Preface

In the days after Lyn Hejinian’s passing, her students and friends reached out to each other, texted messages of disbelief and grief, and gathered in different ways, near and far, to read her work and to collectively express what Lyn means to us. This feature is itself such a gathering. As lifelong students of Lyn’s, we felt a particular impulse, a need, to assemble a collaborative account not just of her astounding body of poetry (which has been and will continue to be illuminated for years to come) but also of her expansive, transformational pedagogy in and beyond the classroom. She was a singular teacher, in some ways that were immediately and vividly apparent, and in other ways that have revealed themselves to us over time.

Across the writings presented here, a clear portrait emerges of a person whose commitments as a teacher and mentor are in harmonious accord with her life as a writer, friend, collaborator, activist, and intellectual. Lyn lived out her thinking in the work she did in ways that still elude canonical narratives about her, which tend to domesticate her legacy to some extent. It is hard to summarize a work and life as capacious and generous as hers. In some ways, only a collaborative and collective effort such as this can testify to how her brilliance has moved and continues to move through our world. 

These beautiful, searching remembrances speak to the ways Lyn shaped each of us. We are still learning from her. 

Note: We’d like to give extra thanks to Iris Bosma, a graduate student in literature at Utrecht University, who helped us line-edit and arrange these texts, and to Magda Andrews-Hoke and Julia Bloch, our generous editors at Jacket2.

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