How Kathy Acker Stayed Radical

Through the force of her originality and irreverence, Acker’s work outlived the trends that helped elevate it. While my graduate school classmates were debating what it meant to “blend” high and low culture or to “deconstruct” the traditional literary canon (most of which, unlike Acker, we hadn’t actually read), Acker bolted headfirst into making it her plaything, taking the life stories of bohemian icons like Verlaine and Pasolini as raw materials, rewriting Dickens and Faulkner and Cervantes through parody, pastiche, and what she insisted on calling plagiarism.