Articles

To inquiry, learned late in life

On the influence of ‘The Language of Inquiry’

From the cover of Lyn Hejinian’s “The Language of Inquiry” (2000).

Although I have vicariously benefited from Lyn Hejinian’s support of so many poets who mean much to me, I myself was never her correspondent — I had an ambivalent relationship with Language Poetry and perhaps for that reason, (or, to wit, my low confidence) did not seek out Hejinian’s mentorship.

Lyn’s writing on memory

From the cover of Lyn Hejinian's “Writing is an Aid to Memory” (1978).

Lyn’s writing is an aid to memory because it articulates (sounds and shapes) memory — not only gripping the past in words (“What memory is not a gripping thought,” as she writes in My Life) but making present (“spelling”) experience in words — experience analogue to, echo of the experience out of which writing itself grows. 

Excerpts for Lyn

From the cover of Lyn Hejinian’s “My Life” (1987).

From Syllables (manuscript) 

For Lyn Hejinian 

sky tiered cherry views
ask the overcast for love
checker the rain back

(don’t foreclose meaning)
write to Lyn about Fall Creek
after she’s gone, or? 

change the slope to up
insist upon the earth here
look revolve ions

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