Kathy Acker Was Against Creativity

Acker’s approach to writing was just as radical as her approach to paying the rent. Inspired by a poetry class taught by David Antin in which he instructed students to make poems out of snippets of text they copied from library books, Acker started making longer prose works with this same method. She would lift passages from existing books, make so

By the 1980s, Acker had also developed a rigorous editing method: She said that she rewrote every book eight times (!), each time with a different criteria in mind: “once for sound, once for meaning, once for ‘beauty’, once for structure, once in the mirror for performativity etc.”

The biographer Jason McBride writes:

Acker loved to talk about bodybuilding in terms of failure, noting that a weight lifter could only build new muscle by first breaking it down, by pushing it past the point of failure. She saw in this an analogy for her own writing process. Language, for her, was also about collapse and creation.