Now we're looking at some four sections from a book called My Life, which is a book-length series of prose poems by Lyn Hejinian. Anna, how is this organized? At the totality, the whole book, how is it organized? Well, she actually wrote two editions at two different ages of her life. Right. The first one was written when she was how old? Thirty-seven. How is 37 in work itself out? There are 37 sections in the book, and each section has 37 sentences. Okay. So 37 new sentences, as Ron Silliman would call them, out of sequence, non sequitur, supposedly, sentences, 37 in each section. The text we're using comes from an edition when she was 45, so there are 45 sentences, 45 sections. The text that she read at the reading that we have as a recording from PennSound seems to be 37 sections. So Lyn Hejinian was 37 or a little older when she read it, and in fact, the title, My Life, hadn't been applied to it yet. So it's pre-publication, pretty early, and a beautiful reading at that. Each section seems to be about a year of her life. So the early sections of the book are about infancy, babyhood, childhood, and then you get to adolescence, and then you get into the '60s and '70s and later, and so the sections we're looking at are ages 5, 6, 7, 8, roughly. She was born in 1941, and the first section we're dealing with is from her birthday in 1945 to her birthday in 1946. We learn about Lyn Hejinian in this Sillimanian way. What do we learn about her? This is My Life, but it's in this language poetry mode of many selves, and the self itself is language, and everything is out of order, even though the sections are in order. What are some of the things we learn? This book has become very widely read and appreciated. I think in many first year of college classes, the intro to this class is to sign. This is such an alternative to the memoir, but is a memoir, so I'm stalling for time while you think of it. What do you learn about her? She seems like a very nervous young girl when she's growing up. In the sections that we're reading, she's anxious, maybe even traumatized a little bit. What else do we learn, Anna? Well, we learn a little bit about her process too. If she's getting access to these memories as a four or five-year-old, like Dave was saying, a lot of what you remember from that time is what you were scared of. So she gets access to a lot of things through talking about when she got lost in the grapevines. Very frightening. Very frightening, till her family "set a masted pole to the ground and hung a colored flag that I could see from anywhere around." Yeah, that's a traumatic moment. That's probably when she's four years old. Or five, yeah. Getting lost, yeah. [inaudible]. I think she's also very concerned with how time is recorded and conveyed. I was reading the text as I was listening to the PennSound recording, and two sentences that she actually added in for the second edition is, "I was an object of time, filled with dread," and also, lower on that page, "Uneven and internal, asymmetrical but additive time." Yes. It seems that she's concerned with creating a history or a past, or how to create an ongoing present, or how memory works in the present. I kept that in mind as I was reading, particularly, the sentences that deal with the composition and the act of writing itself. Let's look a little bit briefly at some of the anxieties and dread, and see if it gets very individualized, and then conclude this segment before we take a break, and then after that, we'll do a close reading on one of the sections. Talk about her focus on language, the actual language. I'll list some of the dreads and fears, and you can comment on them. Anna mentioned that she gets lost among the grapevines, and the family erects up, grapevines, so it's like a grape arbor, it's like a maze, and they set up a flag so that she finds herself. "Tantrum, I was an object of time filled with dread." She looks at an ice cream cone, and what is she worried about? Spiders on the cone. Because this cone is shaped, it's one of those. It has a web [inaudible]. A web-shaped pressed cone. A waffle cone. A waffle cone, and she, the girl, associates that to the spiderweb, and keeps looking for spiders under it. She goes to school, and she vomits secretly in the bathroom because she misses her mom. She hears about lockjaw and worries that her jaw is going to lock. That's on page 28 of the readings that we're doing. She asks whether it's possible to be homesick in one's own neighborhood. That's a very profound question. She's afraid of bears. Her heartbeats shook the bed, maybe nightmares. After her parents were packing, she's afraid her parents were packing to leave, and so she kept an eye on them. So what do we have here? Do we have a particular traumatized girl, do you think? I don't think so. These fears that are charming almost because they seem so universal, and something that we've all shared. I don't think she's traumatized because I think another thing we learned from Hejinian through this is or at least in these sections is that her family life is pretty good. She's not afraid of her father, for instance, that's not one of her fears, like being caught with something, and getting maybe yelled at or something. Even when she gets lost in the woods, they're looking for her, they want to find her. She has this family to return to. She doesn't have that familial trauma the way that Silliman does, or that's with the exterior trauma. Yet the writing that results, at least in these two instances, abides by the same language poetry, ideas or principles. They're both discontinuous, both disrupted, both focused on the way in which the self gets languaged by conventional language, and phrasing, and idioms, and that that is a form of political oppression. I guess oppression too strong a word. The narrativizing of the American life is a disservice to the way we live. Molly, you were going to say something, I think. Yeah. I don't know if I totally agree with Max. Because the second line in this first section is my mother's childhood seem to kind of holy melodrama. She goes on, and I don't know if the next line about the pudding is about her mother. The pudding is either about the young Lyn or someone else. In fact, that's a good moment for object-position. "My mother's childhood seemed to kind of holy melodrama. She ate her pudding in a pattern." Then you have this long sentence about the weird playing with the food. She could be Lyn, it could be the girl. Either way, it's kind of neurotic. Then shortly after that, we have grandfather who was certainly not Ron Silliman's grandfather, but his reserve as the result of shyness and disdain, and his sense that a man's natural importance is characterized by bulk. It's a very traditional, manly reserve. Yes. Somewhere between Max's take and Molly's scope is the big question about this, and we're not going to have time to resolve it. But to what extent is Albany both generalizable to the realm of social and political meaning, and to what extent is it particularly about a life? Let's conclude by looking at the focus on idiomatic conventions and the language self-information, the portrait of the language poet as a young girl. I'll give you some examples, and then we can riff on these. She learns the difference between tartan and plaid. She or someone else likes to say cool, not cool, uncool, kind of happy, old-fashioned things like peachy or nuts to you. Even later in the 1960s when people were saying things like far out and that's nowhere. It's a phrase I've forgotten, that's nowhere. She continues or someone continues to say peachy and nuts to you, and feels somehow the language difference. Shirley Temple's wearing Mary Janes. She had a first grade teacher named Miss Sly. Over the years, she seemed to take on that characteristic though she was once beautiful, and maybe not sly. We'll talk about that. She gets to the notion of hitting upon an idea, and she puts it in quotes. "I had hit upon an idea", emphasizing the idiom. She couldn't get butterfly, so she tried to get moth. Maybe one more example. "They go down to some spot in your town, and they're buying Eskimo Pie." What's an Eskimo Pie? It's like an ice cream sandwich? Yeah. It's ice cream sandwich. It's got the chocolate outer and then vanilla ice cream in Eskimo Pie. Because her mother had grown up in Alaska, they thought they would get a special deal, which is a classic instance of children misunderstanding limit. Tell us about all this. Why the focus on language? Why did she put quote marks around these phrases she's learning, Amories? [inaudible] that you mentioned, the far out, I think shows how language is specific to a culture, region or generation even. If someone said that today would seem anachronistic or strange in a sense. The other one was "Hit upon an idea", I think that relates to the metaphorical origins of language, so where did that come from? Why are we faced with that sort in language, and how can we recreate it for future generations? Why is it important for a poet who has the ideas or share us with the other poets in her group these ideas? Why is it important for her to focus on language that she's writing about the development of the person? Well, she's showing how language constructs her childhood in ways, like she's being constructed by these phrases, and learning these phrases. When she learns more idioms, she becomes more adult in a way. She's showing how language is constructed, and how we are constructed by language. Language is a social construction, that's clear from this. The self is languaged. The very concept of the self is a construction of historical movements. The very concept of the self needs to be disclosed in this new radical effort at describing a life. You can't just tell the life in the conventional terms that have been handed down to you, and thereby create a conventional narrative. Who came first? Napoleon the first. You need to tell the life in this discontinuous way using these juxtapositions and at the same time, make it clear that the self becomes languaged, and then be conscious of that all along the way. She says on page 22 in our reading, language is restless. Language is restless. Therefore, describing the self must be constantly moving. It's always a point in time seen by many, many points in time, 37 years old, 45-year-old, the 45-year-old remembering the 37-year-old missing some things and therefore adding it. The 37-year-old remembering the 25-year-old looking back from the '60s, that period when she said things like peachy. We get a myriad of perspectives on family and self and we're language, that's the point. She's, in a sense, learning and I'm going to ask those who went through American Girl Hit maybe to comment more than I on this. But it's almost as if she's beginning the first reckonings that boys and girls, in this case, girls get of stepping into the pre-made, linguistic marketed image. You almost feel like you're growing up into American girlhood just by encountering and accepting these phrases. Or products for that matter. Let's just do a left-wing or maybe a right-wing attack on the America that creates this language. Can we do a feminist reading on this? Regina is resisting it. If she didn't resist it, if she were writing this in order to become the woman who comes from the girlhood that's socialized to do the Shirley Temple's and the Mary Janes, what can we say that's wrong with a discourse that kind of forces you into that self-hood, I set it up a little bit too much. [inaudible] you want to take a shot at that? Maybe by unconsciously conforming to the language of Shirley Temple's and Mary Jane's, she lost her individuality and her childhood, something that she's only conscious of now looking back quite respectively. So the text is self-aware in that way. It's very playful because it uses that phrase and discloses the fact that they're a little marketing phrases and then we get the grandfather right after that. Does anybody want to do the juxtaposition of reading of the grandfather following Mary Jane's and Shirley Temple's? Kristen? Well, the difference is that as a five, six year old girl, her role is to sit Shirley Temple's and wear Mary Jane's and that's what she's supposed to do and that's what girls are meant to do in this time period. Her grandfather, he should've been a general, but he wasn't quite the right age, but he's going to still have that. Or maybe he shouldn't be, but he's still the kind of man who what? Walks with a cane out there having constitutional. Yes. Does he salute? No. He tips his hat. He tips his hat, "Morning." Then if it's afternoon, "Evening. " I love evening by the way. It's in the afternoon. That's still a language of its time. Not you, but certainly I, growing up. Anything afternoon could be referred to as evening. Not afternoon? Not afternoon. Nice. What do we have? What's evoked here? It's like gender roles. She's meant to wear the Mary Janes and he's meant to wear the general's uniform. To be militaristic and marshall. Oh, the mother. Two sentences before that, the mother of the birthday child at every party serves the ice cream and the cake. Oh, my goodness, it's perfect. They can do it. It's such this 1950s. It's perfect. In a way, collage of this, it's '50s in the sense that it's post-War. It's really 1940s, late '40s. Okay. But really, the '50s, in my opinion, starts from August of 1945 or maybe 1946-1960. That's the '50s. One of the ways to present this post-war, this peaceful booms, economic booms many people see is a kind of suburbanization of American values and the imposition of a concept to the family and therefore of the self, that if you wanted to evoke this period, you could almost do it through a series of collage images. In a way that's what she's doing. She's presenting a scenes from a life, but it could be any life, any American life. Then what's the one that follows grandpa? The tantrum. It's tantrum. Out blue, broke out, blue. I assume that means like out of the blue, without a breath of air. Whose tantrum, not grandpa's, probably. No. [inaudible] another child. Yeah. It's a child's. So you get the cake, the celebration, the war is over. You get the girl rising into girlhood, also part of the cake thing. The somewhat girlhoody, luxuriating of the drink, and nice shoes, and so forth. Then you get grandfather who's still in the military mode and patriarchal and then you get a tantrum. Then you get this line that was added that Anna mentioned earlier. Dave, you read this when I was an object of time filled with dread. Interesting that that was added later. But to me, that calls up memories of being a kid and feeling like there's just too much time, I've got nothing to do. But at the same time, combining it with how she was worried her parents would would pack up and move out. It just seemed like she was always caught in this nervous feeling of waiting, this time is just too much. For sure, kids throw tantrums because they can't process their feelings. All they know is they are upset. They're also are not in control of pretty much anything. Being an object of time to me says that she's subject to the whims of everything, passage of time and the actions of the people around her. She has no agency. Then she's got this background of these fears. The spiders in the ice cream cone is right after that. What is it about the ice cream cone of your childhood. Leave Lyn and Jimmy aside, and just be a kid and get the ice cream cone. What's the association? Oh, it's like a major treat. It's just so great. It's so great because it's not the same if you get an ice cream cone that you like, have a box of ice cream cones in your house and you just love it. It's not the same. This is totally different. You've gone out and you've gotten it, but Lyn, little Lyn, she's looking to see if there's a spider. There's something pathetic and beautiful. I've not imposing this on us, but if I had time and we're on my own, I would do a reading of this as this is a post-war syndrome. This is the child coming out of the war, coming of age, coming of consciousness, linguistically and socially, culturally, and really economically because there are things now happening. Birthday cakes and ice cream cones and Mary Janes. After a time of privation and anxiety, really world existence anxiety, she's still got one little baby foot in the old world, the world of her grandparents house, the world of her grandfather's patriarchy. She's got one foot in this modern world of the people of my generation who were given everything and who in the '60s basically rejected the ease with which we got this given to us. One of the things that got given her is the languages it is with all of its valences. So I tend to read this really as about the war and emerging from the war, those fears. Children who go through a war, even on the home front like this, though she was in San Francisco and there was some real fear about what would happen from the Japanese front, from the Pacific, mostly unrealized fears. But nonetheless, when a child grows up with that fear and they're given something, don't worry, this is pure innocence, just an ice cream. Oh, come on, Lyn. Just eat your ice cream cone and like, "Oh, it's got spiders." What else? She goes to the bathroom. She vomits secretly because. She longs for her mother. She misses her mother. Do want to say anything about that? Emily? Well, I just remember that list you've read about her earlier fears, about getting lost, being homesick of spiders and her ice cream cone. They're all about this type of displacement, this disruption, what you're talking about, and that disruption to define her childhood by creating these phobias and then for her to use disruption as her poetic practice and her kind of structure and non-structure seems lovely and resonant. What happens when you go to school? This is a young girl. She's what? Six. Is that when you go to school? You go when you're five. Five. She's 5-6 in this particular year. What happens? Talk about the development of the ego? What's going on here? It feels constructed by others. You are very accepting and vulnerable to external definitions before you can recreate yourself inline. This is a turmoil moment. Why do you miss mom? It's a fairly obvious question. I mean, it's protective. It feels safe and nurturing. What role does the mother play in this section, earlier in this section? She's the birthday cake maker. Yes. Well, all the moms. In an earlier section, what role does the mother play? Her childhood was a holy melodrama. Right. So now, Lyn goes to school. This is the moment where you get socialized by another set of agents and you move out of the sphere of the domestic and it makes her sick. Followed by a much later thought, now, come a bid chaos, welcome. What could she possibly mean? Or what do we do? What meaning do we construct from that juxtaposition? I don't know, but I had a tendency when I was reading my life to interpret a lot of it metapoetically, so that anecdote might be factually accurate or not. I saw it as maybe that's [inaudible] accumulation that she talks about it and let us describe a belief, or it's this bodily just disorganized chaos. But it's more authentic and that illogical structure, then would be the artificial conventional narrative that Anna was talking about. So when she says, undone is not not done, it's not in the sense that Hejinian's way of writing lacks any meaning or beauty at all. It's recreating it in a new way, which requires a committee, all translators. Translate that undone is not the same as not not done. Translate. Right. It's a double negative, so it means it's getting rid of the binary. It's not that we didn't do it. It's that we undid it.
