Lyn Hejinian, The Proposition

Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, translator, and publisher and is a founding figure of the Language poetry movement of the 1970s and an influential force in the world of experimental and avant-garde poetics. She is the author of many poetry collections, including My Life and My Life in the Nineties (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), The Book of a Thousand Eyes (Omnidawn, 2012), The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003), and her landmark work My Life (Burning Deck, 1980). A native Californian, she teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Georgina Colby is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Westminster. She has published widely in the field of avant-garde writing and feminisms. Her books include Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible (2016), and the collections Reading Experimental Writing (2019) and, as co-editor, The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible (2020). She is the series editor (with Eric White) of Edinburgh Critical Studies in Avant-Garde Writing and Edinburgh Foundations in Avant-Garde Writing.

“I pause on the upswing of the thought” Lyn Hejinian writes in her 1966 poem “The Guermantes Way”, and what we experience over and over, within the air-born pause, is her notation of an abundant and openly curious joy. Hejinian’s vitalism was not only linguistic, as her long participation in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement in American poetry might suggest, but committedly conceptual. She brought a gloriously supple difference to the concept: in her work, thinking radiates delight and the poem is a unit of wonder poised in critical tension with its social and material environment. From the elegantly spare compositions of her 20s, which show an Objectivist-inflected ear for sound intricacy and internal rhyme held aloft by the play of pun and riddle, we are led to the prosier but still-airy texts of the early 80s, which prefigure the turn to the open ended, looping narration of the everyday achieved in her masterful book My Life. The poems collected in this volume, as well as her exhilarating preface (a crucial defence of poetry as revolutionary practise and radical hope), are shimmering evidence of Hejinian’s lifelong enquiry into the life of the mind as a form of living together in language.

• Preface to the Proposition (by Lyn Hejinian)The Proposition: Uncollected Poems 1963-19831963–1965The Grreat Adventure (1969–1970)A Month Without Days (1975)The Inclusions: 1974–1975Chronic Texts (1977)1977–19791979–19811981–19821983Critical EssaysCharles Altieri, The Proposition as Preamble: Lyn Hejinian’s Conative RealismLytle Shaw, Early HejinianEmily Critchley, Lyn Hejinian’s Faustienne beings-withJacob Edmond, Crossing Improvised Boundaries: Personhood, Poetry, EstrangementJessica Fisher, Lyn Hejinian’s ‘Allegorical Activism’Chronology of WorksList of ContributorsBibliography