One Art

BY PROF. VAROL AKMAN

Lyn Hejinian (b. 1941)

Probably all feelings are clichés -- which is not to say that they are invalid, or stupid, or even absurd (though like anything else they may be). Feelings are common to us all, never new, stunning only to the person feeling them at the time, and foolish (or boring) to everyone else.

"In a curious way, I'm not much interested in language. In my ideal poem, no words are noticed." These words of Philip Levine cannot possibly be used to portray the spirit of Lyn Hejinian's poetry. Hejinian was born on May 17, 1941, in Alameda, California. She graduated from Harvard University in 1963. Commonly classified as a member of the "Language" school of American poetry, Hejinian is the author of "My Life," a long autobiographical prose poem that is regarded as her most significant work. This remarkable book has attracted so much scholarly interest that it is now a part of the canon, due in no little part to the efforts of the influential critic Marjorie Perloff.

"My Life" was written in 1978 when Hejinian was 37. Exploring her own past, Hejinian wrote 37 sections of 37 sentences, each section covering a year of her life. Eight years later, when she turned 45, a second edition of "My Life" appeared, with 8 new sections and 8 new sentences added to each of the sections 1 through 37 (thus accounting for her new age). For Hejinian, a biography has no beginning or middle (or end, for that matter); it may continue as long as the poet is breathing. Does she plan to carry on with this practice? Hejinian believes that a poem is not an isolated and rarified object; she also knows how vital it is for a creative artist not to exaggerate a trick:

I keep adding to it, in a gesture of resistance to the final text. [. . .] I'm not going to keep publishing it in different versions, because I think that would do exactly the opposite of what I want to do, fetishise it in another way which is that you have to have a collection of My Life's. [. . .] I'm publishing some new sections just in journals but I'm not going to make it into a book.

In the following, I give the initial segment of section 29, with the first newly added sentence (in the second edition) distinguished from the rest by underlining. Notice how this piece illustrates several precepts of Language poetry, such as: (i) prose is not automatically not verse, (ii) awareness can be of uncertainties as well as certainties, (iii) language is a preeminently social medium and can be used both to uphold the status quo and to alter it. Carrying a cheerful-sounding title, this particular section begins with an agreeable nature image. Slowly, the atmosphere becomes contemplative, and the social/political movements that were underway in the Sixties are touched upon. Then (in the newly inserted sentence) Hejinian's daughter adds her two cents' worth re the meaning of being a poet. Despite all these evocative building blocks, the poem is for the most part enigmatic. The underlying events remain dim, the connections are more often than not missing, and there seems to be no causal order. But maybe that is the way it should be, for Hejinian is a radical adversary of the "closed text," viz. writing that is transparent and can be used to convey facts and events:

The 'open text,' by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies.

NOTES

  • The opening quote is from Hejinian's contribution to "In the American Tree," edited by Ron Silliman (National Poetry Foundation, 1986).
  • The Levine quote is from "Don't Ask," edited by Donald Hall (University of Michigan Press, 1981). This is a volume of interviews with Levine.
  • The quote about "My Life" is from a talk Hejinian gave at the University of Auckland on March 21, 1995 (transcription by Fredrika Van Elburg).
  • The open-text quote is from an article by Hejinian included in "Writing/Talks," edited by Bob Perelman (Southern Illinois University Press, 1985).

Yet we insist that life is
full of happy chance

The windows were open and the morning air was, by the smell of lilac and some darker flowering shrub, filled with the brown and chirping trills of birds. As they are if you could have nothing but quiet and shouting. Arts, also, are links. I picture an idea at the moment I come to it, our collision. Once, for a time, anyone might have been luck's child. Even rain didn't spoil the barbecue, in the backyard behind a polished traffic, through a landscape, along a shore. Freedom then, liberation later. She came to babysit for us in those troubled years directly from the riots, and she said that she dreamed of the day when she would gun down everyone in the financial district. That single telephone is only one hair on the brontosaurus. The coffee drinkers answered ecstatically. If your dog stays out of the room, you get the fleas. In the lull, activity drops. I'm seldom in my dreams without my children. My daughter told me that at some time in school she had learned to think of a poet as a person seated on an iceberg and melting through it. It is poetry of certainty.[. . .]