Books by Lyn Hejinian
The Best American Poetry 2004: Series Editor David Lehman
The Best American Poetry 2004 celebrates the vitality and richness of poetry in the United States and Canada today. Guest editor Lyn Hejinian, acclaimed for her own innovative writing, has chosen seventy-five important new poems and contributed a provocative introductory essay. Through her selections, Hejinian has created an essential nexus -- a meeting place for readers to encounter an extraordinary range of poets. With illuminating comments from the writers, and series editor David Lehman's insightful foreword evaluating the current state of the art, The Best American Poetry 2004 is an indispensable addition to a series that has established itself as the first word on what's new and noteworthy in the poetry of our times.
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My Life and My Life in the Nineties (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
by Lyn Hejinian
New edition of one of the founding works of Language writing
Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties. An experimental intervention into the autobiographical genre, My Life explores the many ways in which language―the things people say and the ways they say them―shapes not only their identity, but also the very world around them.
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The Book of a Thousand Eyes
by Lyn Hejinian
Written over the course of two decades, The Book of a Thousand Eyes was begun as an homage to Scheherazade, the heroine of The Arabian Nights who, through her nightly tale-telling, saved her culture and her own life by teaching a powerful and murderous ruler to abandon cruelty in favor of wisdom and benevolence. Hejinian’s book is a compendium of “night works”—lullabies, bedtime stories, insomniac lyrics, nonsensical mumblings, fairy tales, attempts to understand at day’s end some of the day’s events, dream narratives, erotic or occasionally bawdy ditties, etc. The poems explore and play with languages of diverse stages of consciousness and realms of imagination. Though they may not be redemptive in effect, the diverse works that comprise The Book of a Thousand Eyes argue for the possibilities of a merry, pained, celebratory, mournful, stubborn commitment to life.
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My Life (Green Integer Books, 39)
by Lyn Hejinian
Recognized today as one of the great works of contemporary American literature, My Life is at once poetic autobiography, personal narrative, a woman’s fiction, and an ongoing dialogue with the poet and her experience. Upon its first publication by Sun & Moon Press (the edition reprinted here) the publication Library Journal described the book as one that "is an intriguing journey that both illuminates and perplexes, teases and challenges, as it reveals an innovative artist at work."
Lyn Hejinian is the author of The Cell, The Cold of Poetry, Writing Is an Aid to Memory and A Border Comedy. She lives in Berkeley and teaches at the University of California.
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Positions of the Sun
by Lyn Hejinian
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. POSITIONS OF THE SUN is a sometimes melancholy, sometimes militant cross-genre experiment, combining elements of (largely non-narrative) fiction, with those of local journalism, and of cultural and literary criticism. Its twenty-six interlocking "essays with characters" (plus a "Coda") explore the mid-2000s financial "crisis," the spread of neoliberalism, and attempts by activists and artists to counter it, through the movements and daily lives of a wide-ranging cast of characters located in the Bay Area. In POSITIONS, Hejinian plays the bricoleur, bringing together whatever's needed in her approach to the subject, whether it's the paratactic tactics of poetry, scholarship's critical patchwork, or characters set in time that evokes but frustrates narrative. POSITIONS OF THE SUN is the second work in Belladonna*'s Germinal Texts Series, which seeks to trace feminist avant-garde histories and the poetic lineages they produce.
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Oxota: A Short Russian Novel
by Lyn Hejinian
A verse novel composed of 14-line stanzas inspired by Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin
Over the course of nearly a decade (1983–1991), author Lyn Hejinian visited the USSR seven times, staying frequently with her friends the poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and his wife Zina in Leningrad. During this period, she embarked on translating into English several volumes of Dragomoshcheko's poetry, and the two poets began an extensive correspondence, exchanging hundreds of letters until Dragomoshchenko's death in 2012. During her fifth visit, in conversation with Dragomoshchenko and other poets, she decided to write a novel reflecting her experiences of literary and lived life in Leningrad and Moscow. Cognizant of a general sense that the Russian novel is stereotypically "long," she determined that hers would be "short." What resulted is an experimental novel whose structure (284 chapters, each 14 lines long) pays homage to Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which is generally regarded to be the first Russian novel: a verse novel composed in 14-line stanzas. From time to time, various members of Dragomoshchenko's circle of friends offered suggestions for the novel, as readers will note. There's abundant narrative content, but anecdotes and events are presented in non-linear form, since they unfolded over extended periods of time and thus came to Hejinian's attention piecemeal. Oxota (which means variously "huntress," "hunt," and "desire" in Russian) is a novel in which contexts, rather than contents, are kept in the foreground. Allen Ginsberg, who himself visited the USSR, did not like Oxota. He said that it wasn't realistic; Hejinian thinks that it is.
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Aerial 10: Lyn Hejinian
by Lyn Hejinian
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Edited by Rod Smith & Jen Hofer. Contributors: Rae Armantrout, Carla Billitteri, Jack Collom, Jean Day, Patrick Durgin, Kate Fagan, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Kevin Killian, Katy Lederer, Pamela Lu, Laura Moriarty, Peter Nicholls, Lisa Robertson, Kit Robinson, Leslie Scalapino, Gerhard Schultz, Ron Silliman, Anne Tardos, Jalal Toufic, Rosmarie Waldrop, Barrett Watten, & Tim Wood. Cover art by Tom Raworth.
A career-spanning multi-genre compendium of work by and about poet Lyn Hejinian, one of today's most celebrated and influential avant- gardists. Through a variety of approaches—philosophical, scholarly, and experimental—AERIAL 10 documents and explores her forty-plus years of poetic and theoretical writings. A 464 page volume including poetry, essays, interviews, and letters by Hejinian, as well as essays, poetry, and collaborations by contemporary poets and critics. This book is a must have for anyone interested in modern poetry and poetics.
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The Fatalist
by Lyn Hejinian
A book-length, syntactically surprising poem divided into many sections, it is interspersed with delightful descriptions of daily experience with references to illustrious writers and thinkers of the past and their systems of philosophical inquiry. It offers humorous reflection upon our species' endless attempts to transmit insight regarding our human condition.
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Tribunal
by Lyn Hejinian
The three works of poetry that constitute Tribunal were written in the current context of seemingly ubiquitous warfare and the specter of unabashed neo-fascism, ethno-nationalism, and--especially in the United States--reassertions of white supremacy. As renowned poet Lyn Hejinian recounts, the inspiration for Tribunal gradually took shape over the course of almost a decade in the collaborative work she has done to fight neoliberal policies that dismantle the public sphere through actions that include privatizing the commons, busting unions, and imposing a corporate, profiteering model on a range of institutions including public higher education. Hejinian explores a broad range of responses to our deeply troubling historical period in Tribunal's three collections. These poems express an emotional scope that includes fury, sadness, and even, at times, something very close to pity for our humanity, perpetually unable to avoid its own penchant for cruelty. Hejinian is the rare poet who can bring to the page a rich, complex rendering of how mutually exclusive emotions can exist simultaneously. We lose safety and surety, but we gain a wider lens on contemporary crises from her sometimes lacerating, sometimes intensely beautiful lyric verse. It's only in such an artistic and emotional landscape that readers, thinkers, artists, workers, and all comrades against injustice can manage to keep inventing, imagining, and hoping. Throughout these crises, the poet returns to language as a meaningful space in which to grapple with a seemingly endless cycle of conflict. While the works can be read as expressions of protest or dissent, they powerfully convey an argument for artmaking itself--and a turn to its affirmation of life.
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The Language of Inquiry
by Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her autobiographical poem My Life, a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. The Language of Inquiry is a comprehensive and wonderfully readable collection of her essays, and its publication promises to be an important event for American literary culture. Here, Hejinian brings together twenty essays written over a span of almost twenty-five years. Like many of the Language Poets with whom she has been associated since the mid-1970s, Hejinian turns to language as a social space, a site of both philosophical inquiry and political address.
Central to these essays are the themes of time and knowledge, consciousness and perception. Hejinian's interests cover a range of texts and figures. Prominent among them are Sir Francis Bacon and Enlightenment-era explorers; Faust and Sheherazade; Viktor Shklovsky and Russian formalism; William James, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. But perhaps the most important literary presence in the essays is Gertrude Stein; the volume includes Hejinian's influential "Two Stein Talks," as well as two more recent essays on Stein's writings.
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Happily
by Lyn Hejinian
Poetry. Hejinian's characteristic linguistic intensity and philosophical approach are present in this book- length poem.
"Reading Lyn Hejinian's HAPPILY can make one imagine a second, somewhat happier Stein telling stories in single long or short lines that are aware of one another as they go about their own affairs."—Bob Perelman
"HAPPILY"...is a series of aphoristic statements interrogating 'hap' or, more prosaically, one's lot in life, one's fortune. This notion of chance as it is expressed through its root form, as in to happen, happenstance, happenings, haphazard, happenchance, happily, and happy happiness, becomes the generator that enlivens this ontological exploration of language's relationship to experience."—Claudia Rankine
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My Life in the Nineties
by Lyn Hejinian
Poetry. The continuation of the project begun in Hejinian's best-selling MY LIFE—also available from SPD—MY LIFE IN THE NINETIES provides important glimpses into related works such as HAPPILY, THE BEGINNER, and SLOWLY. Part prose poetry, part autobiography, and part radical modernist experiment, MY LIFE IN THE NINETIES is a masterpiece of recent writing on identity, language, and politics.
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Situations, Sings (Adventures in Poetry)
A collection of twelve formally distinct poems collaboratively written by Jack Collom and Lyn Hejinian. The two poets began working together in 1992, and over the years they have developed a repertoire of forms and procedures, all intended to extend the possibilities for invention, play, and the unfolding of unforeseeable meaning. Both poets embrace collaborative authorship as a means of challenging aesthetic preconceptions. In the process, they frequently venture across thematic limits, discovering unexpected coherences. The poems often give themselves over to pleasure, but they are governed by the logic of poetic language and they carry considerable metaphysical depth.
Jack Collom is the author of seventeen small-press books of poetry, including Red Car Goes By (Tuumba Press, 2001) and two CDs. He spent the early 1980s in New York, where he taught poetry to children in the Poets In Public Service and Teachers & Writers programs. In 1980 and again in 1990 he was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts. Collom lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.
Published collections of Lyn Hejinian’s writing include Writing Is an Aid to Memory, My Life, and The Language of Inquiry. From 1976 to 1984, Hejinian was the editor of Tuumba Press; she is currently the co-director of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets. In the fall of 2000, she was elected the sixty-sixth fellow of The Academy of American Poets. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
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The Beginner
by Lyn Hejinian
Poetry. Across several decades, Lyn Hejinian has been constructing an exemplary and profoundly influential body of exploratory work, work of a discrepant lucidity that undermines commonplace assumptions of the permissible and the possible. Her poetry and her prose, as well as her frequent artistic collaborations, probe with incisive wit and formal invention fundamental questions of subjectivity and community, content and communication, gender and expressivity. THE BEGINNER was originally published in a limited edition in 2001 by Spectacular Books, and is now being reprinted by Tuumba Press. "I'm beginning, and thinking that I think myself launched into something, but the actual beginning has occurred long before and as a result the thought that "I'm beginning" is not a beginning but a pause, a phrase, though one incorporated into a beginning (the beginning concealed around it)."
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Border Comedy, A
by Lyn Hejinian
"Lyn Hejinian's work increasingly explores poetry's relation to knowledge... But rather than abstract frameworks, one finds in A Border Comedy a serial poem in fifteen 'books,' coyotes, geese, didactic asides, horses, philosophical anecdotes, hawks, intercourse, wasps, Russian Formalist literary terms, goats, pigs, ravens and a great deal of urinating. It is through this particularity that Hejinian invents a poetic pedagogy at home with its forgiveness to itself, poised both to topple and attain intellectual authority, happily open to its lack of totalizing system... Situating her project more broadly within intellectual history, she writes: 'Digressing in a didactic tale will teach one to digress.' And digression, in all of its entertaining modes―the antecdote, the interpolated comment, the sudden shift of attention―is the displaced center of A Border Comedy... One of the interesting oddnesses of the book, one that forces us to catch our breath and occasionally to huff, is that quasi-transcendental or a priori insights (often linked to continental philosophy) find their way skillfully and unpredictably into what is otherwise a radically nominalistic, context-dependent intellectual setting." --Lytle Shaw, The Poetry Project Newsletter
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