Lyn Hejinian

'to be a boundless reflection'

On critical composition in Hejinian and Scalapino's 'Sight' and 'Hearing'

Miriam Atkin

As a writing teacher, I am relentlessly bugged by the question of how to move students toward an organic practice of critical inquiry, to help them feel pulled by it at the most basic, creaturely level. In my search for a pedagogy that feels right and real, I look toward the texts that have become my own exemplars of compelling argumentation and analytic integrity, only to realize that my favorite works of critical writing are, in fact, poetry.

December 12, 2022

Lineated time

Some thoughts on the line in poetry

Raymond de Borja
Prague astronomical clock. Photo by Andrew Shiva.

Two problems, first of beginning, then of cohering, beset me as I worried the topic of this talk. Beginning and cohering, obviously, elementary features of typical expository forms, but problematic, more so for a topic that one finds, at the same time, fundamental and elusive, elusive because fundamental, in one’s own practice of reading and writing.

Two problems, first of beginning, then of cohering, beset me as I worried the topic of this talk. Beginning and cohering, obviously, elementary features of typical expository forms, but problematic, more so for a topic that one finds, at the same time, fundamental and elusive, elusive because fundamental, in one’s own practice of reading and writing.

But here are three thoughts to possibly begin with:

September 18, 2019

'A non-sequitur is a song of experience'

A review of Lyn Hejinian's 'The Unfollowing'

BK Fischer
“Many lines function self-descriptively, even synecdochally. […] And yet each line is a discrete instance, a resistance to that impulse to conjoin, maintaining the granularity of the parts in relation to the whole.” Photo by Julia Bloch.

The commonplace that the disorientations and ruptures of contemporary life require an equally disjunctive poetics has led many poets writing today to court the non sequitur as determinedly as a debater might avoid it. In traditional logic and rhetoric, a non sequitur — Latin for “it does not follow” — is a mistake, a fallacy, an inference that does not follow from the premises or evidence.

All volta

A review of Lyn Hejinian's 'The Unfollowing'

Tim Wood
Image of Lyn Hejinian (right) by Gloria Graham, 2005.

The poems in Lyn Hejinian’s The Unfollowing are to the sonnet what the prose poem is to verse. They are fourteen lines long and, more importantly, poems of love and loss. In the press materials, Omnidawn publisher Rusty Morrison tells us that the poems are “a sequence of elegies” although “they are not sonnets but antisonnets.” 

Part 1: To close the streaming eye 

All is black shadow, but the lucid line
Marked by the light surf on the level sand,
Or where afar the ship-lights faintly shine
Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land
Mislead the pilgrim — such the dubious ray
That wavering reason lends, in life’s long darkling way. 
— Charlotte Smith, “Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening”

Aerial 10: Lyn Hejinian Edited by Rod Smith & Jen Hofer.

Charles Bernstein

Aerial 10: Lyn Hejinian

Edited by Rod Smith & Jen Hofer.

ISBN: 978-1-890311-32-2

464 pgs, cover art by Tom Raworth

2015

$40.00

$28.00 direct from Aerial/Edge.

A career-spanning multi-genre compendium of work by and about poet Lyn Hejinian, one of today's most celebrated and influential avant-gardists. Through a variety of approaches —philosophical, scholarly, and experimental—Aerial 10 documents and explores her forty-plus years of poetic and theoretical writings. Its 464 pages include poetry, essays, interviews, collaborations, and letters by Hejinian, as well as essays, poetry, and memoir by contemporary poets and critics.

Uses of the useless

Against the division of poetry and scholarship

Hillary Gravendyk
Photo courtesy of Benjamin Burrill.

Contemporary so-called “innovative” or “experimental” poetry’s fascination and engagement with the theoretical and the critical owes a lot to the Language poets, who, though not the first to approach the composition of poetry as an intellectual enterprise, did offer what Marjorie Perloff characterizes as a “rapprochement between poetry and theory” that could serve as an alternative to the increasingly anti-intellectual creative writing classroom of the 1970s.

June 7, 2015

Without burning up the frame

A review of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko's 'Endarkenment'

Stan Mir

During glasnost in August 1989, Lyn Hejinian, along with Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten, attended the first international avant-garde writers’ conference, “Language — Consciousness — Society,” in the Soviet Union since the Russian Revolution. One of the main organizers of the event was Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, whose book, Endarkenment: Selected Poems, was published by Wesleyan University Press earlier this year.

Pearl Pirie: two new poems

rob mclennan
Pearl Pirie

Pearl Pirie has been one of the most active and engaged poets in Ottawa for at least a decade, from her enormous productivity as a writer, performer, reviewer, blogger, editor, radio host, workshop facilitator, food columnist and small press publisher, to irregularly hosting salon workshops and readings in the house she shares with her partner of twenty-three years, the designer Brian Pirie. Through her growing handful of books and chapbooks, what appeals about Pirie’s work is the way in which sound, mashed words and an unhindered sequence of meanings manage to propel across the page.

All origin stories are Newtonian, part 2 of 2

Amy Catanzano
The Dianthus Kaleidoscope scarf was made using flower-shaped cuttings of collage
The Dianthus Kaleidoscope scarf was made using flower-shaped cuttings of collages from textiles and hand-painted Indian saris as well as scans of peach and pink-colored roses. From Basically Boutique, http://www.basicallyboutique.com/.

From cultural narratives to religion to comic-book characters to conceptions of self, origin stories often serve to explain belief systems and histories within the context of a defined beginning, middle, and end. Origin stories are narrative devices steeped in limitations of both form and content.

Introduction and commentary on the digital reissue of 'Big Allis'

Danny Snelson

To mark the occasion of the digital reissue of Big Allis, editors Neilson and Grim have written the following introductory notes alongside commissioned reflections on the magazine by designer Jean Foos and a few of the magazine’s many contributors.

Melanie Neilson

GOING BIG

The idea of bringing Big Allis to a new readership occurred to me one summer afternoon last year while combing the Jacket2 Reissues archive. I am grateful to Danny Snelson for deeming Big Allis worthwhile to “go big” and be added to the J2 bill. Danny and Amelia Bentley have been artful and meticulous with getting Big Allis safely stored in a user-friendly repository.

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