It is my duty to report that Lyn Hejinian is writing the best poetry of her career right now. The bizarre thing is, I’ve been able to report that virtually continuously for nearly 30 straight years. Before that, I just didn’t know her work well enough.
I will offer as evidence Hejinian’s reading at Kelly Writers House on this past Monday. That link will take you to both streaming & downloadable versions of the event.¹
After reading from My Life in the Nineties, a sequel of sorts to her signature work, My Life, Hejinian turned to what she characterized as pages from The Book of a Thousand Eyes, a “night poem in many parts and an homage to Scheherazade,” followed by poems from a series Hejinian says she is calling The Unfollowed “currently,” a series of elegies for Charlotte Ellertson, the late women’s health activist who was Hejinian’s daughter-in-law.
Listening to Hejinian read these latter works aloud, which I’ve not yet seen on the page, I flashed for a moment on Chaucer, or on what I might call the inclusiveness of Chaucer’s language. The sense I have of Chaucer’s writing, especially in the original Middle English is “how can I not sit down & just listen?” One is drawn right in. Hejinian’s work has some of these same inviting qualities – it does a better job of bringing readers in than almost any post-avant writing I know. At the heart of this is not just Hejinian’s fascinating sense of the line – I could read her texts forever just to watch how & where she breaks lines (her mode is cognitive & a reader can watch her think in these breaks), yet that’s precisely one of the things you don’t get, can’t fully intuit, from a reading. Also at play, even more so when you are hearing it before seeing it, is Hejinian’s sense of the sentence, which is a very particular sentence, one that comes first from the age of classic English prose – that period that extends from Dickens through to Henry James. Which is to say that the grammar is straightforward, that there is pleasure taken in the ability to extend & capture the aside of a dependent clause, & that completion is something not only promised but delivered.
This also means that certain kinds of content enter into the work – the family is a passionate & ongoing theme, whereas contemporary jargon, politics, technology are hardly present at all. Or at least they’re not discussed in the heavily inflected vocabularies that attach to these discourses on the cable news stations.
Yet nothing about Hejinian’s writing feels even the slightest bit retro. She described the elegies as being composed entirely in non sequiturs to register her sense that “death is not acceptable.” The result is a combination of the familiar with the new that is unique entirely to Hejinian and it’s powerful in its capacity to take us as readers or listeners to places we’ve never before visited even as we feel entirely at home.
¹ The introductions to the event take nearly 15 minutes, followed by a reading of just under 40 minutes, complete with encore, so if you’re the anxious sort who can’t wait to hear Lyn herself read, use the downloadable version of the RealAudio file and go straight to the reading.
