Ring Burial, 34
Anti-determinative, interminable, incomplete—the poem has nothing to do with truth or value.
This poem, for example, is philosophical, in that it doesn't seek things to believe but things not to believe.
Every sentence records a stretch of becoming invented as it goes.
It's decontextualization, rather than discontinuation, that time effects.
Both time and decontextualization may generate obscurity but so too might structure, otherness, and particularity even more than entropy.
From Tribunal by Lyn Hejinian, published by Omnidawn. Copyright © 2019 by Lyn Hejinian. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian was born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1941. Poet, essayist, and translator, she authored and coauthored several books of poetry, most recently Tribunal (Omnidawn Publishing, 2019). She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2006-2012. She taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a professor and John F. Hotchkis Chair Emerita, and lived in Berkeley until her death.