour a paper hospital gown, recalling Acker as she read Cervantes “(t)o calm herself while waiting for (her) abortion,” McBride writes.

In London that same decade, Acker became a respected part of a literary coterie that included Martin Amis, with whom she drank wine, Neil Gaiman and Salman Rushdie. There she received her first tattoo — “(Tattooing is) a form that’s so pure, so untouched by the market system,” McBride quotes her as saying. Tattooing made an appearance in her 1988 novel “Empire of the Senseless,” which is memorable for her tattoo illustrations, but also because it’s her first novel to contain a storyline: “I could summarize the plot of ‘Empire of the Senseless’ … I couldn’t do that with any of my other novels.”

Portions of “Eat Your Mind” focus on Toronto, McBride’s home city, to which Acker considered moving at one point. She didn’t, but at least two important moments happened here: Rumour, an art gallery that doubled as a small publisher, released “Kathy Goes to Haiti” in 1978. And, a decade later, in 1989, she read with William S. Burroughs — with whom she was often compared — at the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall, one of Burroughs’ last readings.

When the two had met during a TV interview in London the previous year, the author was “vile” to her. This time, McBride writes, Acker found Burroughs “(a) truly delicate, loving man, as gentle a person as I’ve ever met.”

Kathy Acker strove for uniqueness, and the continued interest in her work 25 years after her death of cancer on Nov. 30, 1997 is a testament to her ongoing influence. McBride’s deep research and respect for his subject pays homage to her importance and introduces a new generation of readers to her unmatched vision.

SHARE: