{Photograph} by Rae Armantrout.
It’s laborious to consider Lyn is lifeless, as a result of her thoughts, her spirit, if you’ll, was all the time so energetic. The final time I noticed her, when she was already fairly in poor health, she talked concerning the comical manner the Hollywood writers’ strike had affected graduation speeches, and about what she’d discovered about AI from a scientist she knew on the Berkeley college. She was nonetheless engaged with the world, in different phrases, regardless of her scenario. She was a really personal individual, but she opened herself as much as different folks and to new experiences repeatedly. As she says in her e book The Fatalist, ”I journey and take into account destiny / as incidence and happenstance as future. I recite an epigraph. / It appears as relevant to the remarks I wish to make as dysfunction / is to order.” It was like her to see opposites (order/dysfunction) as half of a complete—which isn’t to say she couldn’t take sides in opposition to oppression. She might and did.
As a woman, she liked studying the journals of explorers. She was a type of explorer herself. For instance, within the late eighties, she taught herself Russian and traveled first with different poets after which alone to the Soviet Union to translate the work of outsider poets comparable to Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. (And he or she was scheduled to spend a winter with scientists in Antarctica when she was recognized with breast most cancers some twenty-odd years in the past.) She didn’t consider in borders or in endings. As she says in My Life, “However a phrase is a bottomless pit.” She didn’t suppose that was a unhealthy factor. It made her curious.
She had a singular mixture of generosity and discernment, equanimity and élan. I love her greater than anybody I do know. Her generosity was totally with out self-interest; her curiosity was by no means intrusive. These traits shone in her poetry as in her life. After I had most cancers in 2006, she helped to arrange a type of personal fundraising marketing campaign amongst pals and despatched me a number of thousand {dollars}. Due to her discretion, I don’t know who had contributed what precisely, however I’ve all the time suspected she was a serious contributor herself.
She has influenced numerous different poets, however nobody else might come near writing a “Lyn Hejinian” poem. I used to be impressed, influenced maybe, by the way in which her poetry was, to cite one in all her titles, a “language of inquiry.” The primary e book of hers I learn, again within the mid-seventies, was known as A Thought Is the Bride of What Considering. Again then the consensus appeared to be that “thought” was the province of philosophy. However as I’ve stated, Lyn didn’t consider in borders. Her “October 6, 1986” poem in her e book The Cell presents resistance as a type of measuring gadget: “resistance is correct—it / rocks and rides the momentum.” It’s like her to forged resistance as a type of exploration, of appreciation even. That poem concludes along with her attribute humor: “It’s not imperfect to / have died.” These strains strike me with full pressure now. I wish to scream that it’s removed from excellent that Lyn is lifeless, however she knew greatest.
—Rae Armantrout
Lyn Hejinian, poet, essayist, translator, trainer, and activist, was a serious pressure in American and in worldwide poetry. Her affect and presence grew to become even larger over the many years. Rising out of the community-oriented avant-garde motion referred to as Language (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) poetry, a gaggle that she helped discovered, Hejinian’s work stayed comparatively trustworthy to her early aesthetic commitments, although her signature types grew to become extra expansive and inclusive over time. She maintained constancy to the founding influences of her neighborhood lengthy after the Language poets had been much less lively as a gaggle; these influences included leftist and Marxist politics, social and cultural principle, and the writings of the thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein. Not all Language poets adopted the identical stylistic paths, in fact. Gertrude Stein was a guiding instance for Hejinian, who restored a Steinian sense of play to American poetry at a time when the playful experiments of John Ashbery had been dominant. Hejinian’s work was all the time inflected with additional vitality; she wished to discover and categorical expertise through the “open textual content,” the “new sentence,” the materiality of phrases and grammar by means of nonstandard types of telling. Most of her writing, from the varied variations of My Life (which started as thirty-seven sections with thirty-seven sentences) by means of later works like The Unfollowing, deploys a structural intelligence that pushes in opposition to predictability. Her types play in opposition to themselves through different syntax and grammar. Her types—once more, one thinks of Stein and the cubist writing of early modernism—are fairly versatile, permitting for the exploration of each day life and each day consciousness.
Lyn Hejinian was an especially gifted and beloved trainer and colleague; an activist working to assist labor pursuits in her locations of employment; a translator who introduced the works of such poets as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko to American readership; a writer who helped discovered three impartial presses and the group Poets in Want; she was a cherished good friend. I valued the time we spent collectively on two collaborations, each initiated within the nineties after we attended some conferences collectively. We found our aesthetic and ideological affinities overlapped after serving on just a few panels. After realizing that we shared an curiosity in sentence diagramming, Lyn instructed we meet on the Musical Providing, a café in Berkeley midway between our homes, to diagram sentences collectively. At first we had been merely studying grammar books and learning different diagramming types, however then we started diagramming sentences we liked on white sheets of paper. There was all the time multiple manner. Our second collaboration was a gaggle of “versatile sonnets” that generally concerned fifteen or sixteen strains; we’d go a poem backwards and forwards till we had a passable variety of strains. We determined at one level that we must always write a bit kind of than a line every time, as a way to confuse readers who would possibly suppose they might inform the “Brenda strains” from the “Lyn strains.” We had a 3rd collaboration in thoughts: to take a roll of adding-machine paper out to the Berkeley pier and write one very lengthy sentence in a day. However these tasks all needed to be put aside due to our busyness in our instructing and in our household lives. I treasure the reminiscence of time spent with Lyn, I treasure her writing and affect; she will probably be vastly missed.
—Brenda Hillman
On Saturday, February 24, my good friend Roxi Energy known as from Santa Cruz and advised me that Lyn Hejinian had died. We talked for a very long time then. I recalled her writing, in fact, remembering the collaborative e book Sight that she’d written with Leslie Scalapino, which I’d taught in a small class at Penn State—a studying group for graduate pupil writers on what was doable and on what attentions our work requested of us. And a few years later I’d been in a position to contribute just a few strains to the again of her E book of a Thousand Eyes (which she wrote “in homage to Scheherazade”): it’s an enormous superb e book on the evening, 300 pages, and in it she stretches the outdated bifurcations of solar and moon right into a single and magnificently various waking hour.
And we recalled her without delay principled and beneficiant ambivalence about what “greatest” would possibly imply in her introduction to the 2004 Greatest American Poetry quantity, the place she wrote, “What’s, or isn’t, a poem? What makes one thing poetic? These questions stay open. And the truth that there aren’t any last solutions is one supply of the vitality of the artwork type.” (Bernadette Mayer as soon as wrote, on her personal sonnets, “If there aren’t any conclusions why will we want for them? Love should be a topic I felt.”)
Extra lately, at UC Berkeley, in a second when it was essential, Lyn supported Samia Rahimtoola and me in our in the end profitable effort to maneuver the main target of the collapsing Berkeley Poetry Convention to the work and presence of writers of coloration. And in one in all my very earliest moments on the college—nearly twenty years in the past!—she got here by in her PT Cruiser and, in the identical lengthy afternoon, took me to a spot she liked—the Oakland Museum of California—after which to 2 locations that she thought, appropriately, that I might love: Jack London Sq. with its “street-running” railroad visitors, and Redwood Park, the place, strolling, she and I got here—and fortunately—upon coyotes.
—C. S. Giscombe
Wherever Lyn directed the gaze of her consideration, a profusion of insights and interconnected idea-possibilities grew. Her generosity to her personal mind, to her strategy of generative, rigorous, and perpetual pondering, and her generosity to the youthful poets and students she was in continuous, and type, correspondence with, felt like they got here from the identical considerable place. She acted as if we might construct a world the place we’re all pondering collectively, with a rigorousness that’s not antithetical to pleasure, or to artistic impulse, or experiment. In one of many final emails she wrote to me, she stated, “My query of the second is ‘what do you concentrate on magnificence?’ I’m referring to magnificence in artwork (poetry, movie, dance, music, portray, sculpture, and many others.), not the great thing about leaves, animals, mountains, and many others.” I ponder if she knew how quickly her dying can be; nonetheless in that second she was directing her stare upon a query that her, devoted to exploring the contours of our world and discovering complete constructions to share. In My Life, as her father is dying of most cancers, she writes, “we by no means needed greater than one thing starting value persevering with which remained unended” and later in that very same passage, “Acts are hyperlinks, and likewise concepts.” Lyn’s thoughts and life wove many hyperlinks. Might all of us carry our bits and items of her work onward; her perception, her inquisitiveness, her generosity, into the huge mental continuum her vibrant mild is abandoning.
—Cody-Rose Clevidence
I met Lyn Hejinian within the mid-seventies. I liked her 1976 Tuumba e book, A Thought Is the Bride of What Considering, her second e book, although for many of us the primary:
Lucidities, or, lights (a starry angular). The staring, vibrant sorts of phrase and thought. I’ve all the time thought so, one who’s prepared and fairly in a position to make use of all the things, or something. On the nectarine and the clarinet distinction casts a lightweight, in its flip. One has solely to have a look at the factor, and suppose a bit.
A Thought embodied the type of free-thinking poetics I used to be on the lookout for on the time.
Nonetheless am.
Lyn began Tuumba Press with that e book, setting the kind and doing the letterpress printing in her home in Berkeley.
At about the identical time, I revealed my very own first two books, although a lot much less elegantly than Lyn’s Tuumbas: I xeroxed my typescript and made side-staple editions that Susan Bee and I known as Asylum’s Press.
Have been these pockets of poetry insane asylums, as many appeared to suppose, or locations of refuge?
The second e book revealed by Tuumba was Western Borders, one in all Susan Howe’s first books. I learn it simply as I started a lifelong friendship with Sukey.
Lyn revealed my e book Senses of Duty in 1979; it was the 20th Tuumba pamphlet, and solely my second e book after these two from Asylum’s.
Asylum had firm: at across the similar time Lyn revealed Senses of Duty, she additionally revealed pamphlets by Bob Perelman, Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, and Rae Armantrout, all of whom stay the closest of pals.
Which is simply to say, Lyn, 9 years older than me, helped outline the world I might inhabit for the remainder of my life.
Bruce and I, in flip, featured Lyn in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in 1979, with an appreciation by Robert Grenier and “Smatter,” a prescient essay by Lyn: “Placing issues collectively in such a manner as to allow them to coincide, to make that type of movement, is, just like the ‘collage’ and the ‘cluster,’ an try (by analogy with music’s chord) at suggesting (since that’s all one can do) simultaneity, hoping for inherence, haphazard, completely happy likelihood.” After these two items, we appended a brief bibliography that marketed a xerox of A Thought Is the Bride of What Considering for $1.58. (I had assembled a set of out-of-print books and would ship copies out at price.)
In 1980, when Lyn revealed My Life with Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop’s Burning Deck press, I wrote a evaluate for Ken Edward’s Actuality Studios in London (collected in Content material’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984): “She will get to this: buzzing a anonymous, a tuneless, tune—which is, maybe, solely the aspiration of poetry—to not reassure whereas surviving, retrospectively, as track; or such appear to be the phrases of this work. A life, the issues of a life, put so as. I dwell in these items. Fonder of the place we’ve discovered—completely!—maker, founder, of the place we now have domesticated, accultured, discovered with our lives.”
I’m foundering right here, attempting to understand the occasions we first met, which preserve slipping away, as Lyn now does. A lot got here after: her foundational essays, her many years of instructing, her generative and beneficiant publishing and enhancing, her exchanges with Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, and, above all, the handfuls of dazzling poetry books, every distinct, the ensemble creating among the many most opulent and delight-filled our bodies of labor in postwar American poetry.
Returning to these early days: Lyn supplied to let Susan Bee and me keep at her place in Willits, north of the Bay Space—a rural cabin with out electrical energy or operating water that she and her husband, jazz adept Larry Ochs, had lived in, together with their two kids, earlier than they moved to Berkeley. Metropolis of us on an journey, Susan and I adopted the instructions to a distant home, which appeared to be on the prime of a mountain; anyway, manner, manner up a hill. We arrived at nightfall and located a lantern however, strive as I would, I couldn’t get it lit.
I keep in mind I set aflame the perforated housing across the wick.
I figured I wrecked the factor.
Subsequent morning we drove down the mountain to discover a telephone.
Lyn taught me how you can preserve the sunshine lit.
“One has solely to have a look at the factor, and suppose a bit.”
—Charles Bernstein
