A pause, a rose,
something on paper
|
* * *
An excerpt from My Life, by Lyn Hejinian. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission of the author.
A pause, a rose,
something on paper
|
* * *
An excerpt from My Life, by Lyn Hejinian. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission of the author.
Rae Armantrout and Robert Polito on Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian's poetry combines philosophical depth, formal inventiveness and, increasingly, an almost picaresque sense of life's surprising trajectory. Although Hejinian was one of the founding members and seminal theorists of the Language Poetry movement, her work has followed its own unique logic over the course of her twenty-two books.
Her influential book-length prose poem, My Life, transformed our conception of what is possible in the prose poem and in autobiography. It is written in loosely chronological, non-narrative chapters, one for each year of her life at the time of its composition. Hejinian's sentences here (and elsewhere), taken singly, are complex and elegant— reminiscent of 19th century fiction. They are self-contained, yet provisionally related, as adjacent neurons are, across a sparking gap. In their various conjunctions they recreate the ambience of a California girlhood at mid-century or raise questions about the veracity of memory and the ethics of representation.
Since My Life, Lyn Hejinian has continued to produce large-scale, subtly structured, inclusive poems. When we say her work is "inclusive," we mean that there is no type of experience, image, event or emotional tone that couldn't enter into it. Her writing deliberately and courageously welcomes the stranger in the form of whatever may next appear to the eye or the mind's eye. As she writes in Happily, "Along comes something— launched in context". And what might "something" be? Did you think you could guess?
There's a pink pop, a critical pick,
a joke, a skinned dog
And a little dead man on the floor
Is something funny
Did I/you vote for a gnome and get goat's legs?
(A Border Comedy)
As Hejinian tells us in "Some Notes Toward a Poetics Statement," "At points of linkage, the possibility of a figure of contradiction arises: a figure we might call by a Greek name: xenos." She goes on to say, "I espouse a poetics of affirmation. I also espouse a poetics of uncertainty, of doubt, and strangeness." This is what we need now—an ability, of the sort Lyn Hejinian possesses—to transcend binaries, to think complexly, to make room for the strange and the stranger.