When Desire Encounters the Universal
The self-commodifying and authoritative text with thoughts from the work of Lyn Hejinian and Mikhail Bakhtin
Lyn Hejinian reading from Happily. More recordings found at PennSound.
Every day we may never happen on the object hung on a mere chance
- Lyn Hejinian
Fear of missing out (FOMO), while Lyn Hejinian never explicitly writes about this almost sexual desire to know about something, she writes about similar ideas in her essays: “The Rejection of Closure” and “Continuing Against Closure”. Both of which were my original introduction to a more contemporary strain of poetry, especially having written recently about British Romanticism, and Hejinian’s work brought me into the idea of language focused poetry as well.
FOMO as the desire to be part of an event, much like Hejinian’s work describes traditional poetic language as an attempt to know - in the Biblical sense - or an attempt at universal knowing.
My first interaction with Hejinian was through the previously stated essays. Right around the same time that I discovered Charles Olson’s Projective Verse essay. Shortly thereafter I bought a copy of My Life. In the following quote Hejinian describes her work and the authoritative text:
that the real nature of a thing is immanent and present in its name, that nouns are numinous) suggests that it is possible to find a language which will meet its object with perfect identity. If this were the case, we could, in speaking or in writing, achieve the “at oneness” with the universe, at least in its particulars, that is the condition of complete and perfect knowing.
Poetry should resist authority, universal ideas, and canonical representations, some of which the essay look at later.
Much of Lyn Hejinian’s work revolves around the idea that things cannot be described in a perfect 1:1 ratio. Not that language is in itself slippery. To write it as a cliche: things are not as they seem. Any attempt results in authoritarian attempts to know something.
Moving on from that personal experience, the rest of the essay features some recordings where Hejinian answers questions on a series of topics like barbarism and borders; her experiences with Russia, and other recordings from a talk at the Kelly Writers House, February 21, 2005.
Lyn Hejinian answers a questions on barbarism:
wherever there are borders there is barbarism
Hejinian’s answer begins at the 2-minute mark. No shade to the question asker.
Listening to Hejinian’s answer, I took down the highlights:
Poets at the margins of society. Border as a synonym to margins, then move the border to between things. Either between countries or people. Zone of encounter. Everyone is a foreigner. Negotiation between currencies, relationships, and languages. Anti-global-capitalism. Barbarism is a favorable idea.
Initially after listening to Hejinian’s answer, my mind went to the obvious, especially as someone who takes multiple international trips a year. Some borders seem more porous then others. That seemed too easy, too on the surface, so my thoughts went a little deeper into interpersonal relationships especially ones between an authoritative source and ordinary pedestrian. A context-switching of some sorts. A deference or a refusal to toe up to hetero-dox and normative events.
Renegotiating linguistic currencies, social capital, or anything else between different interactions reminded me of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work.1 I thought Lyn Hejinian might describe that in her answer about Russian influences in her work, as it hovers between a logic that tends to force sameness. Maybe my intuition is way off with the Bakhtin synthesis, maybe even Hejinian would shudder due to my synthesis, but unfortunately I’m a product of a university composition system that instilled boredom in me, so I was inclined to get creative.
With my first scan of the Bakhtin essay, he wrote more about the novel as an art form, but whatever. It’s all a language art. Bakhtin explains that there is no direct, unmediated relation between a word and it's object:
finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist – or, on the contrary, by the “light” of alien words that have already been spoken about it. It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents. The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tensionfilled environment . . . it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue . . . The way in which the word conceives its object is complicated by a dialogic interaction within the object between various aspects of its socio-verbal intelligibility.
Hejinian’s answer about renegotiating borders as zones of interactions scans with Bakhtin’s answer. Especially as the way in which language becomes an ideological battle. Found in essays or articles like that describe:
Shell shock and the way terms around PTSD change over time.
Things nowadays are referred to as conflicts rather than wars.
Any other politicized language that you can think about.
Listen to this recording for Hejinian describing when her husband received a fan-letter from the Leningrad Contemporary Music Society. Totally worth the “laugh track”. Near the end, Hejinian explains how here random trip developed into an encounter with the Russian avant-garde: mathematicians, linguists, shamanasitc practices on the outskirts of the city. Hejinian’s experience blossomed her study of the Russian language, which subsequently she went on to translate some Russian poetry, by a Russian poet whose name I did not catch.
The recording above is the answers the influence of Russian in Hejinian’s work. The answer begins around the 1-minute mark. The question-asker asks about punning with the Russian language.
While drafting this essay, I stepped away to run some errands. Nothing more than that just love the procedural aspect of things, or talking about craft without talking about craft.
Upon return to that Bakhtin essay, I looked for a place to re-enter this essay. Immediately upon scrolling down a couple paragraphs, I found Bakhtin writing about poety and fiction. My conflation, perhaps ambivalence, towards writerly distinctions was entirely smashed by Bakhtin’s dialogue of languages - the idea that all languages are stratified by some socio-economic constraint, solidified by the fact that a close-relative of mine calls me Professor - even though I’m not on any track to be a professor. The distinction still holds. Distinctions are present in literature and poetry where poetry is premised on the idea of a unitary language that the beauty of poetry demolished heteroglossia.
Then it was at this point that I began to question my notions about Bakhtin.
Perhaps my ideas that Bakhtin did not apply to the here and now.
Was I reaching for an idea that was not fully there, and just using it to fit some ill-written tribute to a write influential to me? Some self-commodifying purpose, an idea that I would later learn about from an answer by Hejinian.
After all at some points Bakhtin seemed to suggest that all poetic language is artifice, and canonical literature is the end-all-be-all.
But Bakhtin argues that poetry is after-all a social process. The language is directed by a social consciousness. Here’s a longer quote where we can see poetic process beginning to form:
At the time when major divisions of the poetic genres were developing under the influence of the unifying, centralizing, centripetal forces of verbal-ideological life, the novel – and those artistic prose genres that gravitate toward it – was being historically shaped by the current of decentralizing, centrifugal forces. At the time when poetry was accomplishing the task of cultural, national and political centralization of the verbal-ideological world in the higher official socio-ideological levels, on the lower levels, on the stages of local fairs and at buffoon spectacles, the heteroglossia of the clown sounded forth, ridiculing all “languages” and dialects; there developed the literature of the fabliaux and Schwanke of street songs, folk-sayings, anecdotes, where there was no language-center at all, where there was to be found a lively play with the “languages” of poets, scholars, monks, knights and others, where all “languages” were masks and where no language could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face.
Heteroglossia, as organized in these low genres, was . . . consciously opposed to this literary language. It was parodic, and aimed sharply and polemically against the official languages of its given time. It was heteroglossia that had been dialogized.
Al Filreis, host of jacket2 podcast and moderator of the recorded talks asks Hejinian to explain the distinction of the rigoursly, social language poetry movement and the solitary, romantic poet:
Poetics against the rigorously social as a self-commodifying poet. Her advice to Filreis is to start a magazine, to be an editor, thus I guess destroying the ego of self-commodification.
Lyn Hejinian’s work is often characterized as associative. At times in My Life, the sentences are strung along in an dizzying disconnectedness sutured together by memories and personal stories. As Hejinian describes in her essay “The Rejection of Closure”, this is an open text that invites participation and rejects the authority of writer over reader. Lyn Hejinian gives her response here about the open text:
To some extent any text, once published, invites participation, if not interpretation. It’s the degree to which I yield my authorial authority, or offer to share it, that you are asking about, though, right? The reader gets “bragging rights” when she can legitimately claim to be the author or coauthor?
At this point, I would revise my claim that the “open text” (or any text, for that matter) “rejects the authority of the writer over the reader.” It just isn’t the case that any and every “reading” is a right one, even when the text in question is maximally ambiguous or opaque. Anyone who has had the chance to teach literature knows that. Wildly personal and/or idiosyncratic interpretations (of the sort that sometimes appear, for example, in freshman papers on Modernist poetry) are not usually helpful, at least not to understanding a work of art. “The Waste Land” is not a portrait of St. Louis, though T.S. Eliot was born there. Hamlet is not schizophrenic. The s-sounds in Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” are not intended to evoke the serpent in Eden, etc. But there is ample richness in all three of these works, which are beyond what their respective authors consciously intended, and beyond dictation, so to speak.
It isn’t that writers abdicate authority but rather that works—or the materials at play in them—exert their own authority. The connections that are generated, along with the logics that motivate them, are multiple and belong to the text as much as to the writer. And finding those connections, discovering and following those logics, is given over to the reader—who may indeed make something new and additional of the text.
At some point, perhaps we’ve reached that point all language becomes destabilized.
For now, I’m grateful for the life Lyn Hejinian lived, and the work that she contributed. Grateful that I discovered it in my writing journey. It came at a needed time. Eternally grateful.
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May you forever be on your way.
All references to Bakhtin come from an essay called Discourse in the Novel.