The Future (audio only)
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Lyn Hejinian was born in the San Francisco Bay Area on May 17, 1941. Poet, essayist, and translator, she is also the author and coauthor of several books of poetry, most recently Tribunal (Omnidawn Publishing, 2019).
From 1976 to 1984, Hejinian was editor of Tuumba Press, and since 1981 she has been the co-editor of Poetics Journal. She is also the co-director of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets.
About Hejinian's book The Fatalist, the poet Juliana Spahr has written, "Hejinian's work often demonstrates how poetry is a way of thinking, a way of encountering and constructing the world, one endless utopian moment even as it is full of failures."
Her honors include a Writing Fellowship from the California Arts Council, a grant from the Poetry Fund, and a Translation Fellowship (for her Russian translations) from the National Endowment of the Arts. She received the 2000 Academy Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2006 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, where she served until 2012. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in Berkeley, California.
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Tribunal (Omnidawn Publishing, 2019)
The Book of a Thousand Eyes (Omnidawn Publishing, 2012)
Saga/Circus (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008)
The Fatalist (Omnidawn Publishing, 2003)
My Life in the Nineties (Shark, 2003)
Sight (with Leslie Scalapino, Edge Books, 1999)
My Life (Burning Deck, 1980)
Writing Is an Aid to Memory (The Figures, 1978)
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To achieve reality (where objects thrive on people's passions), enormous effort and continuous social interactions are required, and I can't get started without you. Not here—over there's a better place to begin a funny story. History with its dead all shot through with regularities in the woods and following what looks like a cow-path is part of a creature's sexual magic. Its recorded words now are just a small memento meant to trigger memories which will give us energy when the right time comes. Every afternoon high in a tree the forest vagabond naps while time hangs like a swarm of midges, trembling on. It might be female but it has a phallus's tendency to jump up. How lonely it is to think that I can only think what I think even while he is thinking—our thinking just our respective working body's hum. And while the warlords of Mycenae were storming Troy the foundations of their own societies were crumbling, too.
A dream, still clinging like light to the dark, rounding The gap left by things which have already happened Leaving nothing in their place, may have nothing to do But that. Dreams are like ghosts achieving ghosts' perennial goal Of revoking the sensation of repose. It's terrible To think we write these things for them, to tell them Of our life—that is, our whole life. Along comes a dream Of a machine. Why? What is being sold there? How is the product emitted? It must have been sparked by a noise, the way the very word "spark" emits a brief picture. Is it original? Inevitable? We seem to sleep so as to draw the picture Of events that have already happened so we can picture Them. A dream for example of a procession to an execution site. How many strangers could circle the space while speaking of nostalgia And of wolves in the hills? We find them Thinking of nothing instead—there's no one to impersonate, nothing To foresee. It's logical that prophesies would be emitted Through the gaps left by previous things, or by the dead Refusing conversation and contemplating beauty instead. But isn’t that the problem with beauty—that it's apt in retrospect To seem preordained? The dawn birds are trilling A new day—it has the psychical quality of "pastness" and they are trailing It. The day breaks in an imperfectly continuous course Of life. Sleep is immediate and memory nothing.
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