Hejinian, Lyn

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A Must
A classic
textures woven in an experimental pattern
Plucking away at the Postmodern

My Life (Green Integer Books, 39)
Lyn Hejinian
Manufacturer: Green Integer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1931243336

Book Description

Recognized today as one of the great works of contemporary American literature, My Life is at once poetic autobiography, personal narrative, a woman's fiction, and an ongoing dialogue with the poet and her experience. Upon its first publication by Sun & Moon Press (the edition reprinted here) the publication Library Journal described the book as one that "is an intriguing journey that both illuminates and perplexes, teases and challenges, as it reveals an innovative artist at work."

<B>Lyn Hejinian </B>is the author of The Cell, The Cold of Poetry, Writing Is an Aid to Memory and A Border Comedy. She lives in Berkeley and teaches at the University of California.

Customer Reviews:

A Must.......2006-02-05

In order to fully understand the postmodern world, the subversive industry of autobiograpy, the collision between poetry and prose, the influence of hybridity, and the potential of revision any reader of contemporary poetry needs to begin here.

The writing is complex without being hermetic. Difficult without being resistant. My Life is a necessary text. Generous in its insights, its complicated declarations. This is a perfect marriage of philosophy, poetry, and mathematics.

Read this always and often.

A classic.......2004-05-26

The structure of this book with 45 poems of 45 sentences, one for each year of Hejinian's life, makes the reading of the book like a scale miniature (5 minutes to 1 year) life. It makes you think about your own life and about the relative duration of life events. I read this book right after my first kid was born and I was continually thinking about the possible effect of this event on my life through time.

The book's stucture also allows Hejinian the freedom to stretch out without losing the reader. If you get lost on one poem, you are right back on track for the next one.

textures woven in an experimental pattern.......2000-08-22

One can't talk about this book without making mention of its remarkable structure and history: it was intially written when Ms. Hejinian was thirty-seven, and it consisted of thirty-seven poems, each one containing impressions drawn from the corresponding year of her life. Each of these poems was composed of thirty-seven sentences, as well.

Eight years later, when Ms. Hejinian was forty-five, she revised My Life, adding eight new poems (to bring the total up to forty-five) and inserting eight new sentences into each of the previous poems, adding a new layer of understanding and complexity to the earlier work and questioning the idea that a piece of writing (or the evolution of the self) can ever be "finished."

Additionally, the details that she focuses on in these poems and the way these details are ordered comprise a quiet subversion of traditional biographical structure. Ms. Hejinian avoids the normal biographical trajectories-- "here's how I became a success" or "here are the most important events in my life" -- instead she focuses on minutae like the pattern of tiles in a floor. She also resists the impulse to explain whether these details influenced her later self or even why they are important at all, leaving much up to the reader to determine.

This all contributes to making this a wonderful, astonishing, surprising book; a new way of investigating the experience of being human.

Plucking away at the Postmodern.......1999-12-10

If you want prose and postmodern poetry which hasn't lost the integrity and beauty of image, then bring your intellectual shovel and dig in. Don't let postmodernism ruffle your feathers until you've let dutch rub you.

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Xenia (Sun and Moon Classics)
Arkadii Dragomoschenko , Lyn Hejinian , and Elena Balashova
Manufacturer: Sun and Moon Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1557131074

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Dense, productive essays

The Language of Inquiry
Lyn Hejinian
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0520217004

Book Description

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her autobiographical poem My Life, a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. The Language of Inquiry is a comprehensive and wonderfully readable collection of her essays, and its publication promises to be an important event for American literary culture. Here, Hejinian brings together twenty essays written over a span of almost twenty-five years. Like many of the Language Poets with whom she has been associated since the mid-1970s, Hejinian turns to language as a social space, a site of both philosophical inquiry and political address.
Central to these essays are the themes of time and knowledge, consciousness and perception. Hejinian's interests cover a range of texts and figures. Prominent among them are Sir Francis Bacon and Enlightenment-era explorers; Faust and Sheherazade; Viktor Shklovsky and Russian formalism; William James, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. But perhaps the most important literary presence in the essays is Gertrude Stein; the volume includes Hejinian's influential "Two Stein Talks," as well as two more recent essays on Stein's writings.

Customer Reviews:

Dense, productive essays.......2002-11-21

These are dense, stimulating essays by one of the most articulate and accessible of the "Language Poets."

Description (Sun & Moon Classics, No. 9)

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the most profound visionary poet in 20 yrs.sur/reality melts

Description (Sun & Moon Classics, No. 9)
Arkadii Dragomoschenko
Manufacturer: Sun and Moon Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1557130752

Book Description

poetry, Russian, tr Lyn Hejinian & Elena Balashova

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the most profound visionary poet in 20 yrs.sur/reality melts.......1998-03-01

this modern soviet poet breathes passion into everyday concsiousness.the dreams of the surreal possess his soul.the sound of the words read like much meaning.truely inspirational perception that will change how you see everything.wallace stevens meets william burroughs.borges.cortazar.you must have "xenia"&"desciption".what ive come to expect from sun & moon[press]...classics!perfect along side of bob dylan or w.c.williams in the coffeehouse style madness.leaves you craving more. radical.druid/gypsy/priestess.untill you are me & i am you

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Worse Than Magnet Poetry
Generally incomprehnsible
Ivory-tower intellectual fireworks
Give up, go home, lock the door, get smashed
a rather unbalanced look at a year's poetry

The Best American Poetry 2004

Manufacturer: Scribner
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Best American Poetry 2005 (Best American Poetry)
The Best American Poetry 2003
The Best American Poetry 2000 (Best American Poetry)
The Best American Poetry 2006 (Best American Poetry)
The Best American Poetry 2001 (Best American Poetry)

ASIN: 074325757X

Book Description

The Best American Poetry 2004 celebrates the vitality and richness of poetry in the United States and Canada today. Guest editor Lyn Hejinian, acclaimed for her own innovative writing, has chosen seventy-five important new poems and contributed a provocative introductory essay. Through her selections, Hejinian has created an essential nexus -- a meeting place for readers to encounter an extraordinary range of poets. With illuminating comments from the writers, and series editor David Lehman's insightful foreword evaluating the current state of the art, The Best American Poetry 2004 is an indispensable addition to a series that has established itself as the first word on what's new and noteworthy in the poetry of our times.

Customer Reviews:

Worse Than Magnet Poetry.......2005-12-25

There's difficult poetry, and then there's unreadable poetry--most of this book is the latter.

With a few exceptions (about five of the seventy-five poems), the poems in the anthology revel in extreme post-structuralist, avant-garde, or Language poetry obfuscation, resting largely on the philosophy that language conveys no meaning, so therefore any attempt by a writer to impart something other than meaninglessness to the reader is futile.

Obviously, one can debate such a philosophy, but I don't have the space for it here. However, there's nothing novel about such an approach to poetry; it's been done for over thirty years.

For a more scholarly assessment of such poetry, I recommend Joan Houlihan's "Three Invitations to a Far Reading" on the Contemporary Poetry Review website.

Generally incomprehnsible.......2005-07-14

With few exceptions these poems show the arrogance of poets who think conveying any sort of meaning is a cliche.
Read Ted Kooser's Delights and Shadows for an anitdote. (Thank God we have a poet laureate from the Plains!)

Ivory-tower intellectual fireworks.......2005-04-15

I read the 2002 and 2003 editions, and though obviously I would not have purchased 2004 if my curiosity had not been sparked by some of the poems, they are some things that irk me about the series:

Do you really need to have two or more advanced degrees from Ivy League institutions and eight volumes of poetry to your name to be recognized for an American poem? Because, that's what the selections imply. I mean, it strikes me sometimes that poetry has become so obscure in its meanings that the only way to judge it is via the resume and distinction of the poet. So, once again, what you have in the 2004 BAP is a collection of the work of ivory tower intellectuals. Almost every selection is heavily informed by 'critical theory' tropes and studies of other avante-garde poets.

That said, I love difficult poetry, and a lot of the poems this year are absolutely mesmerizing. Also, in year's past, the poems have not necessarily fit together very well, and this year, I was able to read 5 or 10 in a row without being made to cringe by a self-concious stinker or feel like I was cruising on a rumble strip of nonsense.

I guess the nation's tiny poetry audience is somewhat attracted by the cache of hyper-educated poets. I sense that many of poems are missing that hardcore grit that I look for, but all the same, this is very intelligent poetry and the process of seeing through some of it may be valuable to poets and readers.

Give up, go home, lock the door, get smashed.......2005-02-15

A hoax...by any other name...is still a hoax.

a rather unbalanced look at a year's poetry.......2005-01-27

i agree with the reviewer who missed poems speaking to the heart and mind of the reader ... i don't think it's necessary for all poetry to do that ... i wouldn't object to a few of these expirimental poems being in an anthology, as i realize it's valid and important for people to play with the language and perception of it ... it is valuable work to perform, but this book goes overboard in the space it's been given

on my blog, as a joke and experiment, i took some of the nonsense phrases i got in spam e-mail to defeat anti-spam filters, put a few together and made a poem out of them because i liked the sound of the words ... that poem wouldn't have been a bit out of place in this anthology ... most of the poems here make a little more sense than that ... but only a little

what i'd really like to know is how does one tell a "good" one of these language poems from a "bad" one? ... the strangeness of the words? ... the sound? ... the distance from logic and sense? ... the avant-gardeness of them? ... how do we tell what the "best" language poems are? ... for this is what this anthology seems to be ... not the best poetry, but the "best" language poetry

readers who are expecting an overview of the year's poetry will be surprised at this ... and many won't understand it ... it's the same academic experimentalism that's been going on since the 60s ... and it hasn't changed much ... a few of the poems communicated to me ... most of them didn't

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Border Comedy, A
Lyn Hejinian
Manufacturer: Granary Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Lovhers (Picas Series)
My Life (Green Integer Books, 39)
Picture Theory
New Time (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
It's Go In/Quiet Illumined Grass/Land

ASIN: 1887123377
Release Date: 2001-09-02

Book Description

Description: "Lyn Hejinian's work increasingly explores poetry's relation to knowledge. But rather than abstract frameworks, one finds [in A Border Comedy] coyotes, geese, didactic asides, horses, philosophical anecdotes...and a great deal of urinating. ...[It] forces us to catch our breath and occasionally to huff." Lytle Shaw

Writing Is an Aid to Memory (Sun & Moon Classics)

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Writing Is an Aid to Memory (Sun & Moon Classics)
Lyn Hejinian
Manufacturer: Sun & Moon Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1557132712

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happy to toil through "happily"
Ruminative and glad

Happily
Lyn Hejinian
Manufacturer: Post Apollo Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0942996380

Book Description

This book-length poem by one of the foremost American poets, is an inquiry into the nature of time, chance, and being. In the first few months of its publication it has earned praise from Publisher's Weekly, American Poet, Rain Taxi, among other literary reviews.

Customer Reviews:

happy to toil through "happily".......2006-02-04

It takes me a while to truly feel "the pleasure of impossibility" (404) in Hejinian's essay, but after reading it several times I begin to settle into the hurdy-gurdy rhythm of her "accordioning" sentences (384). Then I begin to be less resistant to "take what happens to be happening to value finitude" (400). I'm unaccustomed to thinking of a poem in terms of its ability to help me resign myself to the quotidian, though this is of course what a lot of modern poetry tends to do, if one reflects on it. Still, a modern poet is unlikely to come straight out and articulate the contours of her relationship to ordinariness in no uncertain terms.

This is an aspect of Hejian's ostranenie, or "making strange," that Perloff mentions when she discusses her (185), though she does not discuss this aspect of the essay. Many tend to think of essayistic style and the didacticism that often results from "it" as outside the purview of "good poetry," at least since Alexander Pope and such feel-good hits as "Essay on Man." Sentences that lead us to question a thesis such as "Is happiness the name for our (involuntary) complicity with chance?" (387) seem alien to writing with no set right margin. The essay is made doubly strange when one realizes that the thesis that implores us to be happy with happenstance can never really arrive at a set thesis, a stable emphasis or accent. The only proofs she can offer us for her argument are disproofs to the attitude in us which invents a "future [that] looks back to trigger a longing for consonance" (386). The perpetual "suspending judgment" that results (386), brings us to what Derrida calls an "athesis," a thesis that posits nothing.

Despite her essayistic tone and her arguments that can never fully arrive at themselves, Hejinian is, after all, well within one of the classic spaces of the modern, the same continuous or eternal present that Stein and Beckett, say, interrogate ceaselessly, alongside of countless New Age figures. In doing this in her personalized accordioning style that never stops making strange, she explores one of the cruxes of modernist poetics as well as I've seen, which may be boiled down to this question: What makes poetry poetry in the lack of its conventional trappings (meter, rhythm, rhyme, sense, sensibility)? Hejinian seems to think that this occurs in something like a "poetics of space," as Gaston Bachelard puts it in a book I have yet to read, a space where the poet feels disjunctive meter, rhythm, rhyme, sense, and sensibility as it occurs within her consciousness, rather than yoking these into preconceived form on page. While workshops have long since given up considering matters having to do with meter and rhyme, the poetic crux I stated above does not quite go away. Again, what makes poetry poetry? Doesn't an essay accomplish the same thing that so many published poems do? Some of the poems in popular periodicals like New Yorker may as well be flash fiction (often making them rotten poetry). Hejinian's answer might go something like this. One just feels poetry differently, feels its disjunctive meter as it splays across internal time:

Now is a blinding instant one single explosion but somehow
since part of it gets accentuated
And each time the moment falls the emphasis of the moment
falls into time differently
No sooner noticed no sooner now that falls from something
Now is a noted conjunction
The happiness of knowing it appears
We see this argument put into praxis in her poem My Life to wonderful effect.

Question:
Is the "de-liberating" that occurs by placing a hyphen at the end of the first line here one of these happy accidents? If it is or if it is not, what is the effect?

There is activity in a life, i.e. conduct asserts the power of de-
liberating without knowing how a state of being is brought
into existence every so often often

Ruminative and glad.......2000-04-10

Happily is a long / short poem (about 40 pages) in which Hejinian's "language of inquiry" tackles one of the more prevelant inquiries a person is bound to undertake: happiness. Happiness does not equal banality or "prettiness." In fact, in "Happily," Hejinian has distilled the sensuality of reason, the phenomenology of history / chronology, and the last century (from Stein to Mac Low) of poetic experiment and cleared space for a new conception of beauty. One which is pointed, poignant, and pleasantly difficult -- the poem posits happiness as a choice implicating a context: "history with a future" -- the book is necessary. And that's more than I can say for many other books on the subject.

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The Fatalist
Lyn Hejinian
Manufacturer: Omnidawn Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Reluctant Gravities
Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
Logicalogics: Poems
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The Master Letters

ASIN: 1890650129

Book Description

A book-length, syntactically surprising poem divided into many sections, it is interspersed with delightful descriptions of daily experience with references to illustrious writers and thinkers of the past and their systems of philosophical inquiry. It offers humorous reflection upon our species' endless attempts to transmit insight regarding our human condition.

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Oxota: A Short Russian Novel
Lyn Hejinian
Manufacturer: Figures
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0935724443

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