Lyn Hejinian and Jennifer Scappettone. Photo by Joshua Stein.
I met Lyn Hejinian nearly a quarter of a century ago — a way of casting that moment that smacks of the pompous and arbitrary divisions of history in a way I hear her answering to, but which marks aptly the distance between what seemed, to young me, the all-worlds-possible-in-Berkeley beginning of the millennium and the current time, with its beginnings in the second Gulf War, and its most recent manifestations, to which California exposes itself as cruelly unexempt (gash between the poor and ever richer; neofascism increasing in volume; recessions of safety for the colonized
Left: photo by Mia You. Right: Lyn Hejinian's 'My Life and My Life in the Nineties' (2013).
Though I’d heard of the book before (and of the mysterious movement, Language writing), I first read Lyn Hejinian’s My Life in the Morrison poetry room in Berkeley’s Doe Library sometime early in 1994.
Lyn Hejinian at the launch of Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse in New York. Photo by erica kaufman.
I first read Lyn's The Beginner in a campground. It was a parting gift from Kazim Ali. I was leaving New York to start grad school at Berkeley, driving across the country with my husband and three-year-old son, and I was five months pregnant. I remember precisely the camping chair, the trees behind and to the side of me, the fire pit. “This is a good place to begin,” I read, and kept reading.
In the fall of 2013, I drove my newborn son from San Francisco to Berkeley to meet Lyn. He was barely sleeping and still learning to nurse. The world seemed newly immense, to be navigated, through considerable haze, on behalf of this other, and he had been crying for what felt like a long time when we showed up on Lyn’s front porch and she welcomed us in. I sat on her couch; he fell asleep on my chest; she fed me; we talked. She put me in touch with her granddaughters’ nanny, whom I hired for one or two mornings a week, so that I could write.
Claire Marie Stancek and Lyn Hejinian. Photo by Lyn Hejinian.
I fell in love with Lyn when I came to Berkeley for grad school — or the spring prior, on my visit weekend. It was at a panel talk, where professors shared their current research. I was listening respectfully, a little bored (I was 21 years old), and then it was Lyn’s turn — she spoke about storytelling, Scheherazade, The Book of A Thousand Eyes— and I still remember how the whole room brightened, became electric, urgent.
