Reflecting in 1990 on her early adult years immersed in the New York art world, Acker remembered ‘being taught that it's not an art work's content, surface content, that matters, but the process of making art. That only process matters.’ Attention to the manuscript practice and compositional processes of Acker's works, alongside the question of experimental practice and meaning, brings to light the new forms of creative practice that Acker's works embody. This book opened with Acker's declaration ‘FORM HAS MEANING’ and the importance of the imbrication of form with content to modernist and late modernist experimental writers. Acker's experimental practices – exercises in writing asystematically, collage, topological intertextuality, montage, ekphrasis, and literary calisthenics – reveal a body of compositional strategies that continue to uphold this distinctive feature of early twentieth-century experiment and preserve the radical force of her writings.

Acker's creative practice and the new forms of non-restricted meaning that arise from her works demand critical attention. The obstruction of normal reading in Acker's work is often recognised at a general level when critics perceive Acker's works as unreadable, or fragmented, or senseless. Less frequently recognised are the intricate practices of experimentation, which are innumerable and require more scholarly attention. Acker's early procedural practices, fieldorientated experiments with the page, and practices of rewriting, as well as her use of non-referential language, innovative typography and modes of textual inscription, illustration, writing-through, deviant translation, various modes of cutting-up, cutting in, excising, juxtaposition, writing through the image, the instituting of opacity, and obscuring situate her in a lineage of radical modernisms. Each of the chapters of this book have traced Acker's continuation of the modernist concern with the crisis of language, and the yearning for a new language and a new revolutionary way of writing. One question that arises in a study of Acker's work is the extent to which Acker was successful in creating new languages using the tools of her experimental practice, or whether her efforts result in merely a frustrating impasse. It is my contention that Acker succeeds in creating new non-verbal languages, through experimental composition and experimental writing practices that culminate in her final works in a new form of literary abstraction.