“She does not, will not, should not, did not, can not, would not separate, compartmentalize, segment, subdivide, parcel out…” —Lyn Hejinian, The Unfollowing
Left: Jack Collom and Lyn Hejinian's 'Sunflower' (2000). Right: photo by Obe Alkema.
Lyn isn’t usually read as a writer of landscape or region, even though her work came into being mainly within a focalized, and beloved, locality. When I first moved there, I had trouble integrating place and time. Sometimes I mistook the bewilderingness induced by plum blossoms in February for a more sentimental disorientation and would end up in professors’ offices with no good questions, just a feeling that needed to land. The first time I showed up in Lyn’s, she gave me The Sunflower, a collaboration with Jack Collom.
“Landscape,” Lyn Hejinian writes, is “a vibrational field of reversible effects” (The Language of Inquiry, 106). One way to describe my first encounter with Lyn’s work would be to say that it was, in fact, intensely causal, an act that set in motion the billiard balls that compose my life. In this story, I read Lyn’s writing while browsing the aisles of St. Mark’s Bookstore to escape the cold. I am in my mid-twenties, working in finance, through the accident of a temp job, and I bend open the spine of The Language of Inquiry.
Lyn Hejinian in the Academiegebouw of Utrecht University with Sophie Barklamb and Tim Elfring and their patron saints. Photo by Mia You.
The best pedagogy course I’ve ever taken was having Lyn Hejinian as my teacher. Whenever I say this to other students of Lyn, such as Margaret, Julie and Jen, they always say, “Yes! Same!” It’s a corny joke, but Lyn didn’t mind corny jokes that much, so I will say that now in the classroom, I regularly think to myself, “What Would Lyn Do?” It is always the right way to decide, because in any case, it makes me feel like Lyn is there with me, we’re in the classroom together again, and, in this way, my students get to spend time with Lyn too. That feels like the best gift I can offer them.
Left to right: Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Jennifer Scappettone, Lyn Hejinian, Elizabeth Marie Young, Olivia Clare Friedman, Hillary Gravendyk, Lauren Errea, and Jessica Fisher. Photo by Margaret Ronda.
