Lyn Hejinian, a "central figure in the Language poetry movement of the 1970s and '80s who channeled the seismic social changes and avant-garde artistic climate of the 1960s into work that was both richly lyrical and groundbreaking in its experimentalism," died on February 24, the New York Times reported. She was 82.
Language poetry, also known as Language writing, was largely centered in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. Hejinian, who lived on 80 rural acres in Mendocino County, Calif., "helped to seed the movement in 1976, when she acquired a manual letterpress and started Tuumba Press, a showcase for similarly inclined poets including Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Ron Silliman and Charles Bernstein," the Times noted.
"These poems are as much about how they make meaning as what they mean," said Bernstein, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Pennsylvania who co-edited the newsletter L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E during the movement's early years. "Often the poems evaded any direct message in favor of an attention to the language of the poem and its sonic rhythms."
Influenced by the revolutionary spirit of the antiwar, civil rights, and feminist movements of the 1960s, Hejinian and other aligned poets sought to overturn the social order at the literary level by exploring the open text--a literary work that allows for a multiplicity of points of view and meanings.
She savored her place among the literary mavericks. "We attended and participated in poetry readings that took place two or three or sometimes four times a week, talked until late at night at bars, launched literary journals, hosted radio shows, curated readings and lecture series," she said in a 2020 interview published by the University of California, Berkeley, where she served on the English department faculty for two decades starting in 2001. "We had very little respect for official academia, which, in turn, had very little respect for us."
In 1980, she published her best-known work, My Life, a book-length prose poem written when she was 37 that included 37 sections, each composed of 37 sentences. (When she turned 45, she expanded its structure to 45.)
"Lyn was experimental not in the sense that her work is austere or especially hard to appreciate, but because her work plays with form and pushes against the borders of genre," Armantrout noted. "It contains snippets of narrative, philosophical meditations, and Whitman-like catalogs in a unique and engaging combination that points to a world without limits."
In 1982, Hejinian and poet Barrett Watten started Poetics Journal, which for 16 years published book-length volumes featuring the work of Language writers like Bruce Andrews, Kit Robinson, and Leslie Scalapino. In 1980s, she made several trips to the Soviet Union and learned Russian, eventually translating Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, a prominent Russian Language poet, who became a close friend.
Her own work continued to evolve, with her later output becoming "looser and wilder," Armantrout said, including her book-length poem The Fatalist (2003), which probed the mysteries of fate and chance. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Ashbery called The Fatalist "breathtaking," citing the line "That's what fate is: whatever's happened."
In 2003, Hejinian published the 10-part work My Life in the Nineties, in which she wrote that "everyone is out of place in a comedy."
"We are all clowns," she said in an interview with the Poetry Foundation. "And we feel that. There's some pathos lurking in the disjunct between who one feels oneself to be and who one feels others think one is, or between just treatment and unjust treatment, or within different social and economic contexts.... The gap between laughter and weeping is often a tiny one."