The audience is not large but curious. Mindful of the startling prose of this New York writer they semi-anticipate a Vicious American Female ready to snap the heads off the front rows (if anyone had dared to form a front row!)

But the small figure with the closely cropped hair and the metal adornment hanging from her ear has a surprisingly delicate voice and speaks with a quiet yet forceful intensity. Her fingers tremble as they grip her sheets of words. After some twenty minutes she turns her last page and leaves the stage. The music fades with her.

Blood And Guts In Highschool, Kathy Acker's best known work, is iconoclastic, highly (and brutally) sexual, heavily and deliberately plagiaristic. It emits an eerie contemporary resonance ('teach me a new language damn it, a language that means something to me') and devours established literary forms with a cannibalistic glee.

While that piece in particular would appear to link Acker inextricably to the bleak landscape of Lower Manhattan, it transpires that she now "half lives" in London's Hammersmith in a flat close to the Thames.

Another myth dispelled.

She currently has a major publisher, Picador – the head of whom Acker speculates is "just wanting a little private fun, to cause a bit of trouble and make some money" – but much of her previous work appeared in comparatively esoteric periodicals and books financed by New York art backers.

Now in her 30s, her desire to write has existed since childhood, a time when "I just fetishised books, books were my children, I'd put books to bed at night". She read voraciously, from kids' books to Dickens and Hawthorne, to her mother's Peyton Place, Agatha Christie's and "the dirty ones she'd hide in the closet."

"At 21 I published my first book so I guess that's when I got serious. I started to make a schedule of writing, I said I'd write so many pages a day and hang around other writers and everything.

"At that point I was working in a sex show called Fake. It was a bad deal good on money but bad on everything else. To keep my mind together I used to sit in Tad's Steak House on 42nd Street and write. It was sorta Burroughs and Kerouac type writing. Diary and cut-up surrealist stuff. I modelled my writing a lot on them at that point. I'd come out of writing poetry and wanted to stop and write prose but there were no American prose writers I could relate to except Burroughs and Kerouac.

"I read everything they wrote. Visions Of Cody and The Third Mind were the main texts. I did all the experiments," she says nonchalantly, as if it is what everyone does. The first people who accepted me were New York artists. The NY art scene is very associated with rock and roll, unlike in England. The NY writers have something else. I got sick of poets and I found all writers were full of pretence. I could get on with artists and rock and roll people more easily."

Downtown Manhattan in the mid to late 70s offered squalid but cheap apartments and brought together a gathering of fresh and vibrant young artists linked as much by their mutual poverty as creative ideas. Once the welfare ran out, the very act of living became an act of rebellion.

"Government support of the arts in America is minimal. The State just backs the creeps – unlike in England where it just seems expected. That idea is outrageous to me. In America art is very much about rebellion against society.

I lived with Peter Gordon of the Love Of Life Orchestra for six years. We always had differences musically. I thought he was a bit straight but he knew John Lurie (of Lounge Lizards fame) and there were always new bands with the same people in them. My best friends were the Contortions who became James White And The Blacks. James' girlfriend Anya started the Mudd Club.

"Blood And Guts was written around that time, just straight reporting of what was going on. I've always written for whatever kind of community I've lived in. The excitement there died as the record companies started picking up on the bands. Ze and Sire especially were disgusting. Besides the usual stuff about the record companies doping everybody up like a pimp and prostitute business, their money was buying up what was real and turning it into something else, I guess people just got co-opted.

"Suddenly Fiorucci were selling ripped T-shirts for 30 bucks. In New York there's never been fashion, people have been dressing the same ever since I've known it and were wearing ripped T-shirts because they were poor. But for a while this punk business was in and it turned into New Wave. The big money watered things down and de-politicised them."

Acker's explosive arrival, into what might be termed the literary mainstream, polarised opinion. Her work drew reviews which veered from the ecstatic to the downright savage. In America, the editor of Vanity Fayre even apologised in writing for one personal attack. Most critics felt compelled to attach a string of labels, from 'post-punk porn' and 'post-punk feminism' to simple 'pretentious rubbish'.

"It seems in England labels and groups are very important to a person's identity. A person's identity is very bound up in some sort of social identity, which isn't true in America. I have friends and I do my work. The word punk I don't remember everybody ever using at the time. I have certain politics and insofar as the word punk points to a certain kind of politics, that's fine with me.

"Jesus, feminism! There's such a fight going on among feminists. How can any woman say she isn't a feminist? I don't relate to labels. I think my work is so hard to deal with people have to categorise it to make it easier to deal with. For some reason I'm part of it so they have to categorise me. In England the way I've been described is silly. I'm hardly Sid Vicious!"

But the effect can be shocking! I know a load of people who've gagged over the infamous 'my red cunt ugh' illustration and been unable to get any further. Most literature in comparison is orthodox to the point of cosiness. Admittedly Blood And Guts, as Kathy informs me, is a collection of performance pieces and not necessarily intended to be read right through from start to finish. But even so ...

"I didn't think of the effect I might have until recently. I write mainly what I call experimentally. Which isn't that I make avant-garde experiments but just do what I want to do in terms of learning, with a bit of a sense of humour. I was attacking culture with a capital 'C' the way it told people how to think and perceive. I wanted to use writing as a tool to cut that down.

"The humour is the New York Jewish kind that starts 'Hello, how are you?', 'Oh, I'm dying'. My humour's pretty wacky. I think it's funny to substitute dirty words in some stupid Persian grammar text. But a lot of people are offended. Just plain, outright offended. I am surprised I have a large audience because it's difficult writing. Now that there are more people reading me I'm trying to be as clear as possible. You owe it to people not to jerk them off.

"I'd love to write silly mystery stories but you do what you do. Self expression doesn't interest me. I'm not interested in saying 'this is Kathy Acker' in my books. I write because I have a problem. The impetus of my writing is that there is some muddle I don't understand. There's some pain and I want to work out the pain or work out a language or something. I came out of a very experimental poetry world and I'm trying to make it simpler but I don't think I'll ever be easy to read."

Like a mischievous infant in a roomful of precious crockery, she squeals, "I break rules and I love doing it". But after the rule breaking feast of Blood And Guts, the tales combined into the same volume, 'Great Expectations' and 'My Death, My Life, By Pier Pasolini, began to display something else.

"After Blood And Guts I'm interested more in making my own rules and trying to re-make the world out of texts. I guess because of my reputation people wouldn't believe this but I'm interested in some sort of aestheticism and deconstruction used to re-make the world in terms of some sort of possible beauty."

The elements in her work which she describes as "almost academic deconstruction and journalism" tend to generate an impression of the writer herself as cold, tough and aggressive. Something doubtless bolstered by her striking appearance.

"I've looked the same for years. I partly just revolted against being a girl, it was just too hard to be female. I got used to acting out certain male roles and its become comfortable for me. After a while you just don't fight these things. For me to have long hair would be abhorrent!"

And sometimes the journalistic (re)search can flip back and sting her?

"Yeah, sometimes what I write shocks me. Sometimes I don't even like it. But I really think writing should be an exercise of the mind. I don't mean mind as opposed to heart but an exercise in learning and finding out. It's like the Marquis de Sade being a rationalist, people really do act in this way so put it down. It's an exercise of the mind which isn't about peoples taste, that this offends or isn't nice. You have to think beyond that to perceive what reality is. Writing should be about the real."