hookedonsemiotics:

poetsorg:

Happy B-day to Academy Chancellor Lyn Hejinian!

IT’S LYN HEJINIAN’S BIRTHDAY SO YOU SHOULD DO SOME READING

She worked on this recently and you should read it, especially “Sun and Necessity” and the Editors’ Statement and “Necessity/Immensity”

then go here and read all her stuff (if you’re lazy, you should focus on “The Guard” which is my favorite, but “Gesualdo,”  “A Mask of Motion”, “Redo,” “A Thought Is The Bride of What Thinking”, and “Writing Is An Aid to Memory” are also all very good and come highly recommended)

then go buy her new book The Book Of A Thousand Eyes and while you’re at it The Fatalist and Saga/Circus and if you’re feeling really ambitious My Life and A Border Comedy (which is the densest but also a personal favorite in terms of how it engages with critical theory)

then write some poetry of your own dammit

Happy birthday to a brilliant woman. I’m partial to The Cell, which is my favorite book of hers, but really everything she’s done is great. Here are some poems from “The Cell” for you to enjoy.

"Then is freedom about love?
Bare, and clumsily impossible?"

Lyn Hejinian, The Book Of A Thousand Eyes (via hookedonsemiotics)

"Sometimes dogs eat melon rinds and apple leaves but though I know this there has never until now in the dark been an occasion on which I could “happen” to say so unless I were willing to interject the information into conversation as a non sequitur and I’m not since that would contribute nothing to the general good. Talk among us, perhaps at L’s or K’s or perhaps here at home, no matter the degree of animation, no matter the force of our agreements or disagreements, is all intended for the general good. There was talk the other night about forests. B so strongly disagreed with A’s opinion that the adaptation of birds to blighted environments can be regarded as progress that I thought she was going to cry. Then M interjected that his friend T considered vinyl superior to CD’s, and R cracked, “Hurray for crackle.” That was an unpleasant moment, R’s tricks can sometimes be harmful, though I am never able to tell in retrospect whether R has been malicious or clumsy and I certainly never see things coming. Things in my particular experience don’t make ordinary approaches."

Lyn Hejinian, The Book of a Thousand Eyes

Memory is the past chiefly
motivated away from infinity
springing out of the brightness
of a lull. The bad habit of being

tired in the heat resembles little
of why we arrived out of winter
in the first place — the mind tends

to suppose these things
have an attachment to them,
concentrating on an itch
out of oblivion (and with only
a little melancholy between

the moment and the murmur).
It could have all disappeared
when we opened the window
to let the twilight wedge itself between
us — instead, it appeared.

-C.S. Henderson

Every Night Dreams Collapse

into a coherence, excited
and jumping about in light,
separating themselves from
infinity by memory.
The clock for real intervals
is too small, time always skipping
between being unlived
and experienced without patience.
Yellow things bulge out
of the terrain: lions, wasps,
the shade like grains of a shore.
A smile interrupts all this pleasure
in the middle of its message
like sand in the sea, and dreams
of a smile are always interrupted
in the middle of their incoherence.

-C.S. Henderson