HEJINIAN, Lyn

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Nationality: American. Born: San Francisco, California. Career: Faculty member, humanities department, California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, 1978; faculty member, New College of California, poetics program, San Francisco, 1986–87, 1990–98; adjunct faculty member, University of California, Berkeley, 1994–95. Visiting lecturer, University of California, San Diego, 1992; faculty member, Naropa Institute, summer writing program, Boulder, Colorado, 1992, 1995, 1998; Roberta Holloway lecturer in the practice of poetry, University of California, Berkeley, 1993; Coal Royalty chair in creative writing, University of Alabama, 1996; guest lecturer, University of Iowa, Iowa Writer's Workshop, Iowa City, 1998; visiting distinguished lecturer, St Mary's College, Moraga, California, 1999. Editor, Tuumba Press, Atelos, and Poetics Journal, all of Berkeley, California. Member, literature panel, National Endowment for the Arts, 1979–81, 1990–93; member, literature panel, California Arts Council, 1982–84; member, board of directors, Serendipity Books Distribution, 1984–89; member, board of directors, LINES, Detroit Institute of Arts, 1985–90; president, board of directors, Small Press Distribution, 1987–89; member, steering committee, Oakland Strategic Plan for Cultural Development, California, 1993–94. Awards: James D. Phelan award in literature, San Francisco Foundation, 1974; National Endowment for the Arts, 1978, 1979, 1986 for editor's grants, and 1988 for translator's fellowship grant; California Arts Council, 1983, 1985, 1988 for editor's grants, and 1989 for individual artist's grant; Poetry Center book award, San Francisco State University, 1988; E-2^nd Independent literary award, Leningrad, Poetic Function, 1989; Fund for Poetry grant, 1997. Address: 2639 Russell Street, Berkeley, California 94705, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking. Willits, California, Tuumba Press, 1976.

A Mask of Motion. Providence, Rhode Island, Burning Deck, 1977.

Writing Is an Aid to Memory. Berkeley, California, The Figures, 1978.

Gesualdo. Berkeley, California, Tuumba Press, 1978.

Redo. Grenada, Mississippi, Salt-Works Press, 1984.

The Guard. Berkeley, California, Tuumba Press, 1984.

Individuals, with Kit Robinson. Tucson, Arizona, Chax Press, 1988.

The Cell. Los Angeles, Sun and Moon Press, 1990.

The Hunt. La Laguna, Islas Canarias, Zasterle Press, 1991.

The Cold of Poetry. Los Angeles, Sun and Moon Press, 1994.

Wicker, with Jack Collom, Boulder, Colorado, Rodent Press, 1996.

The Little Book of a Thousand Eyes. Boulder, Colorado, Smoke-Proof Press, 1996.

Guide, Grammar, Watch, and The Thirty Nights. Perth, Western Australia, Folio, 1996.

The Traveler and the Hill and the Hill, with Emilie Clark. New York, Granary Books, 1998.

Sight, with Leslie Scalapino. Washington, D.C., Edge, 1999.

Happily. Sausalito, California, Post-Apollo Press, 2000.

Novels

My Life. Providence, Rhode Island, Burning Deck, 1980; revised edition, Los Angeles. Sun and Moon Press. 1987.

Oxota: A Short Russian Novel. Great Barrington, Massachusetts, The Figures, 1991.

Other

Translator, with Elena Balashova, Description, by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. Los Angeles. Sun and Moon Press. 1990.

Translator, with Elena Balashova, Xenia, by Arkadi Dragomoschenko. Los Angeles, Sun and Moon Press, 1993.

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Manuscript Collection: University of California-San Diego, La Jolla.

Critical Studies: "Too Clear" by Ross Feld, in Parnassus: Poetry in Review (New York), 8 (1), 1978; "Mayer on Hejinian" by Bernadette Mayer, in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (New York), 13, December 1980; "Notes on Lyn Hejinian" by Carla Harryman, in American Poetry Archive News, 1, winter 1984; "Hejinian's Notes," in Content's Dream: Essays 1975–1984, by Charles Bernstein, Los Angeles, Sun and Moon Press, 1986; "Her Favorite Device Is the Echo" by Emily Leider, in San Francisco Chronicle, 18 October 1987; "Two Hejinian Talks" by Stephen Ratcliffe, in Temblor 6, 1987; "What Then Is a Window?" by Marnie Parsons, in Brick (Toronto), 38, winter 1990; "Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity" by Rae Armantrout, in Sagetrieb (Orono, Maine), 11 (3), winter 1992; "My Life through the Eighties: The Exemplary LANGUAGE of Lyn Hejinian" by David R. Jarraway, in Contemporary Literature (Madison, Wisconsin), 33 (2), summer 1992; "Poetic Positionings: Stephen Dobyns and Lyn Hejinian in Cultural Context" by Christopher Beach, in Contemporary Literature (Madison, Wisconsin), 38 (1), spring 1997; "Lyn Hejinian and the Possibilities of Postmodernism in Poetry" by Charles Altieri, in Women Poets of the Americas: Toward a Pan-American Gathering, edited by Jacqueline Vaught Brogan and Cordelia Chavez Candelaria, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 1999.

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American practicality has always been a goad to poets to find some loophole in its philosophical plainness or to puncture it with ribald humor in an attempt to dismiss its deep-rootedness in the American psyche. As long as practicality remains an essential norm of taste, it will make poems squirm to overcome it or to find humorous alternatives. Certainly New England's poets have troubled themselves deeply to unseat the prominence of this slightly disguised puritan virtue. Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens both lavished much irony on the homely virtue; e.e. cummings mocked it tirelessly in childlike nonsense poems and love lyrics.

Lyn Hejinian, like Frost, was born in San Francisco and educated in New England. At age twenty-seven she returned to the Bay Area and began writing a hauntingly ungraspable mode of lyric in which a voice, disembodied but felt, unidentifiable and yet familiar, whispers to the reader of things that never converge to argument but that evaporate as softly as they came. She too has waged war on practicality, on the utilitarian notion of the poem as message or advice.

Also like Frost, Hejinian seems undecided between two orders of things in the mind or between two narratives or subjects, neither of which gains her attention long enough to become belief. Instead, like a double helix unwinding from a spool, two possibilities simply travel together loosely in parallel as she teases and frustrates her readers with seemingly ordered speech, but speech that defies resolution or interpretation.

Gesualdo, a prose meditation published by Hejinian's own Tuumba Press in 1978, offers this curious but typical observation on the doubleness of her poetry:

The capacity of artists to manipulate for their own ends forms invented in a different spirit is one of the facts of life … was dying by artists whose passion and sensuousness essentially distinguished them … because they tremble, as it were, on the brink of one or the other commitment.

Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, was a composer of late sixteenth-century Naples who took the madrigal form as far it would go musically and collaborated with the poet Tasso on numerous canzones and sonnets to create the equivalent of a pre-Baroque language poetry set to music. He whipped up complicated six-voice harmonies that even Stravinsky found overwrought but that Hejinian interprets as the multivocality of consciousness. She duplicates the technique in her prose and dazzles the reader with its overlay of continuous tracts of thought.

Gesualdo offers more admonitions than advice, with a sinister undertone stemming from the composer's murder of his first wife and her lover, a celebrated scandal for half a century. But an admonitory voice is also present in one of Hejinian's previous prose pamphlets, A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking, published by the Tuumba Press in 1976. More tentative than Gesualdo, it nonetheless reveals the intention of all her later work—experiments in tonality, in reordering syntax, in riddling grammar with interjection and transposition. Her meditations draw heavily on older styles of eloquence, much of it coming from the Victorian and Edwardian eras, giving her poems a mood like that of old films and photographs.

The theme of these books is partly the irreality of language against the backdrop of the real world and the menacing forces that hamper human existence. Like other language poets Hejinian plumbs the sense of terror in the twentieth century, of holocaust and sinister forms of government, of authority bearing down on one's freedom to think. Only by the eruptions of unsorted or uncontrolled language can one tear free of grammatical traps and the incarceration that all language poets suffer in their mental lives.

A Mask of Motion, Hejinian's first collection of open-verse poems, was issued by Keith Waldrop's Burning Deck Press in 1977. The work is an extension of the suspended style of the other two prose books: "I'm confusing two different stories, she said; I know I'm mixing them up. But somehow, strange as it seems, completely unrelated events can intertwine in my memory and then I see they had something in common." This is as good an explanation of Hejinian's own method as can be found in her work. It indicates the nervous doubling of her thought and speaks to her indeterminate movements.

In Writing Is an Aid to Memory, Hejinian's preface prepares the reader for what follows:

I am always conscious of the disquieting runs of life slipping by, that the message remains undelivered, opposed to me. Memory cannot, though the future return, and proffer raw confusions. Knowledge is part of the whole, as hope is, from which love seeks to contrast knowledge with separation.

The book is a sequence of forty-two passages, a relentlessly unpredictable discourse in monologue form that moves from one topic to another and from tone to tone without transition. But like a palimpsest the language reveals patterns and meanings buried in the flow of the text, submerged like the stones or fish forms in a swiftly flowing river. There are enough such glimpses of actual things in the discourse, as in the tour of the caves at Dordogne in A Mask of Motion, to make the reader grasp at them as the language moves along with its shimmering but intangible possibilities. Hejinian proves that language can do more than state explicit arguments; it can move a reader to different emotional states merely by the configurations of its words and tones, its subtle and unyielding mysteries.

In the prose book My Life we find Hejinian working from another source of ideas on language poetry: Gertrude Stein's animistic prose in Tender Buttons. Here Hejinian works in small units of prose reminiscence and description to vitalize the ordinary, inert "things" in one's landscape. "Long time lines trail behind every idea, object, person, pet, vehicle, and event," she says of her epistemology. It is as apt a definition of her poetics as one finds in her canon.

—Paul Christensen