Articles

I first encountered PennSound Classics when it already included a significant number of important early titles. I noticed, though, a comparative underrepresentation of the work of poets who identified as women. The dearth was readily explained: early women’s writing, and especially their poetry, tended until very recently to be neglected on college syllabi, in anthologies, and in scholarship. As a result, serious readers have had little opportunity to encounter the work of extraordinary poets like Katherine Phillips, Emily Brontë, and Charlotte Mew.

Lyn begins her contribution to The Grand Piano 8 with a celebration of the artistic imagination’s “capacity for performing astonishing feats of linkage” as “one key to its ability to do philosophical and political work.” She then celebrates its ability to perform “feats of unlinkage” as “an essential part of its subversive liberatory potential” (11). 

The course I teach in the fall semester, “The Act(s) of Poetry,” is indebted to Lyn Hejinian’s “open text,” “one which both acknowledges the vastness of the world and is formally differentiating. It is form that provides an opening” (Hejinian 2000, 41). This course aims to translate this idea into a broader inquiry into what and how poems “act” — on the page, in the world, through conversation, in our imaginations.

Lyn visited Sydney Australia in July 2014 as a guest of Western Sydney University and the University of Sydney.

You lived the happy dance
found language and
the gRReat adventure
your lyricism, blanketed us
with quotidian actualities, 
autobiographical, the
sounds of brown and chirping birds,
singing in shrubs outside your window
framing your open texts.