Lyn Hejinian

'You should know that men like Benvenuto, unique in their profession, need not be subject to the law.' Thus spoke Pope Paul III on learning that Cellini had murdered a fellow artist, so great was Cellini's reputation in Renaissance Italy. A renowned sculptor and goldsmith, whose works include the famous salt-cellar made for the King of France, and the statue of Perseus with the head of the Medusa, Cellini's life was as vivid and enthralling as his creations. A man of action as well as an artist, he took part in the Sack of Rome in 1527; he was temperamental, passionate, and conceited, capable of committing criminal acts ranging from brawling and sodomy to theft and murder. He numbered among his patrons popes and kings and members of the Medici family, and his autobiography is a fascinating account of sixteenth-century Italy and France written with all the verve of a novel. This new translation, which captures the freshness and vivacity of the original, is based on the latest critical edition. It examines in detail the central event in Cellini's narrative, the casting of the statue of Perseus.

My Life

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her autobiographical poem My Life, a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. The Language of Inquiry is a comprehensive and wonderfully readable collection of her essays, and its publication promises to be an important event for American literary culture. Here, Hejinian brings together twenty essays written over a span of almost twenty-five years. Like many of the Language Poets with whom she has been associated since the mid-1970s, Hejinian turns to language as a social space, a site of both philosophical inquiry and political address. Central to these essays are the themes of time and knowledge, consciousness and perception. Hejinian's interests cover a range of texts and figures. Prominent among them are Sir Francis Bacon and Enlightenment-era explorers; Faust and Sheherazade; Viktor Shklovsky and Russian formalism; William James, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. But perhaps the most important literary presence in the essays is Gertrude Stein; the volume includes Hejinian's influential "Two Stein Talks," as well as two more recent essays on Stein's writings.

The Language of Inquiry

My Life (Green Integer Books, 39)

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties. An experimental intervention into the autobiographical genre, My Life explores the many ways in which language—the things people say and the ways they say them—shapes not only their identity, but also the very world around them.

My Life and My Life in the Nineties

Viktor Shklovsky

New Preface by Lyn Hejinian, Introduction and,Translation by Richard Sheldon,In part a memoir of the three 'Factories' that,influenced Shklovsky's development as a human,being and as a writer, the events dipicted within,this book are fictionalised and conveyed with the,poetic verve and playfulness of form that have,made Shklovsky a major figure in 20th-century,world literature. First published in a limited,edition in 1977 and now available in paperback,for the first time, THIRD FACTORY is written with,an unerring artist's confidence.

Third Factory

Elegies of public and personal loss from the renowned avant-garde poet

The Unfollowing

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. POSITIONS OF THE SUN is a sometimes melancholy, sometimes militant cross-genre experiment, combining elements of (largely non-narrative) fiction, with those of local journalism, and of cultural and literary criticism. Its twenty-six interlocking "essays with characters" (plus a "Coda") explore the mid-2000s financial "crisis," the spread of neoliberalism, and attempts by activists and artists to counter it, through the movements and daily lives of a wide-ranging cast of characters located in the Bay Area. In POSITIONS, Hejinian plays the bricoleur, bringing together whatever's needed in her approach to the subject, whether it's the paratactic tactics of poetry, scholarship's critical patchwork, or characters set in time that evokes but frustrates narrative. POSITIONS OF THE SUN is the second work in Belladonna*'s Germinal Texts Series, which seeks to trace feminist avant-garde histories and the poetic lineages they produce.

Positions of the Sun

The three works of poetry that constitute Tribunal were written in the current context of seemingly ubiquitous warfare and the specter of unabashed neo-fascism, ethno-nationalism, and--especially in the United States--reassertions of white supremacy. As renowned poet Lyn Hejinian recounts, the inspiration for Tribunal gradually took shape over the course of almost a decade in the collaborative work she has done to fight neoliberal policies that dismantle the public sphere through actions that include privatizing the commons, busting unions, and imposing a corporate, profiteering model on a range of institutions including public higher education. Hejinian explores a broad range of responses to our deeply troubling historical period in Tribunal's three collections. These poems express an emotional scope that includes fury, sadness, and even, at times, something very close to pity for our humanity, perpetually unable to avoid its own penchant for cruelty. Hejinian is the rare poet who can bring to the page a rich, complex rendering of how mutually exclusive emotions can exist simultaneously. We lose safety and surety, but we gain a wider lens on contemporary crises from her sometimes lacerating, sometimes intensely beautiful lyric verse. It's only in such an artistic and emotional landscape that readers, thinkers, artists, workers, and all comrades against injustice can manage to keep inventing, imagining, and hoping. Throughout these crises, the poet returns to language as a meaningful space in which to grapple with a seemingly endless cycle of conflict. While the works can be read as expressions of protest or dissent, they powerfully convey an argument for artmaking itself--and a turn to its affirmation of life.

Tribunal

Michael Davidson

Barrett Watten

Ron Silliman

Leningrad/American Writers in the Soviet Union

Rae Armantrout

Ronald Silliman

Others

Steve Benson

Barret Watten

Poetry. Cultural Writing. Memoir. THE GRAND PIANO 3 continues the experiment in collective autobiography begun over email by ten poets identified with Language poetry, who sought to reconnect their writing practicesand to "recall and contextualize events from the period of the late 1970s." When completed, THE GRAND PIANO will comprise ten parts, in each of which the ten authors appear in a different sequence, often responding to prompts and problems arising in the series. In this issue, the order is Steve Benson, Tom Mandel, Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Ted Pearson, Kit Robinson, and Ron Silliman.

The Grand Piano: Part 3

THE GRAND PIANO is an ongoing experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language poetry in San Francisco. It takes its name from a coffeehouse at 1607 Haight Street, where from 1976-79 the authors took part in a reading and performance series. The writing project, begun in 1998, was undertaken as an online collaboration, first via an interactive web site and later through a listserv. When completed, THE GRAND PIANO will comprise ten parts, in which each of the ten authors will appear in a different sequence. These poets are Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Ted Pearson.

The Grand Piano: Part 6

An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980

The Grand Piano

Part 10

Poetry. The continuation of the project begun in Hejinian's best-selling MY LIFE—also available from SPD—MY LIFE IN THE NINETIES provides important glimpses into related works such as HAPPILY, THE BEGINNER, and SLOWLY. Part prose poetry, part autobiography, and part radical modernist experiment, MY LIFE IN THE NINETIES is a masterpiece of recent writing on identity, language, and politics.

My Life in the Nineties

Written over the course of two decades, The Book of a Thousand Eyes was begun as an homage to Scheherazade, the heroine of The Arabian Nights who, through her nightly tale-telling, saved her culture and her own life by teaching a powerful and murderous ruler to abandon cruelty in favor of wisdom and benevolence. Hejinian's book is a compendium of "night works"--lullabies, bedtime stories, insomniac lyrics, nonsensical mumblings, fairy tales, attempts to understand at day's end some of the day's events, dream narratives, erotic or occasionally bawdy ditties, etc. The poems explore and play with languages of diverse stages of consciousness and realms of imagination. Though they may not be redemptive in effect, the diverse works that comprise The Book of a Thousand Eyes argue for the possibilities of a merry, pained, celebratory, mournful, stubborn commitment to life.

The Book of a Thousand Eyes

Jack Collom

A Collaborative Poem

Wicker

Lyn Hejinian is considered one of the most important avant-garde poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with five poems written from 1963 to 1965, The Proposition collects Hejinian's previously uncollected works from 1963-1983 in one unique volume. The individual early works curated in this volume broaden the existing published collections of Hejinian's works, showing Hejinian's play with form, visual language, and linguistic experiment before the poet's move to project orientated writing practices. With a new Preface by Lyn Hejinian, and five essays by prominent critics in the field, the volume offers both a new collection of Hejinian's poetry and an important scholarly resource for students, scholars, and readers of contemporary avant-garde writing more widely.

Uncollected Early Poems 1963–1983

Lyn Hejinian, The Proposition

Writing Is an Aid to Memory (Sun and Moon Classics)

Leslie Scalapino

Poetry. A collaborative effort by two of today's most famous poets. Equal parts poetry and philosophy, Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino's collaboration is organized around the act and idea of seeing, written in the form of a literary dialogue. We were interested in a joint investigation into the workings of experience, writes Hejinian in the introduction, how experience happens, what it consists of, how the experiencing (percieving, feeling, thinking) of it occurs, what the sensation of sensing tells us. Visual descriptions interact with meditations on contemporary life, Western intellectual history, dream, film, poetry, and collaboration itself. Scalapino: the sight is the/ reverse of the occurrence Hejinian: Sight is lyrical, because its subtext is annihilation.

Sight

"Hearing is the second in a series of collaborations by Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino organized around each of the five senses. Their first collaboration in this series, Sight, was published by Edge Books in 1999. Hejinian and Scalapino were nearing the completion of Hearing when Leslie Scalapino died in 2010. Ten years later, the book is published for the first time with a preface by Hejinian"--

Lyn Hejinian

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