PLAGIARISM: the further reaches

I read Kathy Acker and think of Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, which I loved in 1978. Reading a few pages brings back all the unsayable,  all the oversaid of that era. Pain can be cloying. These days I am brought to a halt on page 26 by an embedded line of Rilke. Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And read no more. In reading Elizabeth Smart I am reading Rilke, Rimbaud, and the Old Testament, to name a few.

Kathy Acker was born a few months after I was. The last section of Tarantula is 'The Story of My Life', September 1973.

1947. I'm born April 18th; my family thinks of itself as aristocratic, though it isn't, since my grandmother (mother's mother) came from Alsace-Lorraine to U.S.A. poor and in her later life married a wealthy man. They properly worship money as do all good Americans. They assure me that only the unworthy work. I will never have to work since I'm rich and will marry rich, that if I ever have to think about money it's because I've come down in the world. They're incredibly stingy with me. These conflicting early trainings make me proud and shy, confident that I'm by nature above other people and aware that everyone, especially my parents, hates me. .... As a baby I spit at whoever I feel like ....

As a writer she spits. She is thrown in prison for trying to figure out her desires. Or is that the Marquis de Sade? She has read Alexander Trocchi, Lesley Blanch, author of The Wilder Shores of Love (and, my first cookbook, Around the World in Eighty Dishes) WB Yeats, Dickens.

This is writing through your reading. Kathy Acker has a lot more starting torque than Elizabeth Smart. A lot more hatred.

My mother wanted to make me exactly like her. I look like her; we both have large eyes, same bone structure, thick child's skin, dark brown hair, purple lips. We're fond of our bodies and wilful. From the first day I was born and hypocritically smiling, pretending I was happy, I opposed her: I set myself against her so that I should become someone else. She began outwardly to hate me when I began to menstruate. She wanted me to be nothing, like her.

Her autobiography segues into that of the Marquis de Sade. As, in earlier chapters, she copies events from other writers and in copying becomes their characters. Language creates her, not necessarily her own language. It is compelling to write down the words of others. If by reading you become the characters you're reading about, by copying other writers' words you embody them, inhabit them, and so release yourself from yourself. Which was maybe what she, like many writers, especially poets, was trying to do all along.