by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno
Lyn Hejinian, American essayist, translator, and publisher, and one of our most important experimental poets of the 20th and 21st centuries, died on February 25, 2024. A prime mover in Language Poetry, Hejinian’s work always called attention to the language she used in creating the (perhaps) meaning in the poem. “Language is restless,” she wrote. And for Lyn, often, language, circling back on itself, is itself the meaning. A process not so dissimilar to that of the mythological Ouroboros, the snake, who in biting its tail both consumes and rebirths itself.
Or as she relates it: “Language—language in the abstract, language as it sits in a dictionary, language as the raw material of thinking—has no style of its own. It’s an instrument of inquiry and discovery and an improvisatory medium. Style emerges as language is used, but I’ve never tried to develop style for its own sake.”
Interestingly, her most read and acclaimed book is My Life (1980; rev 1987), an autobiographical prose-poem. Structured in narrative form, it is a remarkable achievement and yet I have always found it curious that her most conventional writing was by far the most popular. Which is not to say that it is a traditional memoir. Rather, her technique is to move from subject to subject without clear transitions. The result mimics life and memory where what happens next is not always preceded by what came before.
Her poetics and essays are bold and fierce. In person, Lyn was generous, lively, engaged and engaging, always interested in what someone had to say. A conversation with her was wide-ranging—from the personal to politics to poetics. She was a force on the page and as a person.
Her more than 30 publications spanned decades, from her self-published book of poems a gRReat adventure (1972) to her latest, Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday (2023), a collection of essays.
Lyn grew up in Berkley and Cambridge, Mass. Her father was a professor, first at U.C. Berkeley, then at Harvard. Hejinian, herself, graduated from Harvard in 1963. From 1990 until 1998 she was a member of the core faculty of the graduate program in poetics at the New College of California. In 2001 until her retirement in 2020, she taught at University of California, Berkeley.
In May of 2020, as part of the 150 Years of Women at Berkeley series, Hejinian was interviewed by students Emma Campbell, Kahyun Koh, and Anya Vertanessian. In answer to the question “Who or what inspired you to pursue a career in poetry?, she responded:
I think the first inspiration was my father’s typewriter….When I was in 3rd or 4th grade he gave me his typewriter….I set the typewriter on a desk in my bedroom and began to write. Or, rather, to type. Pounding the keys and seeing sentences emerge on the page, I felt important and powerful. I was, in effect, escaping the limitations of gender. I could imagine myself as anyone and make it “real” (in print). I wrote a radio play featuring characters from a then popular children’s radio show, “Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders,” a western whose main character was an orphan lad named Bobby Benson. I imagined myself as Bobby Benson and in the play “I” lived through a vast melodrama. I behaved heroically, of course. I laugh at this now, but having the typewriter—the tool of my trade—gave me a sense of having a trade, that of a writer.
And what a trade she created for herself! Her legacy will live on in what is now at least two generations of poets writing under her sign. And her advice to these poets? “Write badly, write lies, pay attention constantly to the language around you. Write yourself into strange or dangerous places, write things you don’t understand. And always write in ways that make you excited to be writing.”
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