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

Literature & Fiction

Hejinian, Lyn

Poetry

University of California Press

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.

History & Criticism

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 (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Wesleyan University Press

Product Description A verse novel composed of 14-line stanzas inspired by Pushkin's Evgeny OneginOver the course of nearly a decade (1983–1991), author Lyn Hejinian visited the USSR seven times, staying frequently with her friends the poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and his wife Zina in Leningrad. During this period, she embarked on translating into English several volumes of Dragomoshcheko's poetry, and the two poets began an extensive correspondence, exchanging hundreds of letters until Dragomoshchenko's death in 2012. During her fifth visit, in conversation with Dragomoshchenko and other poets, she decided to write a novel reflecting her experiences of literary and lived life in Leningrad and Moscow. Cognizant of a general sense that the Russian novel is stereotypically "long," she determined that hers would be "short." What resulted is an experimental novel whose structure (284 chapters, each 14 lines long) pays homage to Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which is generally regarded to be the first Russian novel: a verse novel composed in 14-line stanzas. From time to time, various members of Dragomoshchenko's circle of friends offered suggestions for the novel, as readers will note. There's abundant narrative content, but anecdotes and events are presented in non-linear form, since they unfolded over extended periods of time and thus came to Hejinian's attention piecemeal. Oxota (which means variously "huntress," "hunt," and "desire" in Russian) is a novel in which contexts, rather than contents, are kept in the foreground. Allen Ginsberg, who himself visited the USSR, did not like Oxota. He said that it wasn't realistic; Hejinian thinks that it is. Review "Lyn Hejinian's spectral Leningrad recalls the opening of a world in the Cold War's wake―a world of artists and writers hunting for the intersection of words, lives, and things. Reading Oxota today, we find a rare, urgent instance of language able to span identities and ideologies, Russia and America."―Steven Lee, Associate Professor at the University of California Berkeley"It is a deep pleasure to reopen this book, a book of estrangement, of fragmentation, of scattered light and scattered speech, of bridges of sense cast over waters of foreignness. Oxota records a trusting encounter between two poetries across cultural difference unimaginable today."―Eugene Ostashevsky, editor of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko's Endarkenment About the Author LYN HEJINIAN is a poet, essayist, teacher, and translator. She is John F. Hotchkis Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley.

Oxota: A Short Russian Novel

Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday

Arts & Photography

Fiction. Russian-American Studies. Composed of 270 free sonnets inspired by Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin, OXOTA: A SHORT RUSSIAN NOVEL is a stunning edifice in language that proposes and enacts an intimate and restive portrait of life in Russia today. The fruit of many years' interest in, study of, and travel through the country, OXOTA (which means "the hunt" in Russian) transforms with epic confidence Hejinian's social and artistic life abroad into a richly peopled landscape, into a literature brimming with signification.

The Figures

In celebration of Conjunctions' 40th issue, the journal has gathered together fiction, poetry, plays and creative essays by some of its favorite contemporary writers. Featuring novels in progress from authors including Richard Powers, Howard Norman, Paul Auster and Lois-Ann Yamanaka, as well as “Heli,” a surreal novella by China's foremost fiction writer, Can Xue, in which a boy falls in love with a girl who lives entrapped in a glass cabinet from which he must free her. Short fiction by writers such as Rikki Ducornet, William T. Vollmann, William H. Gass and Diane Williams appears, in addition to “Condition,” a harrowing story by Christopher Sorrentino, based on historical events from the 1970s, charting the psychological disintegration of a female newscaster who, on her last day alive, methodically plots her suicide on live TV. 40x40 also features creative nonfiction by David Shields and Eliot Weinberger, poetry by Cole Swensen, Martine Bellen, John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian and Robert Creeley, and a visual poem by Tan Lin. Rounding out this diverse celebration of contemporary work is a previously unpublished play by Joyce Carol Oates, specially commissioned for this anniversary issue, and a lively full-color portfolio of new work by Russian emigré artist Ilya Kabakov.

Conjunctions: 40, 40X40

POWERS, RICHARD

Yamanaka, Lois-Ann

Xue, Can

AUSTER, PAUL.

OATES,JOYCE CAROL

Ashbery, John.

Contemporary

Bard College

The contemporary innovative poetry world is as lively and provocative today as at any time in the last century. Over the course of more than two decades, Conjunctions has published the work of hundreds of highly original poets, both young and established. For issue no. 43, Beyond Arcadia, Conjunctions has invited 12 prominent and respected writers to undertake the difficult task of selecting their favorite young writer, one they feel is destined to become a major voice in American poetry. Among the 12 selectors are prize-winning poets including Jorie Graham, Ann Lauterbach, Lyn Hejinian, Peter Gizzi, Fanny Howe, Michael Palmer, Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Martine Bellen, Sandra Cisneros, Forrest Gander and Nathaniel Mackey. Each of the young poets chosen--whose work has not yet enjoyed wide exposure--will be represented by a chapbook-length selection of new work with an introduction from their mentor/selector. Beyond Arcadia introduces a cross-selection of unique voices from among many in the talented new wave of poets at work today. This groundbreaking issue will also feature a previously unpublished play by filmmaker John Sayles; new fiction by John Barth, Ben Marcus, Jon McGregor, Rick Moody, and many others; as well as a previously unpublished masterpiece of Russian surrealism, A Certain Quantity of Conversations Or, The Completely Altered Nightbook, a play by Aleksandr Vvendensky.

Conjunctions: 43, Beyond Arcadia

Lauterbach, Ann

McGregor, Jon

Graham, Jorie

HOWE, FANNY

MARCUS, Ben

Gizzi, Peter

CREELEY, Robert

Vvedensky, Aleksandr

BARTH, John.

Palmer, Michael

Poetry. Hejinian's characteristic linguistic intensity and philosophical approach are present in this book- length poem. "Reading Lyn Hejinian's HAPPILY can make one imagine a second, somewhat happier Stein telling stories in single long or short lines that are aware of one another as they go about their own affairs."—Bob Perelman "HAPPILY"...is a series of aphoristic statements interrogating 'hap' or, more prosaically, one's lot in life, one's fortune. This notion of chance as it is expressed through its root form, as in to happen, happenstance, happenings, haphazard, happenchance, happily, and happy happiness, becomes the generator that enlivens this ontological exploration of language's relationship to experience."—Claudia Rankine

Happily

The Post-Apollo Press

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

Biographies & Memoirs

Shark Books

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