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.
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.