Articles

Night poems in the early morning

From the cover of Lyn Hejinian’s “The Book of a Thousand Eyes” (1996).

“A terrible attention is given by night.” Lyn Hejinian’s Thousand Eyes were terrible to me one time, sleepless in Seattle-upon-Amazon (late 2017).

 “Excess, hum, buckets of dream-blue lassitude that only an angel would see as action.” If action is whatever exceeds mere being, then insomnia — the barest form of being — is the hum of being that only an angel could perceive as something happening rather than nothing doing.

Chance operations

My first year in Iowa City, and in the midst of the strange crux the Writer’s Workshop then was in the late 1990s, Lyn Hejinian moved in across the street from Kristy and me. I enrolled in her class on George Oppen; I took part in the “secret workshop” she created, held after the pompous insecurities of actual workshop had played themselves out, and where she introduced us to chance and collaborative practices in poetry, inspired by the improvisational techniques of the ROVA Quartet.

Beginners

A video tribute to Lyn Hejinian

I started working on this video in the summer of 2020, in an online workshop offered by Bard College’s Institute of Writing and Thinking. Raj Chakrapani recorded and manipulated the mirror-image footage of New York City. Douglas Arnwine recorded the clip of the windmill. I recorded the rest of the footage between 2019 and 2020, mostly in Oakland, though some of it was filmed in Berkeley, Petaluma, Point Reyes Station, and Point Arena, California.

Hejinian assemblage

Lyn Hejinian reading at Studio One Arts Center, Oakland, California, February 1,
Lyn Hejinian reading at Studio One Arts Center, Oakland, California, February 1, 2013. Photo by Alan Bernheimer.

I want to add to Lyn Hejinian’s ideas about “devices… that may serve to ‘open’ a poetic text” and by extension aid being open to the world.[1] After hearing me read from The Totality Cantos in a reading she and I gave in 2013, Lyn invited me that year to contribute to her Atelos Publishing Project and published it in 2022. I wrote The Totality Cantos from the desire to be interested in everything, open to the totality of discourses.