Cultivating thought

This was the case of Eleonora Duse, possessed by duende, who looked for plays that had failed so she could make them triumph thanks to her own inventions…

The problem is not merely homogeneity of topic, but homogeneity of substance. If you have to publish a newsletter every week, you don’t have the room or incentive to take risks.

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 muse and angel come from outside us: the angel gives lights, and the muse gives forms (Hesiod learned from her). Loaf of gold or tunic fold: the poet receives forms in his grove of laurel. But one must awaken the duende in the remotest mansions of the blood.

The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought.

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.

With idea, sound, or gesture, the duende enjoys fighting the creator on the very rim of the well. Angel and muse escape with violin, meter, and compass; the duende wounds. In the healing of that wound, which never closes, lie the strange, invented qualities of a man's work.

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