“I suppose I had always hoped that, through an act of will and the effort of practice, I might be someone else, might alter my personality and even my appearance, that I might in fact create myself, but instead I found myself trapped in the very character which made such a thought possible and such a wish mine.” ― Lyn Hejinian, My Life

from Lyn Hejinian’s TRIBUNAL

“I was eventually to become one person, gathered up maybe, during a pause, at a comma.”

— Lyn Hejinian, from My Life

Charles Bernstein, Senses of Responsibility, Cover and title page by Susan Laufer [Bee], Designed and printed by Lyn Hejinian, «Tuumba» 20, Tuumba Press, Berkeley, CA, 1979, Edition of 450 (pdf here) [Eclipse Archive]

II - Lyn Hejinian

— By LYN HEJINIAN, Bay Poetics, (Poetry Foundation, 2006)

A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal with cloth in the fourteenth century and gave humankind its first button. It was hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of one person, but nothing is isolated in history -- certain procedures make monuments to fate.

--Lyn Hejinian, my life

Listening to the story, I exercise my will to believe. This is not a matter of gullibility, and it is not merely a willing suspension of disbelief—it is an active, palpable, and I might even say decisive act of volition, and what’s at stake is pleasure.

— Lyn Hejinian, from The Language of Inquiry

"[But isn’t midnight intermittent]" by Lyn Hejinian, who passed away today 25 February 2024.

Every family has its own collection of stories, but not every family has someone to tell them.

Lyn Hejinian, from her poem ‘It seemed that we had hardly begun and we were already there’ (from “my life and my life the nineties”, Wesleyan University Press, 2013)

Many frantic cruelties occur to the flesh of the

            imagination

. . .

from "Elegy" by Lyn Hejinian

Life is hopelessly frayed, all loose ends.

-Lyn Hejinian

“Should he chance to say what he was doing, he would disguise the saying so as to throw one off the track, describing, for example, a passenger on a plane while neglecting to tell us where the plane was headed, or narrating a dream of the night before when asked what he had been doing recently. The voice in the dark doorway blocks the image. Meanwhile, I was growing up as a cowgirl, a child doctor, a great reader. This rigorous inclusion must eventually turn over on itself. Where I refer to ‘a preliminary’ I mean that until 1964 I regarded the world as a medium of recognition and I prepared for it to recognize me. A person does not look the same in a mirror as she does. Swollen glands, sore throat, headache, slight fever—all some kind of mistake. Organizing a lot of material into a general view. That was the most interesting thing I have ever seen at a zoo. A fuchsia becomes exhausted in a heavy wind.”

— Lyn Hejinian, My Life