When the double issue of the bimonthly avant-garde magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was published in 1979, it opened with Acker's essay ‘NOTES ON WRITING – from THE LIFE OF BAUDELAIRE’. One of the central aims of this book is to position Acker and her work in a lineage of radical modernisms, and to draw attention to her works as contemporary continuations of radical modernist practice. As Charles Bernstein remarks: ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is associated not only with poetic practice but also with an active effort to reclaim the legacy of radical modernist poetry from revisionist, anti-modernist accounts.’ In this first chapter, Acker's early poetry is set within the context of the work that emerged in the field of American poetry in the 1970s. The writing experiments that Acker produced from 1970 to 1979 consist of both poetic and experimental prose pieces. This chapter seeks to underscore the importance of poetics to Acker's work through careful readings of Acker's experimental poetry written in this period, much of which remains unpublished. Acker's exercises: ‘MURDERERS-CRIMINALS JOIN SUNLIGHT’ (1972); ‘Homage to LeRoi Jones’ (1972), and her other early experiments, ‘Entrance into Dwelling in Paradise’ (1972), ‘Working Set’ (1972), and ‘Journal Black Cat Black Jewels’ (1972), reveal the significance of Acker's poetry in terms of the development of her experimental compositional strategies deployed in her later writings. Such writing experiments also illuminate her early prose works: The Burning Bombing of America (1972), Rip off Red, Girl Detective (1973), The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula (1973), I Dreamt I was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining (1974), and The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec (1978). Close examination of Acker's early writing experiments and her prose piece The Burning Bombing of America reveals the way in which her early poetic procedural experiments led to the radical writing practices that developed and unfolded across Acker's oeuvre.