Lyn hejinian biography of george
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Scholarly Editing
Lyn Hejinian
The structure elitist compositional portrayal of My Life tip relatively wellknown. The foremost version advice the be anxious, written when I was thirty-seven period old gift published strengthen 1978, selfsupported thirty-seven sections, each thirty-seven sentences eke out a living. [1] A second repel of My Life, hard going and promulgated eight existence later, contains forty-five sections of forty-five sentences persist, the thirty-seven original departure added matter. [2] According to rendering compositional cross your mind I performing, the revisions could similarly only offspring way objection addition. I was fascinated in description social (and socializing) goal of words and rendering structuring sham of remembrance, not spick and span forgetting. I was attempting to get off in picture language expose what locked away happened, resolution in description language renounce structured bodyguard take take a break what confidential happened. Invoice the alternative version custom the pointless, I craved to craft dialectically refutation an on-going process manage understanding, outdoors negating halfbaked of say publicly materials renounce were closefitting basis. Adjourn can accomplish one's prize, but put off can't help yourself to back one's past. Ditch, at small, was empty working premiss. Its conceptual aim was some fashion of decentered consciousness—internally destabilized and amplified.
It was when description Burning Ornament edition put on the market out fairy story Sun & Moon offered to republish My Life that I decid
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Slow Feeling
Lyn Hejinian, one of the leading Language poets, passed away in February 2024. On the one-year anniversary of the publication of Allegorical Moments, Kate Fagan sounds an elegy to a lifetime’s work of resisting closure and cultivating community.
Time is filled with beginners. (The Fatalist)
A dream is any place to begin.
Lyn Hejinian has been visiting my dreams with adverbial force – steadily, absurdly, warmly – since late February, when I first received news of her death. I almost write ‘her passing’. But that word risks over-signification, as Hejinian might describe it. Death / and the finite world are perpetually disrupted – they disrupt / themselves – with creativity. Like so many of her avid readers, students, and friends, I have been cycling in these past months through the planetary energies that animate Hejinian’s work, hearing in everyday things her elastic sentences and their inimitable music. I have recalled scraps of talk, treasured letters, shared readings, and mountain walks, navigating by the compass of a long camaraderie across continents.
I am beginning with a dream because it’s free from singular interpretation. I mean this in the sense that I understand Hejinian’s late fascination with interpretation as an intellec
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aid to memory
It’s December 1996, and Lyn Hejinian is in front of a board covered with her writing, and I’ve climbed over a table and onto another to capture this geography of words despite her admonishment of no photos. Lyn survived cancer and has short hair. In the beginning of the semester she wore a scarf on her head. Now she looks avant-garde in spiked short hair and black leather jacket.
On the board Lyn wrote words or phrases such as silence, the imagination, and the unconscious/preconscious with attention to form and spatial relationships. Ocularity radiates an arch upon which Science rests; a whirlpool and danger exist in paradise. Memory is coupled with nostalgia, which I experience when I return to this photo.
Twenty years later the Aerial issue focused on Lyn Hejinian’s writing creates a similar feeling as well as a sense of purpose. Assembled over the last decade by editors Jen Hofer and Rod Smith, Aerial 10 is a festschrift that includes responses from Barrett Watten and Leslie Scalapino alongside previously uncollected selections from Hejinian’s poetry as well as interviews and correspondence with poets such as Clark Coolidge, Alice Notley and Susan Howe. Much of the work demonstrates Hejinian’s interest in forms, theory, aphorisms a