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. In teaching me to read, she taught me to write — and her lucid opening of Oppen opened me to the ethical crisis deep within lyric poetry’s utmost heart. Other lessons unfolded more slowly. Her essay “Strangeness” continues to be a seminal text for me. It introduced me to a fact from which I’ve never quite recovered: not the knowledge of the fact, but the wonder of it. Lyn writes within the immense and particular field of the episteme — not a received knowledge of the world, but the courageous act of standing in front of the fact of the world. Such facticity is the furthest thing from rote knowing. It depends upon perception, the ongoing and endless play of error and revelation that can only occur through the strictest attention to the world — an attention that weaves the observer into the observed, and so to think honestly is to think in such a way that one is also the thing being thought about. Accuracy is weird. The world is a form of wonder. And a good poem is an instrument of measure that is itself a part of the measurement. Kind of like a mind, when the mind begins in the hands, the eyes, the mouth, the nose, the tongue. Though I read “Strangeness” long after my Workshop days, it helped me understand those hours in the basement of the Dey House that, even then (and still now), felt (feel) sacred to me. The play of those games proved serious in a way that showed me what the true work of philosophizing might look like, an embodiment of Socrates’s definition of philosophy as “serious play,” in which games of chance, wherein intent turns into a form of truer deliberation, reveal the ways in which words themselves are cosmically entangled, and part of, the actuality of the world. What seemed at the time like a needed laugh, a hilarity that opposed the serious work of workshop, became for me the genuine realization of those formative years — that to be actually at play in words is also to become an ethical explorer in the nature of the cosmos, and a poem is test of a kind, an experiment, I mean, in being in the world of which you are yourself a part. I love Lyn Hejinian, and though she’d laugh off the notion, I am in her debt — a debt paid by writing another poem, gratefully so.