Celebrating Lyn Hejinian: Reflections from Students, Friends, and Colleagues

Image of Lyn Hejinian with the text "Celebrating Lyn Hejinian"

July 10, 2024

This year, as we continue to celebrate the incredible life and work of poet Lyn Hejinian, we’ll be publishing a new series of remembrances across our department channels. In July and August, we’ll feature a weekly remembrance from a friend, student, or colleague of Lyn’s on our website. Essay-length pieces will feature here, while shorter remembrances will appear on our department Instagram account. All pieces will depart from a passage of Lyn’s writing selected by the individual. As Lyn wrote in My Life and My Life in the Nineties, “Any work dealing with questions of possibility must lead to a new work.” We hope you’ll join us in celebrating the wonderful possibilities opened by Lyn’s life and writing. Follow along here and also on our department Instagram @ucberkeleyenglish.

Remembering Lyn Hejinian | Charles Altieri

Charles Altieri is Professor Emeritus and Rachael Anderson Stageberg Chair Emeritus in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. His most recent publications include Literature, Education, and Society: Bridging the Gap, and Modernist Poetry and the Limitations of Materialist Theory: The Importance of Constructivist Values.

I always resented Lyn a little bit because I could not be as good a person as she was. I recognized that because I could not evade the way that she could inspire both love and respect in her students, while I had to settle for affability and respect. Still not a bad bargain, especially since I was unwilling and unable to provide the level of devotion and care that she gave to those students. I could take pleasure in observing Lyn’s ways, and learning to admire what I desired to imitate but realized I could not. Then an idea came to me. I could actively participate in Lyn’s virtues if I could persuade her to teach with me. Of course, persuading Lyn to take on more duties was the easy part. The tough part was figuring out what we could team-teach, since our canons were quite different. I think Lyn came up with a brilliant solution: we only had to increase our teaching load by 50%. She proposed her attending and occasionally lecturing in my Introduction to English Literature from 1870 to about 1950, while I would attend her creating writing course, for which she would save most of the spots for students from my lecture course. We both wanted the students to be readers and at least try serious writing. We taught this way twice, until I took on administrative duties. This teaching was one of the highpoints of my career at Berkeley. I will share two delightful memories. One is Lyn’s continual efforts to get me to include modernism in music as an aspect of the cultural framework for the experiments undertaken by writers. The other is getting to know the students in the creative writing classes far better than I at least got to know my students in the large lecture courses. The students in writing courses spoke more, and were far more revealing about their persons as readers and as denizens of a social world. Hearing Lyn in those courses and meeting with her about teaching, led me better to understand her imaginative priorities. And that affected my learning to read her work more imaginatively on my part. I wrote on her first published volume of poetry and on her poetics. Then recently I wrote on her early poetry, in relation to which I developed the concept of conative realism stressing the body’s orientation to what it can trust as knowings and ways of knowing. I regard this as one of my best essays, another reason for admiring and loving this person to whom I would always have to look up to, even if it meant being realistic about my own limitations.

Hejinian Grammar | Gillian Osborne

Gillian Osborne is a writer and educator, trained as a poet and scholar of 19th-c. American and environmental literature at UC-Berkeley. She is author of a chapbook of poems and drawings, basic research (oxeye, 2023), a book of essays, Green Green Green (Nightboat, 2021), co-editor of a scholarly collection on ecopoetics (Iowa UP, 2018), and an assistant teaching professor at Arizona State University’s Teachers College.

“[.. ] I like the tether
and send a message to a fugitive more and more
taken by the nightingale’s information which is all about
the desperately ungraspable vastness of meaning
everywhere and the fact that as flesh and blood
mortals we are doomed always to lose meaning
for lack of adverbs.

(The Fatalist, 29-30)

“Nothing can flicker that cannot linger. At one’s birth
many things have already happened. One’s fate is
what has happened to one, not what is going to happen. Think
of the future anterior: think of what will have been. It begins
(is beginning) right now. Happy Boxing Day.

(The Fatalist, 59)

Lyn Hejinian, The Fatalist, Omnidawn Publishing Inc., 2003.

The simple past is too pointillist. You can’t do anything with it once its door has closed. The dinner party is done. Time to put on your hat. Whereas, forms of ongoingness might infect the present, even the future. What you were studying might be what you are studying, what you will study, and will have studied. Tenses progress, and still the action remains.

Think of the past anterior. Wherein, I had been picking at cheese for some time in the grad student lounge when someone laughed close to my elbow and that laughter was Lyn. Now that she is no longer here, or there, I’ve been thinking a lot about the afterlives that language is. How a teacher goes on teaching, a writer writing, because words have a life of their own.

Which sounds like a truism, or one kind of literary fame, but it’s weirder than that. One thing I learned from Lyn is to look out for the gesture within the sentence. The movement within or beyond the whole. That’s where language is always lively apart from its instigators, speakers, or writers, where it lives not only in content, but also as ligaments. Not synopsis or character or summary or plot. As verbs and adverbs, prepositions and articles, that move, and link, or linger, as arms swing zippily, elbows knock, laughter moves through an entire face.

In this play of fidgety pieces, in Hejinian grammar, nouns are a bur, naming “products rather than processes,” and “obscur[ing] experience.” Nouns are lonely, rigid, monumental, phallic, static, etymologically belabored. Not nearly “fluid” or “fountainous” enough (The Fatalist, 54; “Two Stein Talks,” The Language of Inquiry, 93, 101). What is preferable is gushing friskily from the spout. Lyn admired adverbs above all.

“Constantly I write this happily,” begins one book with an adverb for a title, but it's in The Fatalist where adverbs get commended/theorized most (Happily, 3). “But many creatures have memory, maybe all / do, otherwise nothing would happen, adverbs slowly make this / suddenly clear.” “Feeling the slowness of the wide world fleetingly I’ll speak / to the points that make me hesitant to be / enthusiastic constantly” (The Fatalist, 26, 54). If fate is “what happened to one, not what is going to happen,” either way it’s verbs that conduct the happening. But adverbs matter so much because they are the garments, the “flesh and blood” even, that make transporting verbs seen. Receivable, but not cinched.

Adverbs accompany verbs through time, but not as keepers of time. As a parent’s care is satellite to a child’s growth. As a teacher limns where a student’s thought might go. Adverbs are the flicking strings following verb-kites as, together, they soar across clouds.

No Solutions | Andrew David King

Andrew David King is a doctoral student in English at Berkeley, where they studied with Lyn Hejinian as an undergraduate.

Lyn was both magpie and gift-bearing crow, collector and benefactor; her capacities to retain and bestow seemed unlimited. Fittingly, then, my memory of her is an anthology of comments, quips, and gestures, each as perennially insightful as it was acute in its context. While teaching a workshop in 2012, she described what I recall as an architecture class she’d taken at Radcliffe in which students constructed models as answers to design problems. The instructor—a man who, in Lyn’s account, possessed little English—would peruse the models and, for any he deemed unfit, would wave his hands and boom, “No solution!” I imagined how such a correction might’ve landed with Lyn given the playful sincerity with which she moved through the world; I could sense both shock and thrill in her retelling. The dismissal was uncompromising and full-throated, the kind of stance that might appeal, if only long after the fact, to someone who’d confided that she’d had an undergraduate habit of reading Shakespeare before writing her exams. Maybe the point of the story was about the necessity of revision. Or maybe it was about the impossibility of revising toward some ideal state—as if there were such things as solutions to aesthetic problems rather than the discovery or creation of new ones.

The spring before she died, I helped Lyn prepare the typescript of A Border Comedy for republication. Her search for an assistant, she made clear, was motivated less by a desire for convenience than by an awareness of time’s non-renewability, of its vanishing at an ever-increasing rate—an awareness she knew I shared due to my own chronic illnesses. Time’s inconsistency proved a theme of our last few exchanges. Replying to my request for advice about graduate schools several years ago, she reported that she’d been engaged in what she termed a “dialectical relationship” with social distancing, relishing solitude and feeling oppressed by it—and its temporalities—in turn. And yet the “forced reclusivity” of cancer treatment in a plague year, as she wrote in an email, provided her with long, uninterrupted stretches of time for reading, thinking, and writing. She described how it was either deep engrossment in these activities or the feeling of simply being overwhelmed by correspondence that sometimes delayed her reply. “Happily,” she noted, “the first of these is usually the case.” Her un-self-congratulatory determination to press onward with her work—so characteristic of her ethos as I knew it—furnished a model for moving through my own illness and isolation. It was months after her passing before I began to grasp the parallel between this practical lesson and what Lyn imparted in the classroom. However honest she was about what she didn’t like in a poem, about how much labor poetry could entail, her gift was one of generation, enthusiasm, and love: for what writer and poem, regardless of circumstance, still had time to become and do.

Less happily for those of us left behind, Lyn can no longer answer in the usual ways. At Tim Wood’s Holloway reading last April, where I first read the elegy I include here, I observed that my friendship with her hadn’t ended but changed. What I meant was that our own dialectical relationship—of call and response, exchange and silence—would now proceed by means of encounters, alone or with others, with her writings and thoughts. This elegy, written the evening of that sunny day in February when she died, was the first volley in that transformed conversation. Early that afternoon, a friend learned the news on social media and texted me. Searching online for information, I noticed that Lyn’s Wikipedia page hadn’t been updated. I put down my computer, sat on my bed, and closed my eyes. I was frustrated with myself for not having written her more recently; I hadn’t wanted to take up any more of her time while she was ill, trusting that we were both in each other’s thoughts. When I checked back fifteen minutes later, I saw that someone had updated her page with the year of her death but left the entry in the present tense. I rewrote a few sentences in the past tense before wondering whether I should’ve done so. It somehow seemed more accurate, even then, for the page to report that Lyn Hejinian is a poet, is a presence, is a vital force.

The elegy that follows was—is—an attempt to continue to speak to her despite knowing that this attempt can’t succeed. Granting that impossibility, the poem, in existing at all, takes the form of its denial. It clings to Lyn’s insistence, the last time we saw each other, that we’d have to talk about such-and-such next time, striving to both actualize and defer that time. Its four-word lines, a structure imposed in the spirit of Lyn’s use of formal constraints, contain lyrical gestures I suspect she’d reject, and she might’ve judged the thing too reverent on the whole. No solution, I can hear her saying. But that difference—all that makes the poem’s failures distinctly mine—tracks the necessary distance between student and teacher. It’s a distance that, in one sense, can only widen now, though I hope and trust it’ll narrow along other dimensions.

Something on Paper

I will now never
know what you were
going to tell me
about H. and her
illness but I did
learn of yours, the
cave yawning like a
bud into a blind
sea of signs taken
for human and signs
that never could be.
I ordered what you
said was your son’s
favorite salad while a
woman’s black schnauzer spoke
over all of us
from under a table.
I was aware of
the web of air
between our branches
and the cancer that
bedded down in the
navel of the maze.
I read the book
you gave me, read
it and read it.
Left my glasses in
thought at the lakeside.
We will have, you
said, to talk about
that later, but here
is an anecdote about
how the parking attendant
was the same for
two courses of chemo
five presidents apart. The
world is so much
worse now, isn’t it?
you said he said.
Medicine whistled at high
speeds thru our chests.
Your wig. My phrase.
Glasses of water at
attention. You denied story
had anything to do
with it. A bad
close reader, a close
bad reader, I pointed.
Here, here. Prey. Tell
the time that waits
in the next room
to wait. From behind
wood panels an instrument,
a siren. We went
from “Warmly” to “Love”
to “Warmly” and I
did not describe finding
my letter in your
archive as if our
meeting now were elsewhere.
I could’ve, but didn’t,
say I didn’t recall
anything I had said,
that my reply was
the tulip tree next
door. The night before
I heard via text
I dreamt of corridors
in a musky hall,
vending machines, the white
light of progress, not
thinking of the scene
of cold pastoral those
first nights in Willits
as I hallucinated them
from your early journals:
Tuumba, the dogs, the
children collaged with sun.
Seven minutes later I
saw no one had
updated your Wikipedia page;
forty-five minutes later
I saw they had.
My apology for the
manuscript’s lateness was to
put sentences in the
past tense and ask
the bottlebrush trees if
they might scrub harder
until any of the
visible invisible lines that
made sight difficult made
what sight’s difficulty was
after. Shameless, tired, I
asked you to repeat
what John Zorn said
to a telephone critic:
You know the Marlboro
Man? Well, I am
not the Marlboro Man.
Don’t come here again.
I knew what he
had said, forgot who
had said it, asked
to hear it again.
In seminar that day
you said you could
drop dead at any
moment, which is what
happens for all of
us from the perspective
of a subduction zone,
a reversion to the
meanness of the world
in matter’s blank ledger.
A student, not yet
a friend of clouds,
when you rose for
rest I pointed to
but couldn’t name things:
A pause. A rose.
Moon in the palm
of a motorcycle’s mirror.
Me on my back
in the delayed future,
withdrawal symptoms like gunshots
typed across the brain.
Abacus of pigeons on
a line that carries
in its fiber braid
a message that may
not for any number
of narrative reasons be
said to be heard

To Cross an Uncrossable Border: A Remembrance of Lyn Hejinian | Tim Wood

Tim Wood is the author of two books of poetry, Otherwise Known as Home (BlazeVOX, 2010) and Notched Sunsets (Atelos, 2016), and co-editor of The Hip Hop Reader (Longman, 2008). He has poems recently published or forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Action, Spectacle, Eunoia, and the Kelp Journal’s 2024 Ocean Poetry Anthology. His reviews and criticism can be found in The Iowa Review, the Colorado Review, Jacket2, and The Boston Review. He was Fulbright scholar at the University of Tübingen in Germany from 2013-2014 and served as the 2023-2024 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at U.C. Berkeley. He is a professor at Nassau Community College in Garden City, NY.

All the clouds can feel our bodies change
If we just use some imagination
Some instigation
Is that ambition?
Then let the rains descend
The imagination is useless unless the mind is free of prejudice
So that all the faculties can enjoy their objects
Objects turning day to night
Appearance to lightsource, fountains to rice
And what is knowledge in this condition?
Bondage?
Flight?
As if one’s image of oneself were now racing ahead in an effort to stay in sight
So as to be prepared
When you ask
Do you want to be lifted?

Lyn Hejinian, A Border Comedy, Granary Books, 2001.

These lines open A Border Comedy, Lyn’s fifteen “book” 218-page opus—I call it an epic, but I’m pretty sure Lyn would gently reject the genre categorization. When I first met Lyn in 1998 as her student at The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she was completing work on this project which she characterized as “a poem of forgetting.” In “Book Four,” she calls it, “A poem of metamorphoses, a writing in lost contexts” (63). The function of her forgetting was not about finding a nifty alternative to remembering but, instead, about overcoming remembrance by fashioning a poem of immanence: “And each of my returns to each of the books is prompted / To immediates in a sudden present / Only pastness, which provides forgetting, can provide it” (151). The poem keeps looking ahead. And yet, at the end of the “Sources,” there’s this last, italicized statement: “This book was begun on June 7, 1994 and finished May 27, 1997.” Given the poem’s methods, I’m not sure A Border Comedy can be fixed in time this way. And because the poem is a comedy, I wonder if this isn’t some sort of inside joke. In the poem, Lyn says, “I would write a line or two / No more / And go away / And come back another day only to add something that would change everything” (63). In 2001, when Granary Books published it, Lyn inscribed the copy she gave me with “story to story / To which everyone should add.” Can a poem that relies so heavily on immediacy and return and continuous addition ever really be finished?

When Lyn died, I recommitted these lines to memory to feel close to her. It was hard for me to believe that she had crossed a border that even the imagination can’t cross, and reciting these lines made a different bridge materialize, a bridge that has allowed me to “come back another day only to add something that would change everything.” That is to say, the very thing that keeps these lines, and Lyn, alive is how they transmogrify when we return to them. The first line encompasses all the clouds and a multitude of bodies and addresses a “we.” As the opening lines of the poem, they announce a joyous transformation and instigate a way of being in the world with others. In a few deft lines about the imagination, the mind, and all the faculties, the poem establishes a poetics of inclusive relation, and the quick improvisational catalog that follows shows the innovative play that happens when the imagination is released from the narrow logics of ideological sensemaking. Here, we get a hint of the manifold meanings proffered by both our senses and by language when other connections, and ultimately relationships, are allowed to arise.

Reciting the lines as an elegy, though, makes the meaning of the words change like clouds, like bodies, like bodies felt by clouds, like clouds that become figures for our eventual disembodiment. It has been raining a lot in Berkeley these days. Days awash and wiped clean under atmospheric rivers. The day Lyn died was one of the few completely sunny days Berkeley has had of late. So, this line—“Then let the rains descend”—that once seemed to me like a cheeky response to the question about poem’s “ambition” (and the poem is unapologetically ambitious) is now filled in this “sudden present” with a defiant acceptance of the fact that any radical transformation implies loss as well as possibility. The comic thrust of the lines—their happiness, pleasure, and wit—is tempered with the tragic as these mischievous transformations feel darker, sadder: the progress from day to night, appearance returning to its lightsource, and the lively flow of the fountains calcifying into rice. The comic vitality is still there to be sure, but there is also a lamentation for what, because it is life, cannot last.

The poem interrupts this brief catalog with a question: “What is knowledge in this condition?” I used to think the line meant to challenge knowledge as a category of thought or, at least, as the teleological goal of writing. I still think that. But it occurs to me now that the question is also a pivot toward a more conditional condition that makes questions of knowledge less of a concern. Whether knowledge is a form of bondage or flight or both is superseded by a disorientingly reflexive chase after one’s own image as it heedlessly skips ahead to “stay in sight” or, to hearken back to a few lines ago, to remain as an “appearance.” The poem keeps looking ahead.

This chase is emblematic of the poem’s mode of inquiry: “I thought I could, as it were, follow a poem that kept itself apart from me / And from itself” (63). The poem is made by going away and coming back. Racing ahead and coming back. Always coming back. Until the garrulous romp after one’s image becomes a little more urgent, a little more in haste, and, out of breath, one finally catches up to the poem from which one has kept oneself apart. All this to be “prepared,” a word that casts arrival into the future, that looks ahead to the question, “Do you want to be lifted?” There is evident levity in the question. This is the beginning of a comedy after all. (As one’s voice tends to rise, perhaps there is a levity in all questions?). In the poem, one asks the question to one’s own image, but I can’t help but see a disjuncture between the “one” and the “you”; the “one” attaches to the writer, the chaser, to Lyn while the “you” attaches to the reader, those of us left behind, to me. And here’s my answer: Yes, Lyn, I want to be lifted! We all do and were and are by you.

Thinking of the lines this way reminds me of a moment in another one of Lyn’s voluminous poems, The Book of a Thousand Eyes. In the midst of this commodious homage to Shahrazad’s unremitting storytelling, there’s this ditty: “Lyn? Lyn? Come here! Is that you? Lyn?” (146). I can hear Lyn calling to herself and me rooting her on, “Yes! Yes, it is!” It is just like you, Lyn, to race ahead so as to be prepared for when we ask. As anyone, especially any poet, who has ever known you will attest, all we ever had to do is ask and you would lift us up. You did this through your poetry, your publishing, your criticism, your lectures, your teaching, your correspondence, your life. You bound us to an ongoing poetics of inquiry so that our imaginations might take flight and imagine more and better and open endlessly.

from Jennifer Scappettone's Against the preemptive present*

This extract is from the essay "Against the preemptive present: Some things I learned about time, space, and school from Lyn Hejinian," and was originally published in the Jacket2* feature, Positions of the Sun: Lyn Hejinian and her students. We reproduce it here with gratitude to the editors and the author.

JENNIFER SCAPPETTONE is the author of the poetry collections The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-UpOpera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos, 2016), From Dame Quickly (Litmus, 2009), and SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: 2 Acts(The Elephants, 2018), and editor of Belladonna Elders Series: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse (with Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian, Belladonna, 2009). She has also authored the critical studies Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia University Press, 2014) and the forthcoming Poetry After Barbarism: Fascism, Xenoglossia, and the Invention of Motherless Tongues.As translator she has published Locomotrix, devoted to the poet-refugee from Fascist Italy Amelia Rosselli (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and she curates PennSound | Italiana.She is Associate Professor of English, Creative Writing, Romance Languages and Literatures, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization at the University of Chicago.

“‘Deathlessness’ immediately invokes the ‘breathlessness’ we thought / we’d half heard in the panting of deathlessness whose dashing / is life” . . . (The Fatalist, 2003). On the corporate platform for grief I captioned a photo of us on campus from five years ago standing back to back, laughing about being backpack twins I recall, with the following: “one of the moments stalled drawn from escapades with my teacher and dear friend and mentor Lyn Hejinian, whose presence at whatever distance rendered me coherent (if still difficult) in ways unthinkable now, against the backcloth of her stunning absence from the planet.” The utter disorientation with which body and consciousness received Lyn’s transition into another form, in spite of what I retroactively, of a sudden, understood as years of her preparing me (and herself) for the baffling fate, also brought home this fact for me: that through her I had been infused with the liberty to be “myself” in all its forms notwithstanding the world’s capacity or incapacity to get them or me; her very presence on earth ensured that I made sense. Moreover, it ensured that I should keep making sense. Had I only remembered in the moments when disillusioned by the careerists and trivialities of a society of “content management” I could have been at peace, for that one restless mind on the other end of the line was enough. Perhaps that’s what it means to be a great teacher: to be devoted enough to conversation to listen, to draw out the coherence in the Rube Goldberg machine of each beginner’s mind, each element an excitement, and to reflect that back, in what is ultimately an open, endless co-constitution of consciousness."

On Lyn Hejinian's The Unfollowing | Claire Marie Stancek

Claire Marie Stancek is a writer, editor, and educator. Her poetry collections include wyrd] bird (Omnidawn, 2020), Oil Spell (Omnidawn, 2018), and MOUTHS (Noemi, 2017). With Daniel Benjamin, she co-edited Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry (Tuumba/Giramondo, 2016). With the late Lyn Hejinian and Jane Gregory, she co-founded Nion Editions, a chapbook press that she and Jane now co-edit. Claire Marie earned a B.A. from the University of Toronto and holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Philadelphia.

I'm sick of public life, said the swallow to the bear, said the pigeon in the square to the python
O logic, o oaks by the football stadium, o red future rooster
Risotto!
The younger child is picking out a tune on a taut rubber band with her teeth
The other person in the waiting room at Big O Tires continues reading People
If nothing had a cause, cows could be hatched from robins and balls that fell on one day might float on another
Gratefully we watch a silent film
A clown in blue shoes, never slave to imagination, opens a satin-lined traveling case and removes a viola
A chill slip of spring's stalled layer comes unfastened
The whispering baker has no bottom to her bowl
O
We must not underestimate the risk of consciousness—it carries us into the outer world
The amiable gymnast lunges
There once was a daughter, the second of three—two is good, four is better, she said—do you agree?

Lyn Hejinian, The Unfollowing, Omnidawn Publishing, Inc., 2016.

Broadside of Lyn Hejinian Poem from "The Unfollowing"

On the wall across from my desk hangs a framed broadside of this poem of Lyn's. Often throughout the day, my eyes will fall on half a line and a fragment will leap into my thoughts: a swallow, a bear, a pigeon, a square, risotto. Such a haphazard style of reading seems peculiarly suited to this poem, which is taken from The Unfollowing, a book of sonnets composed entirely of non-sequiturs. As Lyn writes in her preface to the book, her non-sequiturs resist the logic of the sonnet in the way that life resists death: "I wanted each line to be as difficult to accept on the basis of the previous and subsequent lines as death is for we who are alive—a comparison I make intentionally, since my intention in writing the sequence of poems I'm calling 'The Unfollowing' was to compose a set of elegies." Resolutely secular as she was, Lyn would not have described this book as mystical, but I've always read it as a grimoire against death.

Now that Lyn is dead, I experience her non-sequiturs in a new way. The tendency these lines have to arrive mid-thought, while I’m writing an email, or attending a zoom meeting, instructs me in grief's profoundly interruptive capacity, its habit of butting in when least expected and turning my morning upside down. I understand The Unfollowing more deeply now. At the same time, Lyn's exuberance, her enormous energy and ability to bring people together in literary collaboration, intellectual discussion, and conviviality—whether through classes or reading groups she led, conferences she organized, presses she founded, dinners and drinks she hosted—still goes on in this world, in everything Lyn created. Is continuity in conflict with non-sequitur? Not necessarily, and certainly not for Lyn, since she thrived on the everyday’s recombinatory surprises. It’s this spirit of hers that continues. I still feel sustained by her immense liveliness, inspired by her active presence. The amiable gymnast lunges.

Daniel Benjamin, to whom I am now married, gave me this broadside many years ago, when we were just friends, and two eager graduate students in the Berkeley English Department. Daniel had been helping Lyn clear out her office and she gave him the broadside (and several others, which now hang all over our home) as a gift of appreciation. But Lyn's generosity was so instinctual and understated that she probably wouldn't have called it a gift. She would have said something like Daniel was clearing away some old things. Daniel went and had the broadside framed and then gave it to me as thanks for taking care of his cat while he was out of town. This was the atmosphere that Lyn cultivated and modeled, one of spontaneity and free exchange. Friendship with Lyn felt bounteous, joyful. She gave me a Dictionary of Angels, something she found in her bookshelf, when I was working on a manuscript about saints and Christian arcana. Every time she published a book, it would arrive at my home by mail. When later she drew me closer into her world as a small press publisher and invited me and Jane Gregory to found Nion Editions together with her, I saw that she had a long list of people who received gratis copies of the books she made. I don't know if Daniel and I would be together now if we hadn't begun our friendship under Lyn's guiding star. How many other love stories began with Lyn? How many friendships exist because of her?

From where I sit at my desk, the picture frame reflects a nearby window in such a way that the changing daylight is superimposed across Lyn's poem. This too feels right, another of Lyn's non-sequiturs. Lyn was a poet and a theorist of daily life—the greatest of all time, in my opinion. In my first year at Berkeley, I was lucky enough to participate in the first iteration of her "Poetics of Everyday Life" class, a version of which she conducted several more times. In that class, I began a daily writing project which Lyn said was one that I could write forever. All these years later, I'm still writing it. I look up. Lyn’s blue swallow points its beak toward the window's reflection as though poised to soar off the page and into the day.

Lyn Hejinian's Paratactic Plenitudes | Daniel Benjamin

Daniel Benjamin teaches English at Abington Friends School in Jenkintown, PA. With Kevin Killian and Kelly Holt, he co-edited Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan University Press, 2025). With Eric Sneathen, he co-edited The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman Books, 2017). With Claire Marie Stancek, he co-edited Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry (Tuumba/Giramondo, 2016). He received his PhD in English and Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019.

Some people are meant to sleep in clover
These must be sleep specific people
Some toss in bed
There are varieties of rest as there are of flesh
and power
But poetry is so precise that each word must be
a plural
At rest in singularity
In time, in transformation, in fortune
The logics left out shouldn’t serve as interruptions
They might be filled with anything
Nocturnal plenitudes of focus
Logics are like constellations
A thing itself when it’s full of its own interpretation
And since you can’t stop there, some people are logical
to dream in perfect flowers

Lyn Hejinian, The Book of a Thousand Eyes, Omnidawn Publishing, Inc., 2012.

I love how this poem puts the language of poetry on the hinge between plural and singular. A multiple signification that only is at rest in singularity. Perhaps this is not paradox but parataxis: the singular and the plural alongside each other, in a logic that is like a constellation. As Lyn’s PhD student my interest in poetry’s capacity to create forms of non-coercive universality ran up against Lyn’s ardent nominalism: her skepticism about any category description that would assert commonality between two or more individual particulars. Lyn made community paratactically, respecting each individual’s variety of being and fiercely resisting any flattening of experience. Lyn’s community-generating activity was definitive of my life at UC Berkeley, and of my life. The Spinoza reading group at her dining room table. The shorter-lived Aristotle reading group. Coffees at Espresso Experience and Cafe Milano and Espresso Roma and (in a pinch) Musical Offering. Drinks at Henry’s and Beta Lounge. Picnics at Tilden Park. The Solidarity Alliance, and many picket lines. The Active Aesthetics Contemporary Australian Poetry Conference, Lyn’s incredible organizational feat of gathering the resources to bring 30 poets from Australia to Berkeley. The Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today conference–which Lyn officially sponsored and helped gather the more limited funds to create. The Nietzsche reading group at Au Coquelet. Our collaboratively taught course on Collaborations, which transformed my experience of taking risks in the classroom. I am always learning from Lyn that the logics of being together that we find in poems or picket lines or classrooms can be constellations, open to time and transformation, and to the different perfect plenitudes that we can dream.

My life, my Lyn, and the power of undead mentors | Eleanor Johnson

Eleanor Johnson is a professor of English and Comp Lit at Columbia University. She teaches medieval poetry and theology, contemporary poetry, and the history of horror. Her book Waste and the Wasters was published by University of Chicago in 2023; her next book, Scream with Me, is forthcoming in 2025 from Atria Books.

This essay was originally published in the Jacket2* feature, Positions of the Sun: Lyn Hejinian and her students. We reproduce it here with gratitude to the editors and the author.*

The first thought I had when I heard that Lyn Hejinian had died was, She’s going to think that’s so weird! And then my brain seized up, and broke into three parts: one part was scientific and self-castigating, thinking, She died, that’s a fact, and she’s not going to think anything is anything anymore. A second part of me, a more aesthetic part, focused on what I feel in my emotions and my body, doubled down on this felt knowledge that Lyn would think her own death was weird, since, obviously, she wasn’t really dead. A third part of me, let’s call her the evaluative part, watched the other two parts strive against each other, tried to decide which side to line up with, and couldn’t. And then that part decided: good, it’s better this way. I’ll let both realities exist in my mind.

There is something particular about having a mentor die—especially, I think, when that mentor was a writer.

It’s a different kind of grief, and a different kind of privation from losing a parent. Different from losing a friend. Different from when someone famous, whom you really admired, dies. When you lose a parent, you feel it in your whole body. It’s hard to deny that they’re gone, because you are used to speaking to them with some frequency, and now, suddenly, you don’t. So the grief is big, cold, mean, and has a lot of suction. I think of that grief as Charybdis, who drank the sea: it pulls you in and eats you whole. When a friend dies, the grief depends on how close you were. The closer you were, the more cold suction there is. The more distant you were, the less suction. When some famous person that you admired dies, there’s kind of a glitch in your grief, because you didn’t know the person well enough to miss them in the way that you feel in your body—the cold suction way. But the world feels different, a little emptier, maybe a little scarier. But you know that the person died, just as you know that a parent or a friend died.

When a writer-mentor dies, there’s a kind of uncanny valley you fall into. I knew Lyn and loved Lyn plenty well enough to feel deep and disorienting grief at her death. But I didn’t see her or talk to her enough that her absence from my life is palpable in my everyday existence—as it is when you lose a parent. Even so, she did have a kind of emotional centrality to my life, an immediacy and consistent presence in my mind. The valley you fall into is the one I fell into when I heard she died: I understand that she’s dead, but I don’t feel it. And, therefore, I don’t entirely have to believe it. There’s not going to be anything in my life soon that will force me to accept that she is gone.

Quite the contrary, what I have in my life is much of what I’ve had of her for decades now: her writings. I teach My Life about every other year. I teach Slowly and Tribunal. I read Happily when I am sad. When I teach them or read them, I feel like I am talking with Lyn. And I feel like she, through the poems, talks back. That is not going to change with her death. People talk about feeling betrayed when someone dies. I do not feel betrayed; I suppose it’s because I do not feel left behind. I do not feel like Lyn abandoned me. Instead, I feel like she did what she always did: what was right, inevitable, and true.

When I think this way, the scientific part of my brain tries to scare me, saying, I’ll never get to talk with her again. But that aesthetic part shakes her head, Yes I will. I talk with her every time I teach her. The scientific part comes back, Ok, but she’ll never really answer you back. You’ll never talk about anything new. It’ll be the same books, forever, and that’s it.

Aesthetic part: First off, I think you’re an asshole, and Lyn agrees with me. She says that time doesn’t work that way. She says that the past isn’t gone, it’s just part of the compound plenum—the fullness—of the present. You know that.

Scientific part: Lyn did not think I was an asshole. And don’t you forget, she also said, I do not suppose I really am a consolation. Don’t try to make her into your consolation; she wouldn’t want that. Accept your grief. Don’t hide from it. Be brave.

Aesthetic part: I’m not hiding. I am being brave. I just don’t believe in my grief in the way you do. Or, more specifically, I don’t believe in death the way you do. Plus, what she says is, I do not suppose I really am a consolation—very complete, when each link is directly abob. Consolation is when you want something to be complete. I don’t want her to be complete. I want her links to keep bobbing of their own agency on the surface of the sea. So I am going to keep talking to her. Because to me, she is not gone.

Evaluator: Aesthetic discoveries are socially different from scientific discoveries, and the difference is p̵o̵l̵i̵t̵i̵c̵a̵l̵ eulogical.

I had known about Lyn’s diagnosis for about a year; we had corresponded about how she was feeling. She struck me, in her emails, as extraordinarily brave. When I reread them now, I cry. But it’s not a sad cry. A strong cry. A war-cry cry. A cry like, We’re in this together, Lyn—you and me—this perilous project of being a human female who makes words and asks others to read them. You taught me to write my goddamn name in every one of his books. You’re bigger and braver and stronger than me, kinder and more beautiful in every way, but you also love me, and you see me, and that makes me a little bit big, and a little brave; a little bit strong, kind and beautiful. The words she wrote me made me cry even before she died, because they so perfectly encapsulated who she was. And who she was and still is to me.

But at the same time as I feel that she is still with me, I do feel the grief. Paradoxically, the grief feels connected to my feeling that she’s not gone. Feeling the grief makes me think that she would be proud of me—happy for me, even. Because Lyn was not afraid of grief. She was also not afraid of joy, or rage, or boredom. Happiness is another feeling Lyn was/is not afraid of. In fact, in her wisdom, Lyn understood/stands that happiness is a kind of superpower. Every single emotion had a place at her table. Except maybe shame. Although, no: she wouldn’t exile anyone. Probably, she would encourage shame to transform itself into compassion or acceptance. Maybe she would dress him up fancy, his mane trimmed with colored ribbons. Shame at her table looks like the cowardly lion after his makeover in the Emerald City. Happy as a damn lark!

But I think even more important to my evolving relationship with Lyn—I’m not going to say “grieving process,” because I despise the idea that grief is supposed to be neat and linear, and to get you to a particular end product, and Lyn hates it too—than her way of making space for all emotions is her way of accepting and even reveling in uncertainty. What is the meaning hung from that depend is a line from My Life that I love, and have never been quite certain how to teach. So I teach it as being about uncertainty. I try to teach my students about the depth of power that comes from truly accepting uncertainty, accepting that we are both aesthetic and scientific beings, that our lives are both lyrical and prosaic, and that we are making a mistake to try to choose between them, because what matters most depends, in an intransitive sense. It just depends.

So I am going to keep teaching Lyn’s work as if she’s still alive. Because she is. And I will also hold my grief close, a “gripping” thought, because, with her death, there is no “sameness” of the sky.

Reflections on "A Thought is the bride of what thinking" | Jared Robinson

Jared Robinson is a poet and critic from Indianapolis, Indiana.

A little gothic story with a play on syntactical resolution, “A Thought Is The Bride Of What Thinking” (1976) is the title poem of Lyn Hejinian’s first book. Tuumba Press 1, a beginning. Lyn, ever the craftsman, bought the press she printed the work on from a mentor, a printer she’d been working under for some time. In the chapbook, this poem is something of a modest middle piece. It makes a fanciful or romantic interlude between two longer perhaps more L – A – N – G – U – A – G – E -y poems. Unlike those other two, “Variations: A Return of Words” and “The Virtues of the Dead, or, The Return,” “A Thought…” proceeds in uninterrupted, properly indented prose-looking lines—and already the play has begun. The length of the line—as suggestive of Walt Whitman and Charles Baudelaire as of Hejinian’s beloved Gertrude Stein, her neighbor—produces the first question of the poem, the first instance of “What Thinking”; a reader’s initial response to this seeming prosaic line might be to ask: “What is this?” or “What am I looking at?” What, after all, makes a poem.

“What Thinking,” understood as a single thought adjective, strikes me as a persistent theme of Lyn’s work. And given how much time she and I spent, high in her sunstruck office, discussing the proper conjugations of words for my own poems, it seems only right that here, where I have been allowed space to remember her through her work, I might spend a moment worrying over the finer points of this part of speech. These meetings are impossible to forget. Lyn would often sit with me at a table instead of, say, across a desk. And she would always have the work in hand, edited in pencil. (Not in red, not even in ink.) With the balcony door open, taking the air, she’d walk me through every place in the poems I’d written that made her ask a usage question.

“Do you want ‘lay’ or ‘lie’ here?” A question with high stakes in a poem. Where laying down with someone might mean an affair, but lying on them might imply that my speaker had been telling tales out of school.

Her generous thinking with my juvenile work—work I was in truth making for the chance to sit across a table from her, to absorb even a pinch of her love and curiosity for language—made that work into something so necessary to my life and thinking that it hasn’t left me. When we’d come across an especially silly poem I’d made—something too angry or too scant—she’d never let me, lazily, use the word “cut” to describe how we’d rid of it.

“Let’s say, ‘jettison’ instead,” she said.

In its three principle grammatical uses (as a pronoun, a “determiner”, and an adverb) “what” helps the English language to ask for information, for repetition; to emphasize that which is great or remarkable, and generally to find the limits of things. So “what-thinking” might be the mode of thought—wed here to “thought” by dint of syntax or grammar—in which thought probes for the edges of what is emphatic in the pursuit or transmission of knowledge. This positionally “avant-garde” thinking would find itself leading the charge into the unknown with its questions and estimations and wonderings. And this mode of thinking would, ultimately and repeatedly, call to the specification of its object. That is to say, even this rapacious what-thinking would have a limit: the limitations of, eventually, having to articulate itself as thought. That decadent and certainly degenerative formulation of the world for the mind that is the making and taking of images, feelings, stories, and selves portable enough to be recognized in and by the world.

The poem exclaims: “Lordy—what more can you say than that?” The presence of a persistent and slightly ridiculous, idiomatic deity and the transformation of “what” to “that” which formulates the question Lyn’s speaker interjects here gives the lie to the transformation occurring across the poem’s scenes and stories. The stories which become the poem’s content are made up, but we believe them anyway. That is, as readers we can turn what the speaker says into images, into thoughts which hold the tales, and we can “see” them thus. Even if, being tales told out of school or otherwise, they are not nor ever true. So, the poem introduces a writer, a lying man, “his” stories, and some horses’ tails, a thought. In one of his stories there appears an asthmatic woman who dies in a garden. Then the man goes to the hospital, gets arrested and he’s gone. The poem remains to recount “his things.” The speaker dares: “Hawk this, little songster:” and the list begins. Among them is a horse, like any horse, which might fan or lean upon its neighbor.

So the poet fits things together, stories and men, horses and ideas, and if we’re brave enough as readers we can fit them together too. Both here and elsewhere our questions of “what” become stories, true or not, about what “that” was or is. Lyn reminds us:

“The poet plays with order, makes order of disorder, and disorder of order, intent upon confusing all the issues. He is unwilling to distinguish reality from veracity, and veracity from tale, and sees what he thinks to see.”

Lyn’s poem invites the reader to pause and linger awhile in the not yet estimated field of what-thinking, where what “he thinks to see” is still suspended in potential, in the realm of the “what” which syntactically precedes it. It reminds us of this relation that we might remember our own capacity to turn whatever it is we might think, all that is yet “immaterial” and “inside”, into that which appears. Or at the very least how we could make it into a thought perhaps, or a poem whose mysterious, opaque, thingliness might direct someone else toward our question, toward that “what” again.

On Lyn Hejinian's My Life | Deane Wilson

"Any work dealing with questions of possibility must lead to new work. In between pieces, they shuffled their feet. The white legs of the pear trees, protected from the sun. Imagine, please: morbid myopia. The puppy is perplexed by the lizard which moves but has no smell. We were like plump birds along the shore, unable to run from the water. Could there be swans in the swamp. Of course, one continues to write, and thus to “be a writer,” because one has not yet written that “ultimate” work. Exercise will do it. I insert a description: of agonizing spring morning freshness, when through the open window a smell of cold dust and buds of broken early grass, of schoolbooks and rotting apples, trails the distant sound of an airplane and a flock of crows."

-Lyn Hejinian, My Life and My Life in the Nineties, Wesleyan University Press, 2013.

Deane Wilson received a PhD in English from UC Berkeley in 2021. She is the author of the chapbooks Not Yet (Projective Industries, 2019) and Both, Apollo (Omnidawn, 2022).

I started rereading My Life the day I learned of Lyn’s death. I’ve returned to it many times over the years, but the book felt different that day. I was struck by the sense that many others may have opened it on the same denial-tinged impulse, and I began to feel that my act of turning to My Life was, like so many of the actions the book describes, commonplace enough to be a kind of meeting place. “In between pieces, they shuffled their feet.”

The excerpt above is inadequate to this occasion, and therefore fitting. In the introduction to Writing Is an Aid to Memory, Lyn writes, “Abridgement is foolish, like a lopping off among miracles; yet times is not enough.” Any excerpt from My Life feels like a “lopping off,” because it can’t capture the way the book makes memory’s abridgements—of experience, of attention, of knowledge received and sought—sites of possibility rather than of loss. My Life was canonized too rapidly for anyone’s comfort, but I continue to love how completely it resists the obligatory form of the excerpt, along with the types of mastery an excerpt might propose. It moves the way a life moves, through a series of repetitions (always with a difference) that produce their own time. And it feels interminable, because one of the possibilities Lyn uncovers here is that these abridgements might be meeting places, “zones of encounter” where the stuff of life becomes, not shared, exactly, but inhabitable, generative, and open to new configurations of attention. If “any work dealing with questions of possibility must lead to new work,” Lyn’s work is that work. Its acuity and generosity are hers, and we are lucky to have known her.