Her “October 6, 1986” poem in her book The Cell presents resistance as a kind of measuring device: “resistance is accurate-it / rocks and rides the momentum.” It is like her to cast resistance as a form of exploration, of appreciation even. But as I’ve said, Lyn didn’t believe in borders. Back then the consensus seemed to be that “thought” was the province of philosophy. ” The first book of hers I read, back in the mid-seventies, was called A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking. I was impressed, influenced perhaps, by the way her poetry was, to quote one of her titles, a “language of inquiry. She has influenced countless other poets, but no one else could come close to writing a “Lyn Hejinian” poem. Because of her discretion, I don’t know who had contributed what exactly, but I’ve always suspected she was a major contributor herself. When I had cancer in 2006, she helped to organize a kind of private fundraising campaign among friends and sent me several thousand dollars. These traits shone in her poetry as in her life. Her generosity was utterly without self-interest her curiosity was never intrusive. She had a unique combination of generosity and discernment, equanimity and élan. As she says in My Life, “But a word is a bottomless pit.” She didn’t think that was a bad thing. (And she was scheduled to spend a winter with scientists in Antarctica when she was diagnosed with breast cancer some twenty-odd years ago.) She didn’t believe in borders or in endings. For example, in the late eighties, she taught herself Russian and traveled first with other poets and then alone to the Soviet Union to translate the work of outsider poets such as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.
She could and did.Īs a girl, she loved reading the journals of explorers. It seems as applicable to the remarks I want to make as disorder / is to order.” It was like her to see opposites (order/disorder) as part of a whole-which is not to say she couldn’t take sides against oppression. As she says in her book The Fatalist, ”I adventure and consider fate / as occurrence and happenstance as destiny. She was a very private person, yet she opened herself up to other people and to new experiences again and again. She was still engaged with the world, in other words, despite her situation. The last time I saw her, when she was already quite ill, she talked about the comical way the Hollywood writers’ strike had affected commencement speeches, and about what she’d learned about AI from a scientist she knew on the Berkeley faculty. It’s hard to believe Lyn is dead, because her mind, her spirit, if you will, was always so full of life.