About Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian, born May 17, 1941, in San Francisco, California, and died February 24, 2024, was an American poet, essayist, translator, professor, and editor. Often associated with the Language Poets literary group, she is known for her seminal work, "My Life", as well as her essay, "The Language of Inquiry". She taught contemporary American literature and African American literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006, a position she held until 2012.She has published more than a dozen poetry collections and numerous essays, as well as two volumes of translations of the Russian poet Arkady Dragomoshchenko. Between 1976 and 1984, Lyn Hejinian was the publishing director of Tuumba Press, and from 1981 to 1999, she and Barrett Watten co-founded the journal Poetics Journal. She is also co-editor of "Atelos", which publishes multidisciplinary collaborations between poets and other artists.
Hejinian's work explores how personal identity may be constructed by and through language. Her experimental autobiography My Life, first published in 1980, is the purest example of this poetic project, and established her as one of the foremost members of the Language school of poetry.
My Life is composed of titled prose paragraphs, each built of disjunctive sentences that avoid coherence. The text is allusive and often ambiguous. Many of the sentences appear as windows into a life, while others act as brief aphorisms on the making of the book itself. Phrases recur and weave together as motifs throughout, making new meanings through repetition. However, Hejinian keeps overall coherence at arm's length: she acknowledges that when writing any history it is "impossible to get close to the original, or to know 'what really happened.'
Browse all poems and texts published on Lyn Hejinian
The idea of the person enters poetics where art and reality, or intentionality and circumstance, meet.
