Overview

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.

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9781399557764

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Reviews

""I pause on the upswing of the thought"" Lyn Hejinian writes in her 1966 poem ""The Guermantes Way"", and what we experience over and over, within the air-born pause, is her notation of an abundant and openly curious joy. Hejinian's vitalism was not only linguistic, as her long participation in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement in American poetry might suggest, but committedly conceptual. She brought a gloriously supple difference to the concept: in her work, thinking radiates delight and the poem is a unit of wonder poised in critical tension with its social and material environment. From the elegantly spare compositions of her 20s, which show an Objectivist-inflected ear for sound intricacy and internal rhyme held aloft by the play of pun and riddle, we are led to the prosier but still-airy texts of the early 80s, which prefigure the turn to the open ended, looping narration of the everyday achieved in her masterful book My Life. The poems collected in this volume, as well as her exhilarating preface (a crucial defence of poetry as revolutionary practise and radical hope), are shimmering evidence of Hejinian's lifelong enquiry into the life of the mind as a form of living together in language.--Lisa Robertson, author of Boat and Nilling

“I pause on the upswing of the thought” Lyn Hejinian writes in her 1966 poem “The Guermantes Way”, and what we experience over and over, within the air-born pause, is her notation of an abundant and openly curious joy. Hejinian’s vitalism was not only linguistic, as her long participation in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement in American poetry might suggest, but committedly conceptual. She brought a gloriously supple difference to the concept: in her work, thinking radiates delight and the poem is a unit of wonder poised in critical tension with its social and material environment. From the elegantly spare compositions of her 20s, which show an Objectivist-inflected ear for sound intricacy and internal rhyme held aloft by the play of pun and riddle, we are led to the prosier but still-airy texts of the early 80s, which prefigure the turn to the open ended, looping narration of the everyday achieved in her masterful book My Life. The poems collected in this volume, as well as her exhilarating preface (a crucial defence of poetry as revolutionary practise and radical hope), are shimmering evidence of Hejinian’s lifelong enquiry into the life of the mind as a form of living together in language. -- Lisa Robertson, author of Boat and Nilling

Author Information

Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, translator, and publisher and is a founding figure of the Language poetry movement of the 1970s and an influential force in the world of experimental and avant-garde poetics. She is the author of many poetry collections, including My Life and My Life in the Nineties (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), The Book of a Thousand Eyes (Omnidawn, 2012), The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003), and her landmark work My Life (Burning Deck, 1980). A native Californian, she teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Georgina Colby is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Westminster. She has published widely in the field of avant-garde writing and feminisms. Her books include Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible (2016), and the collections Reading Experimental Writing (2019) and, as co-editor, The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible (2020). She is the series editor (with Eric White) of Edinburgh Critical Studies in Avant-Garde Writing and Edinburgh Foundations in Avant-Garde Writing.

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