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. So, instead, when Lyn passed, I turned to her books, specifically The Cell, published by Sun & Moon Classics in 1992, with an early (1912) work by Kazimir Malevich on the cover, “Taking in the Rye,” an abstracted depiction of the rye harvest painted before Malevich turned fully to abstraction, and done way before he was forced under Stalin to return to representative art.
The Cell seems to similarly explore the potential spaces between representation and abstraction: elements of “everyday” inhabitance (as each poem is dated over a period of almost three years), particularly of the body in living space, are abstracted and collaged, placed and re-placed within language, strangely and new. Her statements/observations are productively obstructive in a way that shifts the poem this way and that, pushing away and out of predictability or conclusion. The poems are perceptual and philosophical and wondering and often sensual, as in sensory and sexual and awesomely feminist too.
I was reading through The Cell sequentially, as befitting its journal form, but also did some bibliomancy, closing my eyes to open to the poem written on September 1, 1987. Here is the excerpt that in particular held me:
Form or content?—this was
never the real problem
Light and color in the
open air and their retrospective
A yellow bee or yellow jacket
buzzing, struggling on the surface
to escape the very cold
water in an oval metal
bucket being rescued
The person reaching under it
with the palm cupped to scoop
up the wasp keeping between
them a water buffer
A water background
Any of the languages which
throw the whole
And all particular choices are
to light and color
Sounds like “oval metal” and “bucket being rescued” and “cupped to scoop” please a poet’s sensual ear, while the precise description of the water buffer between hand and wasp to invite body experience to poem. But then the negation of “all” and how all the choices are “to light and color” create that obstructive volta, like pebble in stream, except the turn occurs at the end of the poem, leaving you/me with those hanging choices of light and color, which gesture to art but also to observance and how observance travels through complex routes of eye to brain to hand to word to line. In that choice of light and color is both the representation of the yellow bee in colorless cold water and the abstraction of arranging questions around that representation, of abstracting language and thought away from the strict reality that is really only enacted in an interpretation of it.