On ‘Fall Creek’

From the cover of Lyn Hejinian’s “Fall Creek” (2024).

Lyn Hejinian’s book-length poem Fall Creek appeared from Litmus Press soon after Lyn passed away in February 2024. Close friends and family told me they didn’t know about it until the book arrived from the publisher. This tells you something about both Lyn’s sense of privacy and her unwavering drive to make her mark in the world. From the poem’s postscript, we learn that an early section of Fall Creek was written on the occasion of her friend Brandon Brown’s birthday in June of 2020. Lyn’s cancer was diagnosed two years later. From then on, Lyn continued to work on multiple writing projects, including “Fall Creek,” with full knowledge of the impending finality of her life and work. This she expressed, with courageous candor, quite openly to friends.

The frenzied, helter-skelter, line-to-line movement of “Fall Creek” is mimetic of the constant flow of water in a creek bed carrying all manner of debris downstream into the watershed. I can only speculate that the poem’s imagery — hawks, ripples, fords, russet cows, red canoes, shaggy woods, syncopated pebbles, moss, ferns, minnows, woodpeckers, asparagus, dragonflies, etc. — is drawn in part from her experience in the wilds of Mendocino County, where she and Larry Ochs began their life together in the tumultuous 1970s.

The semantic shifts from line to line, occurring within hinging syntactical constructs, remind one of Lyn’s friend Tom Raworth’s short-lined, long poems like “Ace” and “Writing.” Such work is performative, rhythmic, tantalizing, totalizing, instantaneous, plastic, and tough. While the poem’s imagery here signals a kinship with the natural world, its argument is made by the sounds of words. Here, for example, are a few alliterative passages:

… or bullshit from a pundit in his pomp
and past her blossom viewing lichen
peering when the hawk has drained the cup…

… rising to shine on flash of fish
and fishing snarl of tangle lines
and roots and hooks
and that kind of stuff…

… streets wedged under cloud
ledged over cold slash
down cut through summer stir
of unpurchased silt river…

…without race a creek
happy as a newsroom
when riot runs races
through a nation never known…

With her early essay “Against Closure,” Lyn announced a poetics of the unpredictable, the open, and the spontaneous. For the rest of her life, she remained true to this vision of poetry as a kind of life force primed for discovery and adventure. Even as she felt her efforts nearing conclusion, she demonstrated a tremendous capacity for contradiction, anomaly, and invention.

                        Thought trails in isolation
               through streets of the post-social city
            to be untriggered naked
and unavailable with every face
                        a façade – ha! – swings
                                                the creaking boot
of heliofeminists xenomartyrs calliosophers
accepting and dispensing facts
and fictions done in birds cats pebbles horses moss…

   …of everything desired now flat
as fear out of time empty
bed vacant banks blank facades
                 in dialogues
                                       mumbling with ambivalence
    creek’s repartee all precedents may predict
    but can’t guarantee a limit…

On my first visit to Black Bear Ranch in 1975, I slept with my friend in her summer bed just above a creek. The water rushing over the stones spoke to us in garbled, percussive voices all night long. In the practice of poetry, attention to the sounds of language can open the mind to diverse fields for thought. These are the paths Lyn Hejinian followed gladly, and finally, heroically.