And George Oppen, when writing Discrete Series, had attempted to write a poem without commentary. Snead: About the western scientific method, about western modes of epistemology, and how description … because you seem to be a little less approving of that type of, or maybe more —. But I will say that I have an enormous fascination with the annals of exploration and discovery, and admiration and appreciation for experimental science even today.
I think that description, for a good scientist as for a good writer, is as much hermeneutic as narrative. That is, using language as a medium for exploring — you know, The Language of Inquiry is the name of the essay book. Hejinian: The new collected, I recommend.
What is your interest in allowing readers to access it a sentence at a time? And does this also represent a shift in your compositional practice? Or, do you have ten sentences in reserve, which you will be posting over the rest of the week? Hejinian: This is a splendid question. This is not my blog. Somebody else out there is putting a work of mine on the Internet, one sentence at a time.
I find it unnerving, but not reprehensible. But I am happy that this is a webcast because I want to tell everybody who is listening: That is not my blog; Lyn Hejinian does not have a blog. Filreis: Well, thank you, Ken, for affording Lyn the opportunity to disclaim that blog. CAConrad: Hello. I saw you a few years ago at Villanova University.
You gave a talk and a reading. Afterwards we were standing around this table eating carrots or something, and the discussion turned to politics at one point, and you seemed dismayed about younger poets and where they were politically.
And in retrospect, probably the latter. They were taken out of context in both cases. The way the editors phrased the question, it appeared that Ron Silliman and I felt that young poets were inadequately addressing the contemporary political climate. In fact, my comment in its original context, had nothing to do with younger poets or the political climate.
It was on an entirely different subject. A number of young poets responded to this, and very shortly thereafter the attack on the World Trade Center towers occurred, and those younger poets proved not only that they were highly astute politically, but had already been thinking on a number of issues, which now had to be spoken, and people would listen to them. And really interesting. Lots of energy and courage. But I wanted to ask you about how you would address their relationship.
Your sense is — and I think rightly, but let me just make sure I understand the question correctly — that by virtue of the nature of the original, what I call the raw material from which The Fatalist was sculpted, that it was in ordinary language. And what have I done to make it unordinary? To some degree, that work is built of phrases and composed at the level of phrase. The dynamism and energy comes from the juxtaposition of phrases either in the original, if I was clever that day and wrote a good letter or note or message and there was a long stretch that I kept, or by taking the beginning of something I wrote to one person and finding a phrase somewhere in something I wrote to another person and saw where their conjunction could bring out the texture of whatever was going on at that point.
In The Fatalist I was looking at the language of communication, the materiality of communication. Hejinian: Well, I think that post-Language is particularly problematic because it anchors poets younger than my generation to only one area, when actually they have tendrils and roots in all kinds of other things, and not just poetry.
I think that such labels are useful in conversation, or as a literary-critical or literary-historical marker. But I think they should be defined, and all kinds of definitions are out there to be used. In terms of literary history, I think much, much larger histories have to be described and much more complicated lineages have to be drawn.
I think the history of the last thirty years in poetry has not even been touched. I do find them useful. They can point to or remind us of the impulse and intention behind the composition, and also something of the character of the communities from which, and to which, the work is written. Filreis: Can I ask about another divider as a follow-up? You wrote some time ago, or said in an interview, that the Language movement, that Language writing is rigorously social, and in that sense set up against the romance of the solitary individualist poet.
What is the opposite of rigorously social? The self-commodifying poet? The star poet? Filreis: If I were one of those, what would you say to me about my way of preceding? Because you disagree: you think that poetic communities need to be rigorously social, I think. Filreis: You said that of you and your colleagues: so many people edited, and editing is a generous thing to be doing. She meant it. Devaney [ reads ] : From Jeffrey Julich.
And there was a conversation on the Buffalo poetics list about one such word that appears in the work: D-E-E-N. Nobody could figure out what that was, what word that would be the end of.
You know, things come along, and then you discover what they mean. So I wanted to show things coming into memory, or coming into meaning. So words not yet formed into their wholes. And that was the reason I used the truncated words. Jim Carpenter: Yeah, this is the left-field question.
I have an interest in assessing the quality of computer programs, and am trying to develop a hypothesis that the problem with computer programming arises from the fact that we use engineering practices to construct them. You alluded to some tactical approaches there: rearranging words, extracting words, and so on. Carpenter: But it seems to me that there might be a generalization that one could make there, that in approaching different kinds of texts, and trying to make those texts give up their essence that they are trying to obscure, that there might be some general principles in poetic practice that one would use to engage texts that in other senses are unapproachable.
So, is there, in your view, a set of resources there, or in poetic practice, that are generally valuable in engaging other kinds of literary practice? Lyn Hejinian at Kelly Writers House in Hejinian: Well, I like the question a lot. I model my compositional methods on what I think of as thought-methods, how thinking occurs. In this Book. Additional Information. 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 mids, 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. 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.
Table of Contents. If you need your order sooner, consider purchasing from one of our retail partner links in the buying options. Thank you!
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.
The latter begins: Evgeny Onegin is a novel of manners Belinsky called it encyclopedic , a family saga, an autobiography, an aimless plot with the symmetry of time, an impression of philosophy, and Dead Souls is an epic, hopeful of resurrection The epic, said Mikhail Kheraskov, will remember important, memorable, famous events occurring in this world to cause important change, or it will sing of events occurring in a certain state to glorify life, or occasion peace, or finally to provoke a transition to a different condition Here is the paradox Hejinian embodies in Oxota.
Dead Souls is written in prose but its domain is that of epic; Onegin is in verse, but it is more properly understood as a novel of manners or autobiography. One needn't choose one or the other "Equally marvelous, as Gogol said, are the lenses that contemplate a star and those that study a bug" , but Hejinian's personal predilection is for the freedom of the Pushkin model: "Every fact could break through deterministic constraints," and moreover "Everyone has to eat and many eat potatoes, but some of those also eat pineapples.
But "Even 'it' is irregular," she responds, referring both to Evgeny Onegin. The resulting design resembles, as Hejinian herself notes, those picture books where little figures are buried inside the outlines of larger images, their detection presenting a challenging "quandary for children": Things in the picture are hidden but once found one can never not see them though to someone's who's never looked they're still out of sight, lost in the lines This is precisely what happens to the reader of Oxota.
Consider the title Oxota the hunt. The first overt explanation of its meaning comes near the end of the "novel" in chapter It's characteristic of a Russian novelist to reveal some lack of confidence in the relationship between words and their things A chair but not sure what sits and what will match it Noon freezing on the spot we don't remember Each action hangs, inconsequentially, over objects How many alternatives there must be How many patient comparisons await fulfilling Unextracted paradoxes, breathless empty ice streets, anticipated catastrophes with no one approaching, love not provided with intrigue It was Zina who called it oxota The hunt Here Hejinian refers obliquely to Roman Jakobson's famous distinction between the metaphoric and metonymic poles of language, the former or figure of similarity said to belong to poetry, the latter or figure of contiguity , more properly to realistic prose fiction.
Postmodern poetry has challenged and undermined this opposition; the metonymic mode Jakobson associated with Tolstoy's and Chekhov's fiction has become prominent in lyric as well. Then, too, theorists from Lacan and Genette on down have been at pains to show that Jakobson's sharp dichotomy between the two will not stand up to scrutiny.
Metaphors can work metonymically and vice-versa; figures of similarity and contiguity are always intertwined. Hejinian, in any case, adapts the Jakobson model to her own purposes. In a lecture to the Kootenay School of Poetics at Vancouver, she described her desire for a phenomenological "description" that would avoid both "after-the-fact realism, with its emphasis on the world described the objects of description " and the "organizing subjectivity that of the perceiver-describer.
Metonymy moves attention from thing to thing; its principle is combination rather than selection. Compared to metaphor, which depends on code, metonym preserves context, foregrounds interrelationship. And again in comparison to metaphor which is based on similarity, and in which meanings are conserved and transferred from one thing to something said to be like it, the metonymic world is unstable.
Comparing apples to oranges is metonymic. Here Hejinian stresses the instability rather than the supposed realism of the metonymic world. In "The Formative Properties of Words" , Hejinian gives us some idea of what such a "hunt syntax" involves: I cannot imagine a glass prose But I was losing interest in the phenomenology of my dreams Daylight was thicker than it seemed-- with augmentation, odor, air Where are words changed?
I f the language of transparency, a "glass prose" is inadequate, "reality" does make its demands on the poet: "Daylight was thicker than it seemed-- with augmentation, odor, air. From Writing is an Aid to Memory and the first version of My Life , to her recent long metaphysical poem "The Person," Hejinian has refused all notions of the self as "some core reality at the heart of our sense of being," the still dominant myth of the "artist's 'own voice,' issuing from an inner, fundamental, sincere, essential irreducible, consistent self, an identity which is unique and separable from all other human identities.
This suggests that when speaking Russian a self is felt but has no proper name, or that the self occurs only in or as a context but is insufficiently stable to occur independently as a noun.
Just the same, this particular peculiarity of Russian grammar helps Hejinian articulate her own view that "The person We come to know the way Hejinian's language works--her stylistic choices are highly particularized -- but we learn little about the poet's past or present circumstances, and it would be difficult to say that she has such-and-such attributes and character traits, or to comment on her nature.
Psychology, in this scheme of things, means, not self-revelation but, in Wallace Stevens's words, "description without place," the anchor being the buried but ever present analogy to Evgeny Onegin.
Here is Chapter One: This time we are both The old thaw is inert, everything set again in snow At insomnia, at apathy We must learn to endure the insecurity as we read The felt need for a love intrigue There is no person-- he or she was appeased and withdrawn There is relationship but it lacks simplicity People are very aggressive and every week more so The Soviet colonel appearing in such of our stories He is sentimental and duckfooted He is held fast, he is in his principles But here is a small piece of the truth-- I am glad to greet you There, just with a few simple words it is possible to say the truth It is so because often men and women have their sense of honor In good epic tradition, the poem opens in medias res with "This time," the implication being that "this time" arriving again in the Soviet Union?
But "This time we are both" immediately displays Hejinian's deceptive flatness : the language seems totally ordinary, and yet it throws out any number of plot lines.
Perhaps it means that "We are both here," but then who are "we"? And what is it we both are? Both poets, one American, one Russian, or one woman and one man? Both guests of the Soviet government?
Both ready for a relationship? Or, if "both" is construed, not as the predicate nominative but as the modifier of the predicative adjective s , we might read it as "both tired and hungry, both frightened and elated, and so on. Something, in any case, is about to happen "this time. In the meantime, the stage is set for the unfolding of events: "People are very aggressive and every week more so," where the reference to "week" is a play on the standard complaint that "Things get worse every day!
And now the stanza ends on a turn of phrase that is brilliantly deployed throughout Oxota , especially in the early chapters, where the poet records how it feels to be a linguistic alien in a country one wants so badly understand. Many of us have had the experience of meeting foreigners who seem extremely, if not excessively polite until we realize they are speaking a careful English based on the classroom model or grammar book. Translated into colloquial English, line 12 carries something like the locution, "Believe me, I am really happy to meet you.
Accordingly, for the "we" who are "both," assimilation will depend, not on finding out what the words mean, but how they are used, how to read the signs. And, as Hejinian wittily implies throughout, this is no easy matter.
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