Lyn hejinian biography meaning

Born in 1941 in Oakland, California, where Gertrude Stein had grown up fifty years earlier, Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essaysist, translator, and publisher who currently lives and teaches in Berkeley, California.

Hejinian's work explores how personal identity may be constructed by and through language. Her experimental autobiography My Life, first published in 1980, is the purest example of this poetic project, and established her as one of the foremost members of the Language school of poetry.

My Life is composed of titled prose paragraphs, each built of disjunctive sentences that avoid coherence. The text is allusive and often ambiguous. Many of the sentences appear as windows into a life, while others act as brief aphorisms on the making of the book itself. Phrases recur and weave together as motifs throughout, making new meanings through repetition. However, Hejinian keeps overall coherence at arm's length: she acknowledges that when writing any history it is "impossible to get close to the original, or to know 'what really happened.'" As the book begins:

"A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned home from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left, was purple—t

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Yet we insist that life is full of happy chance

LYN HEJINIAN
1980

INTRODUCTION
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
POEM TEXT
POEM SUMMARY
THEMES
STYLE
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
CRITICAL OVERVIEW
CRITICISM
SOURCES
FURTHER READING

INTRODUCTION

In the early 2000s, Lyn Hejinian's "Yet we insist that life is full of happy chance" appeared destined to remain a work in progress. The original version of the poem (and the one reprinted here) was first included in Hejinian's collection My Life (1980), which was composed of thirty-seven sections, each comprised of thirty-seven sentences. When she first wrote it in 1978, Hejinian planned to write an autobiographical poem in a form that corresponded to her age (thirty-seven). But as time passes, the numerical markers of a person's age increase, and in 1987, Hejinian released a revised edition of the original poems, expanded to reflect the fact that she was then eight years older. Just as Hejinian's life had lengthened to included forty-five years, so, too, did the collection, now expanded to forty-five sections, containing the original poems, each with eight new lines. Later, Hejinian published a number of independent sections that suggest a continuation of My Life to include memories of the 1990s.

Taken together the verse paragraphs arrange Lyn Hejinian