On the influence of ‘The Language of Inquiry’

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. But the influence of her essays, especially those collected in The Language of Inquiry,[1] remain with me to this day and in fact, slow bloomer that I am, perhaps mean more to me now than they did in my manifesto, tear-down-literary-idols days of my youth. Specifically, I took from her essays something so precious that I carry with me to this day — as a writer and as one who is simply alive: that I can be torn apart by trying to navigate opposing impulses, those desires which, on the one hand, want to be unshackled, boundless, unhampered and free; and on the other, want to be bound within some organizing logic, some kind of “containment and coherence.”[2] But being torn apart is not desirable, nor is it suggested; in fact, even as the rift between what I think I know, who I think I am, and what I think should happen is tossed asunder, so is the inclination to exert any control over the narrative of my life.
It is thanks to Hejinian’s close reading of William James that my life’s trajectory took a bit of a detour — for a decade, I gave up my literary pursuits in order to study and practice, full time, the art of hypnosis. It was Hejinian who reminded me that my work with the unconscious was not to be as some authority over the interpretation of dreams but rather, as one who follows another into a “liminal situation”; in other words, to reject closure even if transitions cause anxiety, and open to only more questions.[3] All in all, as Hejinian expanded James into Stein, I too became La Faustienne; I went far afield of poetry and lost, for a time, the conviction to write. But what remains as Hejinian’s influence in me is the return to writing now, through the looking glass of growing older, and seeing that yes — I am even more strange now than I was before — and therefore, it is as one who is “unstable as a word and located in an unstable terrain”[4] that life, friendships, influences, and the rejection of closure goes on — especially in those moments when it seems that too much has been lost. This is the letter I would write to Lyn Hejinian now, if I had the chance.