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Recognized today as one of the great works of contemporary American literature, My Life is at once poetic autobiography, personal narrative, a woman's fiction, and an ongoing dialogue with the poet and her experience. Upon its first Sun & Moon publication in 1987, the book began (and continues to be) taught in hundreds of college and university courses. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

On:My life

As mush as I love, and say that I love these widely experimental and new ways of looking at things, I cannot really work through the language presented as a dialogue to discuss these newer things.They can be looked at whimsically, and without much contrariness on the part of the reader.However, approaching Lyn Hejinian's My Life, I was hoping in fact for something more along the lines of a classical narrative, something that was decidedly missing in as I turned the pages.I was able to understand that she had a couple of kids, but seemingly never had sex.Quite honestly, I have no idea what Hejinian's life was like, and this novel/poem/chap book obscures any understanding that I might want to know, as the assertions in My Life are vague, repetitious, and quite frankly uninteresting.

My Life
If you like poetry, disguised as prose, with sentences oddly juxtaposed enlarging their possible meaning (I do), then read this autobiography.

Cryptic, yet Beautiful
I'm no college graduate, so I don't know how useful a review by me would be, but I have read this book twice now and can give a rudimentary review.I'm sure I can give nothing as well as my professor has given, though.

If you're looking for a plot or storyline, look elsewhere.You won't find it here.If what you're looking for is experimental poetry that grasps beauty, then here it is.This book is great for bathroom reading or to discuss with your highly intellectual friends.I can't imagine anybody reading this book who doesn't enjoy the intellectual fittings of life.

I guarantee, no matter how bright you are, you'll get lost reading this book.What's going on?What does she mean?Will we ever know?Well, no, not really.But I suppose that's not the point.I believe the point here is that every reader is allowed to pluck which meaning they wish from the text, and create whichever story lines they wish.Fortunately, it is written in very short increments for the attention impaired, such as myself.

The exposition itself is brilliant.There are as many chapters as there were years in her life when she wrote the book, and there are as many sentences in each chapter as there are chapters.I stole the idea myself the first time I read the book and wrote a memoir called "My Crib of My Life."People liked it (or at least they said they did.)Of course my memoir was nowhere as cryptic or as beautiful.If cryptic and beautiful are what you are looking for, then you will definitely find it here.

Life as Language
This was a difficult read for me, personally. I was intrigued by what the poet was trying to accomplish, but I found myself often drifiting off because I wanted line breaks to help move me through the poem.

Hejinian's poems are very dense but although difficult to read, quite fascinating. I was drawn to the way she used repetition throughout the poems; in particular I was impressed by the way she used specific lines in their entirety in different poems throughout the book to given a reverberation to the life she is chronicling.

This is a must read for any modern poet and is a great collection for instruction. The everday reader, however, may find this a difficult group of poems to get into because of their densitry, but we should all be up for adventure and challenge :)

A Must
In order to fully understand the postmodern world, the subversive industry of autobiograpy, the collision between poetry and prose, the influence of hybridity, and the potential of revision any reader of contemporary poetry needs to begin here.

The writing is complex without being hermetic.Difficult without being resistant.My Life is a necessary text.Generous in its insights, its complicated declarations.This is a perfect marriage of philosophy, poetry, and mathematics.

Read this always and often.

... Read more

Product Description
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 mid-1970s, 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. Prominent among them are Sir Francis Bacon and Enlightenment-era explorers; Faust and Sheherazade; Viktor Shklovsky and Russian formalism; William James, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. 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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Dense, productive essays
These are dense, stimulating essays by one of the most articulate and accessible of the "Language Poets." ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

Smug, too Ashberyian, and lacks inspiration
I can't say that I enjoyed reading this. It is too much like a diary and the lines are quite plain. It is very dry and only mildly witty. There are hints of Ashbery's introspective yadda-yadda-ing and some general observations. I do not think Lyn could've published this had her name not been accompanied by a tiny bit of scholarly repute (and the street cred by association that she has via John Zorn). Even in Ashbery's blurb on the back cover one almost get a sense that Ashbery was yawning as he wrote it. It is too self-indulgent and pseudo-intellectual. The language is too vague and the diciton is anything but evocative.

The Die Ain't Cast
The Fatalist is a terrific instance of Hejinian's work in recent years: a lush re-purposing of sinuous, elegant syntactic constructions to hoover up just about anything that happens in the mind in time. Everything from childhood Victoriana to John Zorn ensembles get gathered up into the poem, which becomes a field of surprise and play in every sense: play of signifiers, mind at play, the play's the thing, play that funky music, you name it. Because her lines push clauses through time with the variety and complexity usually attributed to "fine" writing, the poems slip easily past the centurions of craft--there's no doubt among the doubting that this counts as poetry. But beneath the surface shine, The Fatalist in fact works as "a site of resistance to resolution" that refuses any logic (of mortality, of fate) that insists things have to end. ... Read more

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Fiction. Russian-American Studies. Composed of 270 free sonnets inspired by Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin, OXOTA: A SHORT RUSSIAN NOVEL is a stunning edifice in language that proposes and enacts an intimate and restive portrait of life in Russia today. The fruit of many years' interest in, study of, and travel through the country, OXOTA (which means "the hunt" in Russian) transforms with epic confidence Hejinian's social and artistic life abroad into a richly peopled landscape, into a literature brimming with signification. ... Read more

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At every level of Anne Tardos's paintings, films, poetry, and cross-genre work, the familiar is engaged while acknowledging the violently contested landscape of what we think we know. Connection is the dominant mode of composition. A brand new vernacular emerges when Tardos's unique voice announces itself in her rapid language switches, gleeful humor, and rare willingness to blend the personal and political. With new and previously published work as well as an introductory interview with the author and prominent poet Lyn Hejinian, The Dik-dik's Solitude is the first comprehensive collection of work by this significant, avant-garde contemporary artist.

Interview by Lyn Hejinian. ... Read more

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The Best American Poetry 2004 celebrates the vitality and richness of poetry in the United States and Canada today. Guest editor Lyn Hejinian, acclaimed for her own innovative writing, has chosen seventy-five important new poems and contributed a provocative introductory essay. Through her selections, Hejinian has created an essential nexus -- a meeting place for readers to encounter an extraordinary range of poets. With illuminating comments from the writers, and series editor David Lehman's insightful foreword evaluating the current state of the art, The Best American Poetry 2004 is an indispensable addition to a series that has established itself as the first word on what's new and noteworthy in the poetry of our times. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

Not much of a good read
I'd heard of "langauge poetry" from some literary friends and picked this up to see what one of its advocates was up to. Prof. Hejinian may be a fine teacher and person, but most every time I waded into this volume, the results were disappointing. Many of her selections seemed to like the sound and juxtapositions of certain phrases, but their meaning often escaped me, overall. Without that, this reader wondered what was the point.

elephants and blind men
I have loved poetry ever since childhood; my first favorite poem started, "Once there was an elephant who tried to use the telephant."As I've matured, so has my taste in poetry. Rather than ranting against this poetry as I've done on another review I've decided to accept that this poetry is cutting edge and a little over my head right now. A book of The Best American Poetry should seek out poems that are the highest state of the art and not put out a book of the best liked poems. So, -feeling some envy of those who can enjoy such poems, I will spend my time, as I have for years, on those poets in between the Best and the Worst.

Unless you're into language poetry...
don't buy this.I'm sure these poets are very good at what they do, but I derive no pleasure from this volume.I usually dust this book off when unsuspecting undergraduates gripe about Yeats or B.H. Fairchild.After I dropped "State of the Union" on them, they were much more appreciative of my syllabus content.

Worse Than Magnet Poetry
There's difficult poetry, and then there's unreadable poetry--most of this book is the latter.

With a few exceptions (about five of the seventy-five poems), the poems in the anthology revel in extreme post-structuralist, avant-garde, or Language poetry obfuscation, resting largely on the philosophy that language conveys no meaning, so therefore any attempt by a writer to impart something other than meaninglessness to the reader is futile.

Obviously, one can debate such a philosophy, but I don't have the space for it here.However, there's nothing novel about such an approach to poetry; it's been done for over thirty years.

For a more scholarly assessment of such poetry, I recommend Joan Houlihan's "Three Invitations to a Far Reading" on the Contemporary Poetry Review website.

Generally incomprehnsible
With few exceptions these poems show the arrogance of poets who think conveying any sort of meaning is a cliche.
Read Ted Kooser's Delights and Shadows for an anitdote. (Thank God we have a poet laureate from the Plains!) ... Read more

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"Lyn Hejinian's work increasingly explores poetry's relation to knowledge. But rather than abstract frameworks, one finds [in "A Border Comedy"] coyotes, geese, didactic asides, horses, philosophical anecdotes...and a great deal of urinating. ...[It] forces us to catch our breath and occasionally to huff." Lytle Shaw

7 x 10 in. ... Read more

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This book-length poem by one of the foremost American poets, is an inquiry into the nature of time, chance, and being. In the first few months of its publication it has earned praise from Publisher's Weekly, American Poet, Rain Taxi, among other literary reviews. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

happy to toil through "happily"
It takes me a while to truly feel "the pleasure of impossibility" (404) in Hejinian's essay, but after reading it several times I begin to settle into the hurdy-gurdy rhythm of her "accordioning" sentences (384).Then I begin to be less resistant to "take what happens to be happening to value finitude" (400).I'm unaccustomed to thinking of a poem in terms of its ability to help me resign myself to the quotidian, though this is of course what a lot of modern poetry tends to do, if one reflects on it.Still, a modern poet is unlikely to come straight out and articulate the contours of her relationship to ordinariness in no uncertain terms.

This is an aspect of Hejian's ostranenie, or "making strange," that Perloff mentions when she discusses her (185), though she does not discuss this aspect of the essay.Many tend to think of essayistic style and the didacticism that often results from "it" as outside the purview of "good poetry," at least since Alexander Pope and such feel-good hits as "Essay on Man."Sentences that lead us to question a thesis such as "Is happiness the name for our (involuntary) complicity with chance?" (387) seem alien to writing with no set right margin.The essay is made doubly strange when one realizes that the thesis that implores us to be happy with happenstance can never really arrive at a set thesis, a stable emphasis or accent.The only proofs she can offer us for her argument are disproofs to the attitude in us which invents a "future [that] looks back to trigger a longing for consonance" (386).The perpetual "suspending judgment" that results (386), brings us to what Derrida calls an "athesis," a thesis that posits nothing.

Despite her essayistic tone and her arguments that can never fully arrive at themselves, Hejinian is, after all, well within one of the classic spaces of the modern, the same continuous or eternal present that Stein and Beckett, say, interrogate ceaselessly, alongside of countless New Age figures.In doing this in her personalized accordioning style that never stops making strange, she explores one of the cruxes of modernist poetics as well as I've seen, which may be boiled down to this question:What makes poetry poetry in the lack of its conventional trappings (meter, rhythm, rhyme, sense, sensibility)?Hejinian seems to think that this occurs in something like a "poetics of space," as Gaston Bachelard puts it in a book I have yet to read, a space where the poet feels disjunctive meter, rhythm, rhyme, sense, and sensibility as it occurs within her consciousness, rather than yoking these into preconceived form on page.While workshops have long since given up considering matters having to do with meter and rhyme, the poetic crux I stated above does not quite go away.Again, what makes poetry poetry?Doesn't an essay accomplish the same thing that so many published poems do?Some of the poems in popular periodicals like New Yorker may as well be flash fiction (often making them rotten poetry).Hejinian's answer might go something like this.One just feels poetry differently, feels its disjunctive meter as it splays across internal time:

Now is a blinding instant one single explosion but somehow
since part of it gets accentuated
And each time the moment falls the emphasis of the moment
falls into time differently
No sooner noticed no sooner now that falls from something
Now is a noted conjunction
The happiness of knowing it appears
We see this argument put into praxis in her poem My Life to wonderful effect.

Question:
Is the "de-liberating" that occurs by placing a hyphen at the end of the first line here one of these happy accidents?If it is or if it is not, what is the effect?

There is activity in a life, i.e. conduct asserts the power of de-
liberating without knowing how a state of being is brought
into existence every so often often

Ruminative and glad
Happily is a long / short poem (about 40 pages) in which Hejinian's "language of inquiry" tackles one of the more prevelant inquiries a person is bound to undertake:happiness.Happiness does not equalbanality or "prettiness."In fact, in "Happily,"Hejinian has distilled the sensuality of reason, the phenomenology ofhistory / chronology, and the last century (from Stein to Mac Low) ofpoetic experiment and cleared space for a new conception of beauty.Onewhich is pointed, poignant, and pleasantly difficult -- the poem positshappiness as a choice implicating a context:"history with afuture" -- the book is necessary.And that's more than I can say formany other books on the subject. ... Read more

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Literary Nonfiction. Biography and Memoir. Part Nine in the ongoing series of collective autobiography, THE GRAND PIANO: PART 9 continues to mark the events, movements and intersections among ten contributing 1970s Language poets. "Like the early avant-gardes, the poets who gathered at THE GRAND PIANO developed not only an exacting and liberating poetics, but also a way of living-in-art. Its chronicle here is many things, among them a deeply human and amusing map to building community through literature in this most unlikely of times"--Cole Swensen. ... Read more

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A long overdue collection of critical writing on Oppen's substantial legacy.

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uncollected longer poems from late 70s to present ... Read more

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Poetry. Across several decades, Lyn Hejinian has been constructing an exemplary and profoundly influential body of exploratory work, work of a discrepant lucidity that undermines commonplace assumptions of the permissible and the possible. Her poetry and her prose, as well as her frequent artistic collaborations, probe with incisive wit and formal invention fundamental questions of subjectivity and community, content and communication, gender and expressivity. THE BEGINNER was originally published in a limited edition in 2001 by Spectacular Books, and is now being reprinted by Tuumba Press. "I'm beginning, and thinking that I think myself launched into something, but the actual beginning has occurred long before and as a result the thought that "I'm beginning" is not a beginning but a pause, a phrase, though one incorporated into a beginning (the beginning concealed around it)." ... Read more

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Accompanying a unique exhibition at the respected Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, this book is a remarkable combination of the work of poets and artists, that explores in new ways the relationship between the visual and the verbal. In his preface, Charles Bernstein writes:"Not words and pictures but poems as visual objects. Not poems about pictures but pictures that are poems. Not works closed in a book but hanging on a wall or suspended from the ceiling or rising from the floor or sounding from inside a figure or embedded with paint on a canvas or written in the sky or flickering on a screen." Co-curator Jay Sanders explains in his introduction:"We had a gallery and we wanted to flood it with poetry. Not with "poetic" artwork, but with actual poetry, made by poets. But, we have gallery walls, not pages in a book. So we organized a show of art overrun with poetry and a show of poetry riddled with art."

Artists include among others: Carl Andre, Arakawa, Susan Bee, Tom Phillips, Mira Schor, Kiki Smith, Philip Guston, Wallace Berman, Robert Smithson, Richard Tuttle, Michael Snow. Poets include among others: David Antin, Robert Creeley, Clark Coolidge, Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, John Cage, Madeline Gins, Lyn Hejinian, Kenneth Goldsmith, Robert Grenier, Tan Lin, Jackson MacLow, Steve McCaffery, Emily McVarnish, Nick Piombino.

Edited by Charles Bernstein and Jay Sanders.
42 b&w.
7 x 10 in. ... Read more

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poetry, Russian, tr Lyn Hejinian & Elena Balashova ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

the most profound visionary poet in 20 yrs.sur/reality melts
this modern soviet poet breathes passion into everyday concsiousness.the dreams of the surreal possess his soul.the sound of the words read like much meaning.truely inspirational perception that will change how you see everything.wallace stevens meets william burroughs.borges.cortazar.you must have "xenia"&"desciption".what ive come to expect from sun & moon[press]...classics!perfect along side of bob dylan or w.c.williams in the coffeehouse style madness.leaves you craving more. radical.druid/gypsy/priestess.untill you are me & i am you ... Read more

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Like many of Shklovsky's works, Third Factory is not easily classified. In part it is a memoir of the three "Factories" that influenced his development as a human being and as a writer, yet the events depicted within the book are fictionalised and conveyed with the poetic verve and playfulness of form that have made Shklovsky a major figure in twentieth-century world literature. In addition to its fictional and biographical elements, Third Factory includes anecdotes, rants, social satire, literary theory, and anything else that Shklovsky, with an artist's unerring confidence, chooses to include. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Part memoir, part political allegory
Written by Viktor Shklovsky, a leading figure in the Russian Formalist movement in the 1920s, Third Factory is an engaging literary narrative translated from Russian into English by Richard Sheldon. Part memoir, part political allegory, part personal anecdote and part novel, Third Factory is replete with thought-provoking conundrums arising from a complex and imperfect world, as summarized in the three "factories" of life, which form the core of this engaging and erudite work. Enhanced with an Afterword by Lyn Hejinian and an informative introduction by Richard Sheldon, Third Factory is an especially recommended reading for students of 20th Century Russian Literature. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Lyn Hejinian, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 1062 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

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This digital document is an article from The Review of Contemporary Fiction, published by Review of Contemporary Fiction on June 22, 2003. The length of the article is 2842 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Lyn Hejinian. Happily.(Book Review)
Author: Danielle Dutton
Publication: The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Refereed)
Date: June 22, 2003
Publisher: Review of Contemporary Fiction
Volume: 23Issue: 2Page: 128(2)

Article Type: Book Review

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