Lyn’s proposition

On October 14^th, 2020, I reached out to Lyn to propose an edited volume of her poetry for the Foundations series. Lyn responded with such generosity. Lyn told me she had recently come across a file of early poems from 1961 to 1981, and that her husband, Larry Ochs, had also found a manila envelope containing a manuscript of poems written between 1974 and 1975, which Lyn had titled “The Inclusions.” Lyn had started typing the poems out and had thought of a title: The Proposition. She wondered if I might be interested in this collection of previously uncollected early poems. “Whether that early work has aesthetic value (as ‘good’ poetry),” Lyn commented, “or merely historical value (as ‘early Language Writing’) I can’t judge.” 

We discussed the structure of the volume, which Lyn envisaged being chronological — “something like 1963-1970; 1970-1974; 1975-1979; 1980-1983.” Lyn arranged The Proposition into nine sections. In the preface to the volume, Lyn situates these groups of poems in their biographical contexts, offering intimate glimpses of her early life as well as avant-garde and literary contexts from which her works emerged. Lyn remarks:

Poems are written from within lived lives. Such is certainly the case for the poems collected here. And, though direct references or discernible details from the lived life that was my own when I was writing them are rare, that life is more than background to the poems. In their peculiar ways, the poems embrace it. And both polysubjectivity and the experience of present moment utopias characteristic of commitment to sociality are, I hope, embedded in those collected here.^[1]

The Grreat Adventure exudes this embracing of life. Lyn describes this section as “very much a product of 1969-1970: a miscellany of political anecdotes interwoven with poems about sex, love, drugs, and outer space and bedecked with psychedelic drawings, rubber stamped images, and press type transfers (mostly letters).” Lyn intended to publish it in a comic book format (one hundred copies were published by Don Donahue who published R. Crumb’s first comic books) in 1972. Lyn recalls how most of the copies were accidentally destroyed: “I’d moved with my two children […] and the musician Larry Ochs to an undeveloped piece of land in inland Mendocino County; we were building a cabin and, with no place to put the cartons, I left them under an oak tree.”^[2]

Lyn Hejinian, from The Grreat Adventure (1974), in Lyn Hejinian, The Proposition: Uncollected Early Poems 1963-1983 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024), p. 27  [click to enlarge]

The Proposition is a deeply visual collection. We decided to preserve the original artwork and typed versions of poems in ‘The Inclusions’ and poems dated 1977-79 by dropping in jpegs of the originals. I love Lyn’s small handwritten title jotted aslant in the right-hand corner of the original page of the eponymous poem ‘The Inclusions’ (1975). The most visually striking poems are the four text/image work collected in The Grreat Adventure. I recall the jolt of excitement when I opened the attachments and encountered the vision and vitality of the poetry.

In our initial correspondence Lyn stated: “I was imagining that early work not as finished but as a proposal (mostly to myself, but also to poetry/poetics).” This twin aspect and orientation of Lyn’s proposition, directed to the poet herself and to poetry/poetics, drives the energy of the collection: 

“An Untrammeled Attention’’

a small thing

a thought loosely held

is not difficult

an oval of soil.    one does things with the voice

– a response –

close to the eyes


Chapter Two:   Surrender


we say attention wanders^[3]

Elsewhere in the Preface, Lyn contemplates the radical nature of propositionality, which “comes into play, functioning sometimes as a prod, sometimes for the sake of speculation and invention, and sometimes heuristically.” Lyn remarks, “propositions may serve as points of departure, even when they are disguised as points of arrival. In writing them I have experienced them as epistemological forays — tests and experiments.”^[4]

Whilst the original poems were written from 1963 to 1983, The Proposition, as a volume collected and arranged between 2020 and 2023, is a very contemporary book. The formation of the collection spans the end of Trump’s first presidency, the 2020 presidential election, and the COVID-19 pandemic. These contexts filled the spaces of our correspondence over the course of four years, and they hover at the edge of Lyn’s remarkable preface, written in 2021, which spans sixty years of avant-garde thought and writing.

Reflecting on the concerns of Language Writing in the 1960s and 1970s, Lyn also speaks to the present moment in which she was writing and the one in which we find ourselves now: “Linguistic systems and structures have ideologies embedded in them, and these are almost always instruments of hegemonic power.”^[5] 

Artwork by Lyn Hejinian, sent to Georgina Colby as a possible cover for ‘The Proposition.’ [click to enlarge]

“But at the same time,” Lyn writes, “language’s positive creative and heuristic possibilities are all but infinite, and its ability to excite the imagining faculties (including those that concoct fantasies) and stimulate poesis (the making of neologisms, creative phrases, small and large narratives, as well as descriptions and definitions) is endless in its own ways and seemingly endless underway.”^[6] It is this space of possibility that fills The Proposition,^[7] it reaches towards the “flowering focus on a distinct infinity” that Lyn understood in her 1983 talk “The Rejection of Closure” to be “the ‘paradise’ for which writing yearns.”^[8] The Proposition brings these possibilities into our contemporary moment.

The Proposition encountered numerous rounds of proofs. Every time the poems in Chronic Texts (1977) arrived back to me they had shifted and rebelled on the page, the typesetter and I put them back, they moved again with a restless, impulsive energy, defying and resisting the containment of the printed form. 

Lyn Hejinian, final cover of The Proposition: Uncollected Early Poems 1963-1983 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024), [click to enlarge]

In February 2023, Lyn sent me three of her extraordinary artworks as possibilities for the cover. The two that were not selected appear here, alongside the cover itself. The aesthetics of these collage works in their formal and aesthetic multiplicities, materialities, and colours, reflect the creative and heuristic possibilities created in the pages of The Proposition; its latitude, its gift of newness.

I think in time

I am the first second and third persons of my

ages and in the chronic texts is my freedom

—       Lyn Hejinian, “Chronic Texts” (1977)