Lyn Hejinian

Lyn, Marjorie, Neeli, Tyrone: In Memoriam

Charles Bernstein

Lyn Hejinian (1941-2024)

PennSound: featuring LINEbreak interview
EPC author page

Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024): An obituary by Lytle Shaw

Lytle Shaw
Photo by Gloria Graham.

Lyn Hejinian, American poet and essayist, died on Saturday, February 24. Born Carolyn Frances Hall on May 17, 1941, and raised in Berkeley and later Cambridge, Massachusetts, she graduated from Harvard University in 1963.

Lyn Hejinian, American poet and essayist, died on Saturday, February 24. Born Carolyn Frances Hall on May 17, 1941, and raised in Berkeley and later Cambridge, Massachusetts, she graduated from Harvard University in 1963. Her children, Paull and Anna, were born while she was married to the physician John Hejinian.

February 29, 2024

Remembering Lyn Hejinian

Jacket2 Editors
Photo by Blake Martin.

The loss of the wonderful, talented, groundbreaking, generous poet and literary citizen Lyn Hejinian has rocked the poetry world. Those who knew her personally — as many of us at the Writers House did — and those who have read and discussed her work (e.g. the experimental coming-of-age book-length prose poem, My Life), are already feeling the impact of the loss: we won’t be able to read new poems and new books by Lyn. It remains for us to read and re-read the astonishing writings she left us.

We start this week off with unwelcome news that resonates widely: Lyn Hejinian has passed away suddenly at the age of 82. Our own Al Filreis shared the following message this morning, reflecting the feelings of many of us at  Jacket2, KWH, and PennSound:

The loss of the wonderful, talented, groundbreaking, generous poet and literary citizen Lyn Hejinian has rocked the poetry world. Those who knew her personally — as many of us at the Writers House did — and those who have read and discussed her work (e.g. the experimental coming-of-age book-length prose poem, My Life), are already feeling the impact of the loss: we won’t be able to read new poems and new books by Lyn. It remains for us to read and re-read the astonishing writings she left us.

‘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.

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