Articles

I never met Lyn but exchanged a couple of emails with her
and was struck by her easy, generous manner. Then not long after
she died I read her introduction to Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives.
Having read a lot of Stein’s writing and a lot of writing about her
work, this passage struck me as an exact articulation of what
it is that makes her writing so unique:

I very much felt the coastal distance with Lyn Hejinian: I’m a New Yorker who clings to East Coast concrete and deciduous trees (and with New York-exacerbated claustrophobia, I also tend to avoid flying). And so I have missed out on the personal closeness I might have or have had with so many wonderful California poets from Barbara Guest to Joanne Kyger to Norma Cole to Susan Gevirtz to Lyn Hejinian.

“Tuumba, tuumba, tuumba, tuumba.” Lyn showed me how Larry Ochs would beat out a rhythm with one hand. Then with the other, he’d set a second rhythm. “Tuumba, tuumba, tuumba.” Nonsense syllables, which became the name of her press. Fifty chapbooks, most of which she typeset and printed by hand.

Lyn Hejinian joined the core faculty in Poetics at New College of California for a few years in
the late 1990s. She was on “sabbatical” teaching at Iowa when I arrived in the fall of 1998. She
was never to return. The tide had shifted in academic circles and Language Poets were quickly
ceded faculty space in English/Writing programs across the country. I had particularly looked
forward to studying with her in the Poetics program. As it turned out, so had the majority of new
students who entered the program that year. The program seemed robust, what with her and Tom

In 1988, I started translating Language poetry from Ron Silliman’s anthology In the American Tree and Charles Bernstein’s and Bruce Andrews’s The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. The selection appeared in the Belgrade journal Delo (1989). After the mid-1980s in socialist Yugoslavia, poetry experiments disappeared, and, when I read about Language poetry, I knew it would be something important.