Lyn Hejinian

Poet, essayist, translator, and publisher Lyn Hejinian was a founding figure of the Language poetry movement of the 1970s and an influential force in the world of experimental and avant-garde poetics. Her poetry is characterized by an unusual lyricism and descriptive engagement with the everyday. She authored many poetry collections, including Tribunal (Omnidawn Publishing, 2019), The Book of a Thousand Eyes (Omnidawn Publishing, 2012), The Fatalist (Omnidawn Publishing, 2003), and her landmark work My Life (Burning Deck, 1980). A native Californian, she taught in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Like most Language school writing, Hejinian’s work enacts a theoretically sophisticated poetics. In all its stylistic diversity, the Language movement is difficult to reduce to a particular style, and most writers in this group are concerned with writing in non-standardized, often non-narrative forms.

Progressive politics and social theory are common subjects of Language writing. Hejinian’s work is committed to exploring the political ramifications of typical language usage. Her work differs from the traditional, identity-affirming, political poetry of most left-wing writers as much as it does from mainstream poets. 

As the poet Juliana Spahr writes, “It is easier to trace the influence of language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s aphoristic statement that ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,’ or to apply Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of ‘making strange’ to Hejinian’s poetry than it is to relate her work to the contemporary poetry usually anthologized in the Norton or Heath anthologies of American literature.”

Although Language writing tends to be anti-confessional and anti-realist, Hejinian’s work does not reject these modes, and instead repeatedly engages with biography or autobiography. Her long “novels” My Life (Sun & Moon Press, 1980)and Oxata: A Short Russian Novel (The Figures, 1991) draw on her own experiences and are in some ways recognizably autobiographical. Through her work, Hejinian insists that alternative means of expression are necessary to truly represent both reality and that which is often considered confessional, exploring the relationship between such writing practices and the subjectivity biographical genres often obscure. 

The alternative form Hejinian uses most frequently has come to be called the “new sentence,” a form of prose poem composed mainly of sentences with no clear transitions. The gap, created by a text moving from subject to subject, invites the reader to participate and bring their own reading to the text. Hejinian’s commitment to the Language movement and its techniques is evident throughout her work. Her first book-length collection, Writing Is an Aid to Memory (The Figures, 1978), investigates confessional systems of memory and the difficulties of portraying them without smoothing over the questions they raise.

Crucial to understanding Hejinian’s work is the realization that it cultivates, even requires, an act of resistant reading. Spahr notes, “Her work is deliberately unsettling in its unpredictability, its diversions from conventions, the way it is out of control.” In Hejinian’s essay “The Rejection of Closure,” published in The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000), she develops a theory of an “open text” that defines both her earlier work and the writing that followed. “The ‘open text’ is open to the world and particularly to the reader,” she writes. “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.” To provoke the reader’s participation, the open text engages in a series of disruptive techniques exposing the reader to the possibilities of meaning that they bring to the text.

My Life is an autobiographical example of Hejinian’s “open text.” Spahr regarded the book as “the most important of Hejinian’s work,” noting that it has attracted much scholarly attention. Poet and critic Lisa Samuels, in a similar vein, has advocated the inclusion of My Life in the academic canon. Through its attention to multiple, alternative ways of telling, the book refuses to invoke the transparent language conventions that typically compose autobiography.

On a trip to Leningrad with her husband, Hejinian met a variety of contemporary poets who would provide the inspiration for Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (Mercury House, 1991; coauthored with Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten). Written collaboratively—as is common in the movement—Leningrad is a typical Language movement text. The four poets in this collection alternate voices and discuss various ways post-glasnost society forces them to confront their own politics of encounter. Hejinian’s engagement with Russian poets and poetics, which extends beyond this collection, has profoundly influenced her work. Her years-long collaboration with the Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoschenko resulted in a theater piece, film script, and translations of each into the other’s language. It also produced Oxata, a work that displays Hejinian’s interest in form, prose, and the self-disclosures of language. The book, based loosely on Aleksandr Pushkin’s long poem, Eugene Onegin, shows how “the long poems of our time … cannot be pigeonholed,” as Marjorie Perloff writes.

A prolific writer, Hejinian’s work since Oxata has been various and wide-ranging. My Life has been twice reprinted and updated. Her long poem Happily (Post-Apollo Press, 2000), included in The Language of Inquiry, was met with great acclaim. Anthologizing from over 25 years of work, The Language of Inquiry offers an illuminating glimpse of Hejinian’s influences and preoccupations, especially the centrality of Gertrude Stein to her development as a writer and thinker. In the Boston Review, Brian Kim Stefans writes that the collection “extend[s] the frame of the ‘poet’s essay’ beyond issues of form and tradition, and into an open-ended philosophical dialogue that engages with one in the very act of reading a book, alone at home or in a crowded cafe.” 

Hejinian’s continued interest in notions of the “experimental” is evident in some of her later work, including Saga/Circus (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008). Again in the Boston Review, Joyelle McSweeney notes how the two long poems of the book “make short work of narrative and dismantle genre with an alert and damaging wit,” concluding that “the possibilities within Hejinian’s oeuvre are inexhaustible, [h]er working and reworking of writing’s generic and epistemological potentials and capabilities is unending. In this life’s work, each falling short produces a conceptual distance into which writing can move.”

Since the 1970s, when Hejinian began writing, many of the techniques and interests of Language writing have moved from the margins to the fore of American poetry; Hejinian and her fellow Language poets such as Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, and Rae Armantrout have also found employment in academia as professors and visiting writers, complicating the “oppositional” stance of much of their early work. Discussing the newly anthologized status of Language writing with Craig Dworkin in an Idiom interview, Hejinian notes: “Both the big Messerli anthology and the Norton have the overt ambition to define and historicize a lot of activity, and they’re going to do that. They are going to be, for a long time now, the avenue through which people come to understand and be exposed to this work. That may be good for your generation: there it is, that’s history, now we can get on with what we’re doing. But for me, the big challenge is to remember that this story is not adequate, that it’s not the whole story, that these books don’t feel like what it really was—they don’t really show it.”

In 2006, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her honors and awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, a Writing Fellowship from the California Arts Council, a grant from the Poetry Fund, and a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts for Russian language translations. 

In addition to teaching literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Hejinian was an editor and publisher. She was editor of Tuumba Press from 1976 to 1984, and she coedited Poetics Journal (with Barrett Watten) from 1982 to 1998. She was also a coeditor of Atelos, which publishes cross-genre collaborations between poets and other artists. Hejinian died in 2024.