Lyn
Hejinian’s sentences are more straightforward than Scalapino’s &, indeed,
those in My Life in the Nineties are
noticeably more straightforward & less apt to be “sentence fragments” than
the ones in either published version of her breakthrough My Life. Nineties, as I think I’m going to refer to it, builds on
& plays with its relation to that famous earlier work, but is far less “a
continuation” of the project than it might at first appear. For one thing, it
doesn’t appear to incorporate the reiterative material folded in throughout the
earlier, larger project, other than the slightest sprinkling of phrases,
playfully added as an allusive garnish rather than integral to the form itself.
But most importantly,
the reduced number of sentence fragments combined with the notably longer
paragraphs – Hejinian does appear to be going for the sentence-for-every-year
approach, although I haven’t counted to see if each of the paragraphs here
contains the same number of sentences (as I presume that it must) – to give the
poem a radically different sense of rhythm, one that is more casual &
relaxed than My Life. This new
prosody fits well with Hejinian’s fundamental optimism – she still seems
startled at the idea that she of all people should have become one of the
defining poets of our time:
To be born at all seems chancy,
and having been born, that it should have happened now and here and in human
form to me even more so, but after that the most remarkable things occur at
points of forced encounter between facts of equal strangeness.
The
contrast with Scalapino, born just a few years later, raised in the same city,
both attending John Muir Elementary,
each the daughter of a professor at the same university, could not be more
pronounced. Indeed, this contrast is part of what gives Sight, the booklength collaboration between these two poets, its
extraordinary energy. Indeed, more than any other poets I can think of,
Both
conceptions of the sentence deserve greater investigation & thought. In
Hejinian’s case, the historic function of the 19th century novel –
the last moment when the world-making construct of fiction itself could be
anything other than ironic & self-mocking* – and explicitly of the sentence
in that work is worthy of much greater consideration. It is a process of
thought articulated in stages, enabling care, a panoramic view if that’s
required, self-reflection – all the elements that will enable & empower
modernism a generation hence. Yet Hejinian’s project as a poet is anything but
backward looking – as these constructivist memoirs demonstrate precisely
through their subversions of the form. The sentence in her work is a tool of
investigation, to a degree matched perhaps only by
I feel as
though I am only scratching the barest surface here, both in discussing Lyn’s
work & that of Leslie’s as well over the past couple of days. What I want
to get across most, though, is that I think there is a major project that is
being outlined by these two simpatico but radically dissimilar writers, one
that meets & perhaps reaches its greatest fruition in a reconceptualization
of what the sentence is & can be. I’m not sure that either, finally
completes that project except insofar as each seems to play such a critical
role in staking out what its terms must be. In fact, I’m not sure that the next
step is a project that any of us 50-somethings can embark on at all, but it’s
out there & when somebody “gets” it, this new further sentence will seem as apparent to our lives as the writing
of Melville should have seemed to his.
* A moment
that occurs when, “In the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis,” at the start of
the seventh chapter of Ulysses, Joyce
starts to peel away the onion-skin layers of realism away from the real itself.
