Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. "Lyn Hejinian's work increasingly explores poetry's relation to knowledge...But rather than abstract frameworks, one finds coyotes, geese, didactic asides, horses, philosophical anecdotes, hawks, intercourse, wasps, goats, pigs, ravens, and a great deal of urinating. It is through this particularity that Hejinian invents a poetic pedagogy at home with its forgiveness to itself, poised both to topple and attain intellectual authority...One of the interesting oddnesses of the book, one that forces us to catch our breath and occasionally to huff, is that quasi-transcendental or a priori insights find their way skillfully and unpredictably into what is otherwise a radically nominalistic, context-dependent intellectual setting" - Lytle Shaw.
Synopsis
-Lyn Hejinian's work increasingly explores poetry's relation to knowledge... But rather than abstract frameworks, one finds in A Border Comedy a serial poem in fifteen 'books, ' coyotes, geese, didactic asides, horses, philosophical anecdotes, hawks, intercourse, wasps, Russian Formalist literary terms, goats, pigs, ravens and a great deal of urinating. It is through this particularity that Hejinian invents a poetic pedagogy at home with its forgiveness to itself, poised both to topple and attain intellectual authority, happily open to its lack of totalizing system... Situating her project more broadly within intellectual history, she writes: 'Digressing in a didactic tale will teach one to digress.' And digression, in all of its entertaining modes--the antecdote, the interpolated comment, the sudden shift of attention--is the displaced center of A Border Comedy... One of the interesting oddnesses of the book, one that forces us to catch our breath and occasionally to huff, is that quasi-transcendental or a priori insights (often linked to continental philosophy) find their way skillfully and unpredictably into what is otherwise a radically nominalistic, context-dependent intellectual setting.- --Lytle Shaw, The Poetry Project Newsletter
About the Author
Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her groundbreaking book of poetry, MY LIFE, published by Sun and Moon/Green Integer, has had five reprintings from 1980-2002. Her most recent books include A BORDER COMEDY (Granary Books, 2001), SLOWLY and THE BEGINNER (both published by Tuumba Press, 2002), and THE FATALIST (Omnidawn, 2003). The University of California Press published a collection of her essays entitled The Language of Inquiry in 2000. In the spring of 2007, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley.