The Non Sequitur in Lyn Hejinian's The Unfollowing

BK Fischer reviews Lyn Hejinian's under-discussed The Unfollowing (Omnidawn, 2016) for Jacket2. Fischer begins by considering the non sequitur as a poetic device. "A skeptic might call it 'disjunctivitis': how much resistance can a device mount, how disruptive of expectations and assumptions can it be, how strong a jolt to hegemonic power can it deliver, if everyone is doing it?" More:

The seventy-seven numbered poems in the volume gather non sequiturs — observations, utterances, images, and examples that convey no logical relationship or narrative from one to the next — in sets of fourteen, a constraint that inevitably invokes what is perhaps the most closed and logical poetic form of all: the sonnet. To call these poems sonnets, Hejinian writes cannily in the book’s preface, “wouldn’t be inaccurate — or it would be entirely so” (9). “Sonnets are the summit of logicality,” she continues, and unlike “the sonnet proper,” these poems “are intended to be illogical” (9). Defined by and defying their constraint, the poems refuse to “follow” the sonnet’s traditional structure of argument and resolution, instead marshalling disparate materials that instantiate that refusal. No group of fourteen items adds up — to insight, to story, to revelation — though each one nonetheless accrues tonal and affective force. “A non-sequitur is a song of experience” (60), one poem tells us, and these poems resonate forcefully as memos from a postlapsarian world — Blakean in their contrapuntal richness as well as in their woe.

The avowed illogicality of these poems, though not disingenuous, nonetheless elides their reliance on logic of a different order — not “following,” not logical progression, but analogy. It is a logical paradigm Hejinian has espoused before. Her seminal essay “The Rejection of Closure,” still a go-to text for disjunctive poetics thirty-five years after it was first delivered as a talk, presents a rationale that hinges on analogy: 

The “open text,” by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies.

Read the full review at Jacket2.