Lucy Ton That
My Life, by Lyn Hejinian. Green Integer, 2002, 165pp., $10.99
There is no wrong way to “read” Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. I’m even inclined by the opacity of Hejinian’s other poetic and theoretical works to say that, should you somehow obtain a copy of this book, rotate it 180 degrees, and “read” it upside down, Hejinian would be pleasantly surprised that you declared the experiential quality of the text essentially more important than its semiotic qualities.
Sprawling and difficult, My Life actively seeks to avoid categorization. It was first published in 1980 and expanded in 1987 from 36 essays/poems of 36 lines/sentences into 45 essays of 45 lines. (Hejinian toggled these lengths to the age of her own body, making this list compositionally literal.) It is an autobiography yet not autobiography, poetry yet not poetry, prose—and not prose. It blazes through Hejinian’s life, obliterating chronology and meditating on both the sublime and the mundane. Reading Hejinian shift from experience-oriented details to philosophical statements to curious platitudes is like climbing a mountain on a narrow switchback. But despite the title of My Life, and its short length, you might reach the summit not knowing very much at all about the life of Lyn Hejinian. The merits of the text and its political ambitions lie in this un-knowing.
We are first invited in, as if guests at the front door, by Hejinian, who starts with color:
“A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned home from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left, was purple—though moments are no longer so colored.”
And immediately, she intimates the shifting opacities and illegibility of the text that will follow.
This shifting legibility is certainly not universally admired. In a 2013 review of My Life in the Chicago Tribune, Michael Robbins sulkily complains of Hejinian’s impenetrability:
“I find it more stimulating as a lesson about what I want from a text (for Lacan, language and desire are closely related forms of otherness). “My Life” is repellent: My attention bounces off it like a rubber ball. Indeed, I’ve found that it’s best to let my attention flit across the poem’s surfaces, not worrying much about semantics.”
Robbins may be shallow, but he is not wrong. He problematizes motion and magnetism in My Life. The bouncing rubber ball is gravitational, flying on and off the text—and both the “on” and the “off” are important. It is just as important that the rubber ball comes back down to earth as it is that it enters an atmosphere outside of the world of Hejinian’s poem. I find Hejinian’s language, especially her image pairings, to be isolating, individuating, collectivizing, and nostalgic. Between adjacent lines about counseling summer camp and the nearness of pant-pockets to the body–“keeping the pennies warm. Or haylike, and muzzy”–I lose myself in the drift of my own associations. The cold embarrassment of loose change scattering out across the floor of the dorm laundromat, finally fleeing from my most worn dungarees. The beady dryer lint that is returned to me, in the pockets of those same pants, like a small offering. The drift is the smell of the Branford laundry room, the water that pools in front of washer twelve, the empty plastic basket of condoms—sad.
The pull is fantastic. Like Robbins’ rubber ball (yellow, in my imagination), I eventually fall back into the world of Hejinian’s My Life. Upon my first reading of My Life, I thought I had figured out Hejinian’s game: a pattern appears between the pages. All of the text on the page is left justified, save for a small square of white space in the top left corner, like each page is dogeared. In these little white matrixes, Hejinian places a refrain. Examples include, “A pause, a rose, something on paper,” “As for we who ‘love to be astonished,’” “A name trimmed with colored ribbons,” and my personal favorite: “I never swept the sand from where I was going to sit down.” Just as you begin to drift, a Hejinian refrain appears to pull you back, unblemished by a particular context or meaning because, as you will come to understand in the following pages, Hejinian constantly recontextualizes them.
The associative lucidity of My Life should not be explicated from its political commitments. My Life was one of the defining works of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics movement. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group (including Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, and Susan Howe) was a constellation of avant-garde poets and theorists all loosely interested in the experiential qualities of language. It is instructive to know that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics were mostly defined in negatives, born from a repulsion of New Critical tendencies and a repudiation of mainstream American politics. Prevailing New Criticism ideas held that poetry should be a closed system, unbothered by the affect and biography of both the reader and the author, and always analyzed without mind to authorial intent. Many L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets took their cues from Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, a literary theory of understanding language as more open-ended and available to interpretation. As Douglas Messerli writes, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets were concerned and consumed with experience and interpretations (subject to both the identities or contexts of the reader, writer, and general world), which they found impossible under the New Critical theory.
These poets, like Hejinian, opted for art they found more participatory. Bernstein’s explanation of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics and opacity in his 1986 article “Thought’s Measure” can be very useful for understanding My Life and why one might “bounce on and off it like a rubber ball.” He writes that intimacy in writing “allow[s] the formal requirements of clarity and exposition to drop away. To speak intimately is to be free to speak as one will, not as one should. Confusion, contradiction, obsessiveness, associative reasoning, etc. are given free(er) play.” Within this freer play, arguably more can be experienced; more can be explicated (on the part of the writer and the reader) than from a clearly expositional text.
Hejinian takes up the project of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry not just in its experiential mantra, but in its politics. The experiential qualities of a poem, its penetrability, are themselves political. Though terse and often associative, Hejinian’s sections almost always include a plainly worded philosophical locality. “Like a mermaid blowing a fog tuba. Aesthetic discoveries are socially different from scientific discoveries, and this difference is political.” Her inclusions of Wittgenstein and Lenin, Franz Kline and George Sand, appear to me more expository than any of the fragmented photographic details of childhood, adolescence, or motherhood. Reflecting on both this theorized “pull” and the illuminating introduction to “Language” Poetries: An Anthology by Douglas Messerli, it occurs to me that in these moments Hejinian makes reading and writing a political performance:
“Writing, rather, becomes for most of them a political action in which the reader is not required merely to read or listen to the poem but is asked to participate with the poet/poem in bringing meaning to the community at large. As Craig Watson has concluded, such writing serves as ‘a performance in which the reader is both audience and performer.’”
Hejinian exercises her dexterity in accomplishing two things at once: willing us readers to be part of her project by provoking a direct reaction or association to the scholars and artists she names. Like many of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, Hejinian was a poet engaged in academia, a poet whose politics were grounded theoretically. As an active Marxist and anti-war activist, Hejinian takes for granted that whoever is reading her is already in community with her. She doesn’t feel the need to explain herself. One may decide that it is presumptuous of a poem (and by extension, its poet) to assume its readers have read the works of Wittgenstein, and perhaps that is true. But I propose that Hejinian is demanding we experience her and ourselves: even our own literary inadequacies. With our baggage and our Wittgenstein—read or unread—we associate ourselves into the fabric of the text, participating in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E project of deteriorating the author/reader binary and revaluing the qualities of literature. I have come to see My Life as a litany of sorts, particularly since many of Hejinian’s lines are in fact political and aesthetic petitions. She is seeking the action and assimilation of her larger political communities: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E theorists, Marxists, poets.
Hejinian, who passed this last February, leaves behind an innovative literary legacy. Hejinian doesn’t want to be understood—or at least not completely. She may want to understand us—but never totally. Just as “a name trimmed with colored ribbons” appears again and again throughout the text and then vanishes. For the first portion of the book, it appears that she uses the refrain as her own composition, extracting it from the pages ahead and placing it in the corner of the pages before. This type of foreshadowing facilitates a theory of cyclicality, the refrains reappearing like jumping gophers. But Hejinian abandons this towards the end of the book, where her language becomes even more opaque, her references even more esoteric. The distance between these pages is almost a decade, mapped onto time and space in ways I cannot explain to you except to say: a pause, a rose, something on paper.