Poets Lyn Hejinian and Frances Richard respond to the work of artists Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey with poetry that attempts to grapple in language with wordlessness.

Lyn Hejinian teaches in the English department at UC Berkeley, where her academic work principally addresses modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, with particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social practices they entail. She is the author of more than twenty-five volumes of poetry and critical prose, most recently Positions of the Sun and Tribunal.

Frances Richard teaches at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her poetry collections include Anarch., The Phonemes, and See Through. She is the author of Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics and coauthor, with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, of Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates.” She is the editor of Joan Jonas Is on Our Mind and the forthcoming I Stand in My Place with My Own Day Here: Site-Specific Art at The New School.