Excerpted from Larry McCaffery's Some Other Frequency

Larry McCaffery: Your use of appropriation seems to change just about the time of Great Expectations.

Kathy Acker: Appropriation is not a literary strategy I've chosen. I have always used appropriation in my works because I simply can't write any other way. I mean that very literally. When I was in my teens I grew up with some of the Black Mountain poets who were always giving lectures to writers to the effect that, "when you find your own voice, then you are a poet." The problem was, I couldn't find my own voice. I didn't have a voice, as far as I could tell. And yet I wanted very badly to write. So I began to do what I had to if I wanted to write: appropriate, imitate, and find whatever other ways I could to work with and improvise off of other texts. In high school I was always imitating Shakespeare, redoing poems from Romeo and Juliet, and so on. It's been that way ever since. What this comes down to, I think, is that I've never liked the idea of originality, and so my whole life I've always written by taking other texts, inhabiting them in some way so that I can do something with them.