by Megan Friedman

To enter Lyn Hejinian’s work is to enter a space in which “the poem is the becoming / exhibition of its own language” (The Cell, 66). As seen through the world of this line, the poem is understood as a constant state of becoming, in which each image or notion comes into existence only through its relation to the next image or notion. And it is the perception of this relationality by writer, reader and their overlap that allows an exhibition of becoming to occur. Thus, the poem is understood as inherently dynamic, generating an unceasing influx of relationalities, each magnetically charged with possibility and perceptibility. This magnetism is both the driving force and the perpetual result of Hejinian’s work and understanding of the world that ultimately allows the poem to begin, exist, and last as an object of maximal excitement. 

As an experimental poet, influential essayist, and an important figure of the Language poetry movement, Hejinian’s work spans genres, forms, and conceptualizations to establish ideas and images as ‘maximally excited’. In her seminal essay, “The Rejection of Closure”, Hejinian posits “because we have language we find ourselves in a special and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world,” thereby naming language as a unique and irremovable aspect of relationality. Through a focus on the relationship of language to objects, Hejinian creates a space in which “Here we are / where blown from consciousness leaves fall / like images from a dream that cannot be revised and never fails” (The Book of a Thousand Eyes, 169). It is in this movement from consciousness to image that Hejinian’s myriad poetic interests, technique, and experimentation contains, memorizes, and interrogates the constancy of the world and its happenings. This movement is achieved through a blend of philosophical inquiry, lyricism, and declaration, through which Hejinian creates unique patterns of thought and image filled with circles, paradox, and contradictions, whereby “The trajectory is eager for / more reality and more recognition / Strutting with explanation … with characteristic / restlessness” (The Cell, 65). Subsequently, throughout Hejinian’s poems, these patterns work to manipulate the relationship between language and the material world, as is made clear in The Book of A Thousand Eyes (1996): “There is nothing but reality” (101). 

Thus, in the spirit of more reality, I must emphasize the importance of reading Hejinian in order to expose oneself to the enormity of what reality can be and hold and, moreover, to what the poem can be and hold. However, due to the magnitude of Hejinian’s reality, one may find that approaching her work in its entirety evokes the same sense of overwhelm that seems to afflict Hejinian herself as she moves through the world. Throughout her life, Hejinian lived and wrote through feelings of urgency, anguish, and excitement, the last of which she questions in her 2018 essay, “Everything Is Imminent in Anything”: “what does one do with the excitement one feels when one’s excitement becomes exciting and excites an awareness of the excitement and the exciting? And how long can one do it?” This positive feedback loop of intensive feeling and discovery is central to Hejinian’s poetics, and it is through a similar intensity that the profound vastness of Hejinian is, at times, massively overwhelming in its truth-seeking scope and can be, therefore, nearly impossible to briefly capture in its wholesome magnificence. 

That being said, I believe Hejinian has never required encapsulation, mimicry, or easy understanding from the reader or responder. Contrarily, Hejinian thinks of the reader as inexplicably involved in the writing process, and that the relationship between writer and reader is that which maintains a text as open, and therefore, expansive and long-lasting. In “The Rejection of Closure”, Hejinian describes an open text as one that “emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification”. An unreduced, uncommodified text is a vast and real text, and for Hejinian, “Words are a way to keep and to keep rolling” maintaining us in relation to “The purple night, the building clouds, the point of time” in which “the thought will be long, it will wind through ten events” so that “the horizon doesn’t hold there / Its gaping point of contact spreads the latitudes” (The Book of a Thousand Eyes, 172, 167, 81). 

It is through these wild leaps and measures of time that Hejinian establishes her poetic methodology, packed full of surprising juxtapositions of image and declaration. She suggests a “good mood for chores” as “the beginning of previousness” and that “the bed is made of sentences which present themselves as what they are” collapsing the distance between syntax and material, bringing mood to the forefront of time (The Cell, 59; The Book of a Thousand Eyes, 17). It is through this methodology that Hejinian utilizes logic as a contradiction and contradiction as a logic to spin ideas inside-out into entirely new forms of meaning, in order to “come out from a misunderstanding and see the situation anew” (The Book of a Thousand Eyes, 194). Hejinian is able, then, to “combine a long / time span with a short / one and assume the form / of a pair of eyes” so time becomes undeniably attached to perception, allowing relations to form into “That hour, and just us!” (The Cell, 74). Her 1980 collection My Life, originally published by Burning Deck, and subsequently reissued by Wesleyan in 2003 with an addendum titled My Life in the Nineties, notably made strides in the establishment of her poetics. My Life utilizes repetition across a vast set of interwoven, discursive autobiographical prose poems in order to continuously re-signify thoughts, exponentially expanding their meaning. Phrases such as “what memory is not a ‘gripping’ thought” and “religion is a vague lowing” are repeated throughout the book to do and undo their meanings, creating a large web of signification and possibility (46, 69).  

Through these poetic movements, Hejinian establishes an understanding of the world and its structure as focused on an ephemeral relationality through which moments, feelings, objects, and subjects are made distinct through their entanglement despite, perhaps, their relative finitude and transience. This philosophy is established in “The Rejection of Closure”, in which Hejinian writes, “I can only begin a posteriori, by perceiving the world as vast and overwhelming, each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. What saves this from becoming a vast undifferentiated mass of data and situation is one’s ability to make distinction”. The idea of ‘making distinction’ is an essential aspect of Hejinian’s poetics, and an aspect that  most notably occurs through the combination of Hejinian’s voice, lyric, repetition, and declarations. Take this poem from Hejinian’s The Book of a Thousand Eyes for instance:

I’m almost ready—here—
things come—okay
each thing must reveal itself in order
to begin and then distinguish itself
by being obdurate and endear itself
without omission so as to proliferate
without summary and secure
itself — I’m almost ready— so
as to continue and remain—

(126)

This poem focuses on a central philosophy of Hejinian’s: that in order to exist, the subject, breathed into being through the poetic ‘I,’ must understand themself as always almost ready. As the subject moves through the world, they move through an enormous and complicated arrangement of things. These things are not only happening, but are constantly shifting in their existence, and through our perception of their existence. Thus, things reveal themselves both ‘in order’ through a sort of perceptive chronology, and ‘in order to begin’ their existence in the first place. Then, ultimately, ‘in order to begin,’ a thing must also ‘distinguish’ itself. This distinction happens as a thing contains itself, being separate from other things, though constantly in relation to other things, so the thing may become the thing, the world may become the world. It is through this becoming and relationality that things and objects arrange and materialize into an ever-shifting and uncertain constancy of entanglement. Now for Hejinian, it is only through this framework that the subject may exist. Here, the subject must remain in a constant state of almost; thereby, keeping themself open to change, though not without hesitancy as established by a perpetual not-knowing. So the subject is able to relate, to begin and begin again, to continue, and to remain. As Hejinian states in The Book of a Thousand Eyes, “Now it’s dark and there’s someone in it” (143).

This instability of being and problematizing of a legitimacy of existence speaks to Hejinian’s work more broadly, through which her poetics become all-encompassing—making meaning without flattening ideas or feelings into pure understanding. Though understanding is a desire of Hejinian’s, I find the openness of her work to reveal a present and truth-oriented goal of constant discovery. Through this constancy, happenings are left open as uncertain, facts as questionable, and feelings as ever-evolving. As Hejinian commonly ties feeling to image (seen most notably throughout The Cell— “this egg is an emotion / the sensing of a large / amorous aptness”— and The Book of a Thousand Eyes— “shows of kindness, signs of real riverbanks”), she also maintains a consistent vulnerability around feeling itself (141, 138). Hejinian names feeling as something that often lacks the correct type of attention: “I felt self-sufficient except with regard to my feelings, to which I was always vulnerable, always in relation to someone else. We pay attention to other things” (My Life, 52-53). Here, the insecurity Hejinian expresses around feeling is directly correlated to relation, which she further describes in The Book of a Thousand Eyes: “that’s one thing of which I’m certain. Contact produces uncertainty” (127). Thus, for Hejinian, there is a constancy of, and necessity for, relation through contact—which maintains a certain instability. As motions of contact are brought into the poem, even the lyric is understood as being created through relation, whereas “the person thinks by being / aloud / that is the relationship of / music to poetry,” and “the obvious analogy is with music” (The Cell, 116; My Life, 24). Reality, then, is created through the relation of things to other things, things to language, language to lyric and within this enormous amount of overlap emerges love, longing, despair— the exigencies of being alive wherein one must admit that “To achieve reality (where objects thrive on people’s passions), enormous effort / and continuous social interactions are required, and I can’t get started / without you” (The Book of a Thousand Eyes, 312). 

Thus, in an effort to actively involve oneself in the connectedness of the world, I can only insist on immersing oneself in the pleasure and magic of Hejinian. Through her extensive collection of ideas, images, forms, genres, decades, inquiries, and lyricisms, Hejinian’s work maintains itself as an immortal object, able to withstand the shiftings of time and last beyond a moment through a constancy of relationality. Consequently, to immerse oneself in Hejinian is to truly believe that “overlapping is all that lasts” in seeing that “as for we ‘who love to be astonished’ so do all relationships move” (The Book of a Thousand Eyes, 100; My Life, 62). Therefore, I would like to share one last poem to celebrate Hejinian that I believe captures the poet’s magnitude, passion, and vibrancy, and through these aspects, her ability to live on. In the following poem from The Cell, Hejinian asks “Am I awake?” and I would say the answer has always been, and continues to be, yes. 

A beautiful sea of a
chopped blue
With interruptions — but they are
ovals
The sunlight in floating salts, 
wash, door, monopoly
That swells
There’s no sardonic evidence for
the kiss
For the man who formed
a face with eyes awake
it’s I who am looking
at this paper
The dream shakes but the 
real remains real
Am I awake?
I can’t tell
How can I tell?
Well 
If it seems to me
that I am here and 
I am really here then 
I am awake
But am I here?
Something reminds me of the 
skin on a thistle but 
is thankful
A finger in a perception
at the seashore
And the seashore without opposite
Elsewhere is there where yet 
an event has no effect
while it tends toward one
The expression very carelessly like
that of a passenger
The eyes covered (they covered
an animal)
Aesthetic discoveries are themselves a
theory made with belligerence
Blue

August 11, 1988

(The Cell, 188-189)

Works Cited

Hejinian, Lyn. My Life. Los Angeles, Green Integer, 2002.

Hejinian, Lyn. The Book of a Thousand Eyes. Richmond, Omnidawn Publishing, 2012.

Hejinian, Lyn. The Cell. Los Angeles, Sun & Moon Press, 1992.

Hejinian, Lyn. “The Rejection of Closure.” The Poetry Foundation, 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69401/the-rejection-of-closure

Hejinian, Lyn. “Everything is Imminent in Anything: An Essay on Fending Off Chaos.” Literary Hub,

https://lithub.com/lyn-hejinian-everything-is-imminent-in-anything/