Articles

Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024): An obituary by Lytle Shaw

Photo by Gloria Graham.

Lyn Hejinian, American poet and essayist, died on Saturday, February 24. Born Carolyn Frances Hall on May 17, 1941, and raised in Berkeley and later Cambridge, Massachusetts, she graduated from Harvard University in 1963.

Lyn Hejinian, American poet and essayist, died on Saturday, February 24. Born Carolyn Frances Hall on May 17, 1941, and raised in Berkeley and later Cambridge, Massachusetts, she graduated from Harvard University in 1963. Her children, Paull and Anna, were born while she was married to the physician John Hejinian.

What we lack in knowing we make up for in syntax

An introduction to new recordings of Larry Price’s poetry

Although broken up by punctuation and performance, Price’s sentences are robustly syntactical — they are faithful to and fanciful with English syntax, and yet they rarely quite “make sense.”

On December 12, 2023, Larry Price visited the Wexler Studio at the Kelly Writers House to record a series of his poems for the PennSound audio archive. This complete recording session, as well as excerpted recordings of each individual poem, can be found HERE at PennSound.

Voices of my desert

An introduction to the Vox Audio collection at PennSound

Acequia Booksellers in New Mexico
Acequia Booksellers in New Mexico

Vox Audio was initiated in 2001 to promote several poets to a possible community interested in such work. The CDs were distributed largely by mail, free of charge. As the name implies, Vox also reflects a regard for voice in poetry – that is, for the kinds of involvement not available from the page, like intonation or subtleties of sound and rhythm that require voicing. 

Vox Audio was initiated in 2001 to promote several poets to a possible community interested in such work. The CDs were distributed largely by mail, free of charge. As the name implies, Vox also reflects a regard for voice in poetry – that is, for the kinds of involvement not available from the page, like intonation or subtleties of sound and rhythm that require voicing. This interest grew from the work of Pound, H.D., and Williams, especially from Williams’ concern with a speech-based poetic and emphasis on contact and locale, what might now be termed context, the dialogic.

All the meaning life provides

Excerpts from Cid Corman's notebooks

Scan of the cover of Cid Corman's journal no. 2
Scan of the cover of Cid Corman's journal no. 2

In 2002, the late American Kyoto-based expatriate poet, Cid Corman (1924–2004), gifted Fred Jeremy Seligson, an American poet living in Korea, a collection of his notebooks as a token of his appreciation for the financial support that Seligson had provided to him during some particularly difficult years. These “Uncollected Kyoto Notebooks” span the crucial period from 1960 to 1975.

These excerpts are from The Uncollected Kyoto Notebooks of Cid Corman, Selections: 1960 to 1975. Selections were made by Fred Jeremy Seligson and Gregory Dunne and submitted with the permission of Bob Arnold, Literary Executor for the Estate of Cid Corman. Inquiries concerning Corman can be sent to longhousepoetry@gmail.com and copies of Corman's books are available for purchase at longhousepoetry.com.

 

Prosody and pain in 'Scherzos Benjyosos'

Author photo (left) courtesy of Keston Sutherland.

In the course of Keston Sutherland’s Scherzos Benjyosos, inarticulate pain is transformed into elegy, and elegy, at the last, into love song. This is first and foremost a prosodic achievement. I do not mean by this simply that prosody offers figures or symbols for the poems’ thematic and narrative content — that the book’s tormented passage from pain to love is echoed and illustrated by the shapes and sounds of the text on the page and in the ear (though to some extent this is true). Rather the pressure that prosodic constraints exert on the poet’s language, and therefore upon his thinking, exposes seams of pain and of potential happiness which could not have been anticipated nor, perhaps, discovered in any other way.[1]

In the course of Keston Sutherland’s Scherzos Benjyosos, inarticulate pain is transformed into elegy, and elegy, at the last, into love song. This is first and foremost a prosodic achievement. I do not mean by this simply that prosody offers figures or symbols for the poems’ thematic and narrative content — that the book’s tormented passage from pain to love is echoed and illustrated by the shapes and sounds of the text on the page and in the ear (though to some extent this is true).