POET

Lyn Hejinian (1941 - )

BIOGRAPHY

An unusual lyricism and descriptive engagement with the everyday world characterize Lyn Hejinian's poetry. Hejinian is a founding figure of the language writing movement of the 1970s, and her work, like most language writing, enacts a poetics that is theoretically sophisticated. While language is stylistically diverse and, as a movement, difficult to reduce to a particular style, most writers in this group are concerned with writing in non standardized, often non narrative forms. Language writing is community-centered and often takes as its subject progressive politics and social theory. Hejinian's work, for example, is committed to exploring the political ramifications of the ways that language is typically used. Her work differs, however, from the traditional, identity-affirming, political poetry of most left-wing writers. In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Juliana Spahr observed, "It is easier to trace the influence of language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's aphoristic statement that the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,' or to apply Viktor Shklovsky's theory of making strange' to Hejinian's poetry than it is to relate her work to the contemporary poetry usually anthologized in the Norton or Heath anthologies of American literature."

Although language writing tends to be anti-confessional and antirealist, Hejinian's work does not reject these forms. Rather, it insists that alternative means of expression are necessary to truly represent the confessional or the real. Her work, repeatedly concerned with biography or autobiography, explores the relationship between alternative writing practices and the subjectivity that these genres often obscure. The alternative form that Hejinian uses most frequently is what has come to be called the "new sentence," a form of prose poem composed mainly of sentences that have no clear transitions. The gap created by a text that moves from subject to subject invites the reader to participate, to bring his or her own reading to the text.

Crucial to understanding Hejinian's work is the realization that it cultivates, even requires, an act of resistant reading. Spahr noted, "Her work is deliberately unsettling in its unpredictability, its diversions from conventions, the way it is out of control." In her essay "The Rejection of Closure" published in Poetics Journal, Hejinian develops a theory of an "open text" that defines both her earlier work and her current work. An "open text," she writes, "is open to the world and particularly to the reader. . . . [It] invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies." To provoke the reader's participation, the open text engages in a series of disruptive techniques that expose the reader to the possibilities of meaning that he or she brings to the text. In Hejinian's work the disruptive technique most often used is the "new sentence."

Hejinian's commitment to the language movement and its techniques is evident throughout her work. Her first book-length collection, Writing Is an Aid to Memory, presents her wrestlings with the confessional systems of memory and the difficulties of portraying these systems without smoothing over the questions they raise. An example of Hejinian's "open text" is the autobiographical My Life. Spahr regarded My Life as "currently the most important of Hejinian's work," noting that it has attracted much scholarly attention. This work, through its attention to alternative and multiple ways of telling, refuses to invoke the transparent language conventions that typically compose autobiography.

On a trip to Leningrad with her husband, Hejinian met a variety of contemporary poets who would provide the inspiration for Leningrad. It is a typical language movement text, even written collaboratively, as is common in the movement. The four poets in this collection alternate voices and discuss various ways post- glasnost society forces them to confront their own politics of encounter.

CAREER

Tuumba Press, editor, 1976-1984, and Poetics Journal, editor, both Berkeley, CA

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

• A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking, Tuumba Press (Willits, CA), 1976.
• A Mask of Motion, Burning Deck (Providence, RI), 1977.
• Writing Is an Aid to Memory, The Figures (Berkeley, CA), 1978.
• Gesualdo, Tuumba Press, 1978.
• Redo, Salt-Works Press (Grenada, MS), 1984.
• The Guard, Tuumba Press, 1984.
• (With Kit Robinson) Individuals, Tucson, Arizona, Chax Press, 1988.
• The Cell, Sun and Moon Press (Los Angeles), 1990.
• The Hunt, Zasterle Press (La Laguna, Islas Canarias), 1991.
• The Cold of Poetry, Sun and Moon Press, 1994.
• A Border Comedy, Sun and Moon Press, 1999

NOVELS

• My Life, Burning Deck, 1980, revised edition, Sun and Moon Press, 1987.
• Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, The Figures (Great Barrington, MA), 1991.

OTHER

• (Translator) Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Description, Sun and Moon Press, 1990.
• Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union, Mercury House (San Francisco), 1991.
• (Translator, with Elena Balashova) Arkadi Dragomoschenko, Xenia, Sun and Moon Press, 1993.
• Two Stein Talks, Wenselsleeves Press (Santa Fe), 1995.
• (Editor) The Best American Poetry 2004, Scribner Poetry (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including Poetics Journal.

FURTHER READINGS

BOOKS

• Contemporary Poets, 6th edition, St. James Press, 1996.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 165: American Poets since World War II, Gale, 1996.

PERIODICALS

• American Literature, March, 1996, p. 139.
• Poetics Journal, May, 1985, p. 134.
• Publishers Weekly, August 29, 1994, p. 66.