So 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? She actually wrote two editions at two different ages of her life. Right. The first one was written when she was how old? 37. And how does 37 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. When she's 45 years old, our text, the text we're using comes from an addition when she was 45, so they're 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 she, 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. So what do we mean by "about"? How can you write - we're not doing this in our discussion - but how can you write about the first year of life, 0 to 1, in 37 sentences if you're 37 years old? Kristin, what would you do if you were given that assignment? I suppose I would have to interview family members and find out what that year of my life was actually like because I don't have any memories of it. "Actually"? Or how they remember it. How they remember it, but, of course, they impose their own family stories... Obviously. ...which, of course, is actually in the sections we read. There's a mention of the myriad family stories that basically multiply all the selves of everyone. So you would do that. What about in a kind of Proustian way? Do you have any strategies for that? Maybe not 0 to 1, but maybe 4 to 5 years old. I'm going to pass this off to Emily. I think she knows more about Proust than I do. Emily, do you have any Proustian strategies? Just a lot of sensory stuff that leads you back into the... Sensory. And there are sensory things, there are phrases in the very beginning - a wallpaper with a kind of rose, a flowery wallpaper that she keeps coming back to and some other impressions. Yes, so that would be Proustian, that would be Modern, not Postmodern. Associational memories, you tell a story and then you have a memory and you do flashbacks basically. This is constant flashback-flashforward in the sense that we got from Albany. Let's go back to this question and ask Max. If the section of 1945-1946 roughly, ages 4 to 5, is about that year of her life, what does it mean? You read the text, what does it mean for that to be "about" that year? It's not so much about that year per se, I think, the way that Kristin was getting at it like saying that she would have to interview people to find out what really happened, but it's about her remembering that year or trying to remember that year or about her sort of reconstructing that year. Now, Lyn Hejinian has said, and it's the title of one of her books, "Writing is an aid to memory." It's very Steinian book, Gertrude Steinian. In what way, Amaris, does my question for Max about what this section is about - how could it be about a year - in what way does it have to do with that statement, "Writing as an aid to memory"? Good luck. Well, writing isn't an act of creating, of composing a self, so in the sense that remembering is sort of fictionalizing that past. There is no actual or truth that we're trying to fix in writing, but rather, she is creating it in the process of doing it. So it's happening as she does it and remembering entails membering again. One way to read My Life, and it's a perfectly good way, and Marjorie Perloff, who's written partly about this said this in passing, "It's really such a piece about an American girlhood." Do we have any American girlhood moments, in here? Anna, can you think of one? "I was into horses." You were into horses, so she's a bit horsey. So we have that. Anybody else? What American girlhood moments do we have? She sips Shirley Temples. While wearing her Mary Janes. And just the sound - no, I wasn't an American girl but I certainly hung out with American girls, I suppose, and the Shirley Temples and the Mary Janes, just those names make you think like, "Oh so pretty that day," you know? What is a Shirley Temple, by the way? It's 7-Up with grenadine in it. I definitely drank a lot of it when I was little. So it's a big girl's drink but it has no alcohol in it. It's very sophisticated, you drink it in a martini glass probably. No. No, maybe not. And Mary Janes? Mary Janes are shoes with a strap on them. Yes, and they're usually shiny patent or something like that. So, Dave? One line I love was, "A child, meanwhile, had turned her tricycle upside down and was turning the pedal with her hand to make the front wheel spin." That's just so evocative. Yeah, good. Any other signs of American girlhood? Photographed in a blue pinafore. Yes. Thank you. Any references that are more historically specific? This is a tough question for you. I'll start with one while you're looking. "All night," this is the first of the sections we're looking at, "All night the radio covered the fall of a child in the valley down an abandoned well-fitting," that is a well, like a drill, an oil well, " the clammy narrow pipe 56 feet deep, in which he was wedged, recorded, and died." This refers to an actual scene that, in the days of radio, would grip everyone. This is a memory, seemingly, of Lyn Hejinian in that time, in that place. This is the kind of mini trauma that you'd get - "Where were you at Pearl Harbor?" No, she was she was born in 1941, that's not appropriate for her. "Where were you when Kennedy was shot? Where were you when that boy that we listened all night, we gathered... Remember when we gathered around listening to the radio talk about this tragedy?" And if you're a young person, a child, and that happens, it's one of those things that you remember. And that's surrounded by, on one side, "The greatest solitudes are quickly strewn with rubbish," which seems to be a kind of vague, more general thing. And then after it, "Stanza there." All right. Any other, while I was stalling for time, was any other specific references? Kristin? In the second section that we're reading, there's, "At every," it's towards the beginning, "At every birthday party that year, the mother of the birthday child served ice cream and a surprise cake, into whose slices the favors were baked." When she says, "that year," there, it's after the war, 1946 or so. And why were the mothers baking surprises into the cakes that year? Can you... This is a tough one. They were probably finally off of rations, right? They had eggs and butter and they could bake again. Well, flour was rationed, eggs were rationed, butter was rationed, sugar was... You weren't making cakes during the war. So she's born in 1941, Lyn is, and she comes of age, basically, during the war. She has a grandfather who was too young for World War I and too old for World War II, but has a kind of military bearing; he's a major figure. So she's surrounded by this kind of war consciousness. And then, Kristin, back to you, then we get the moms all that year. This is a very specific cultural moment in the United States. So why were we suddenly doing that? Baby boom? Well, there's baby boom, that's true. Though the boom, her boom, would be wartime things, so she's just pre-boom, Lyn is. I'm not sure. If you were a mom with kids and you were... What did they have? What did they do for birthdays during the war? Little muffins, little flourless something or other. I don't know, hardtack or something like that. And suddenly - oatmeal. And suddenly, go crazy. This is such a post-war... So now we bake cakes and we were putting prizes in them and it's like an explosion of domestic pleasure and spending and joy and what? Yeast. Yeah, and it's pre-cake mix time too, where they were too busy to... Pre-cake mix, right. So it's a very beautiful, historical reference and we're going to do a close reading of that section so we can come back to it. 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 college classes, Intro to Lit classes, it's assigned. This is such an alternative to the memoir but is a memoir. 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? We learn a little bit about her process too. If she is getting access to these memories as a 4 or 5-year-old, like Dave was saying, a lot of what you remember from that time is what you were scared of. She kind of gets access to a lot of things through... Talking about when she got lost in the grapevines and her... 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." That's probably, if she was four years old, that's the... Or five. Getting lost, yeah. Amaris? 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 poem talk, I mean, I'm sorry, to the PennSound recording and two sentences, 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. And it seems that she is concerned with the sort of creating a history or a past or how to create an ongoing present or how memory works in the present. And I kept that in mind and as I was reading all the, particularly, the sentences that deal with the composition and the act of writing itself. Let's generalize a little bit about this; this is really important. Hejinian writes, "Writing is an aid to memory," which is a Steinian text, it's the title of a book of hers, an early book. Robert Grenier, thinking about Stein in this context, Grenier being something of a progenitor or kind of uncle relationship, slightly older than the language poets, who said, "I hate speech," which is thought of as a kind of a launching of the critique of ego psychology that underwrites the traditional idea, that these people are rejecting, of almost a Kerouacian idea that the self gets expressed through language if just liberate it, and a rejection of that. And in that context, Grenier says, "Stein was concerned with language not as object in itself, but as composition functioning in the composition of the world." I'm going to say that again and ask one of you to explain it. Grenier is saying, in the context of the language poets, of Stein, who's important to them in terms of time and writing, the following, "Stein was concerned with language not as object in itself, but as composition functioning in the composition of the world." Amaris, explain. That was a lot, but I think... I think Hejinian is Steinian in the sense of repetition with a difference. We talked about how language gets weighed down, historically, with the burden of connotations, ideological, social and so forth and Stein was very radical in wanting to liberate each word even from its conventional syntactical position. Here, Lyn, I wouldn't say is less radical, but not to that extreme in that she combines prose and poetry. There are words that are syntactically conventional or seem it or are at least close enough that we can recognize them and sort of gather some meaning, but she still is radical enough to leave that sort of... Those gaps in meaning that were so important to Stein. And there's the way which we could say that she's... Maybe what you're finally saying is that My Life is more readable than Tender Buttons. Yeah. But there's another way in which we make these Postmodern poets more radical than the Modernists in the sense that they're pushing to the edges this critique of genius, this critique of the author as authority. I mean Stein and Pound and Williams and HD all, more or less, implicitly subscribed to the genius theory of creativity. I think that Hejinian and Silliman and Perlman and Bernstein and the others are mounting a critique of that single, unified creative source of all this discontinuity. So there's a discontinuity in the language, but if you peel back to the author, you get a discontinuous sense of the self. So, in a way this is a... Silliman, Albany, and My Life are both communalistic, assembling, collage-ish assemblings of the American life, of this particular coming of age that is both particular to the individual and her particular neuroses, but also kind of generalized to childhood and generalized to culture at that time. For instance, the postwar moment of the birthday cakes. 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 of one of the sections, talk about her focus on language, the actual language. Let's come up with some... 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 a- I mean grapevine. It's like a grape arbor that she's... Sort of 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 like a web. A web-shaped pressed cone. A waffle cone. A waffle cone, and she, the girl, associates it with a spider web 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 heartbeat 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. What do we have here? Do we have a particular traumatized girl, do you think? I don't think so, I think we have... These fears are kind of charming almost because they seem so universal and something that we've all shared. And what I... I don't think she is traumatized because I think another thing we learn from Hejinian through this, or at least in these sections, is that her family life is pretty good and she doesn't seem to... 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. And even when she gets lost in the woods, they're looking for her and they want to they want to find her; she has this family to return to. She doesn't have that sort of familial trauma the way that Silliman does with its exterior. And yet the writing that results, at least in these two instances, abides by the same language poetry ideas and 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. Suppression is 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 seemed a kind of holy melodrama," and 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 of juxtaposition. "My mother's childhood seemed a kind of holy melodrama. She ate her pudding in a pattern," and you have this long sentence about the weird playing with the food. "She" could be Lyn, could be the girl. And either way, it's kind of neurotic. And then, shortly after that, we have a grandfather who was certainly not Ron Silliman's grandfather, but his reserve is 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. Somewhere between Max's take and Molly's take is the big question about this, and we're not going to have time to resolve it, but to what extent is this, as Albany is, 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 in formation, 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." And even later, in the 1960s, when people were saying things like "far out" and "that's nowhere" - that's a phrase I'd forgotten, "that's nowhere" - she continues, or someone continues to say "peachy" and "nuts to you" and feels the, somehow, the language difference. Shirley Temples, wearing Mary Janes. She had a first-grade teacher named Miss Sly and, 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 in quotes, "I '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 near town and they're buying Eskimo Pies. What's an Eskimo Pie? It's an ice cream sandwich. Yeah, it's and ice cream sandwich and it's got the chocolate outer and then the vanilla ice cream, Eskimo Pie. And because her mother had grown up in Alaska, they thought they would get a special deal, which is a classic instance of children misunderstanding language. Tell us about all this. Why the focus on language? Why did she put quote marks around these phrases she's learning? Amaris? For the two I remember that you mentioned, the "far out" I think shows how language is specific to a culture or region or a generation even and if someone said that today, it would seem anachronistic or strange in a sense. And 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 of impulse and language and how can we recreate it for future generations perhaps. Why is it important for a poet who has the ideas or shared with the other poets in her group these ideas? Why is it important for her to focus on language as she's writing about the development of the person? She's showing how language constructs her childhood in ways. She's being constructed by these phrases and learning these phrases, and 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, so the very concept of the self needs to be disclosed in this new kind of, radical kind of effort at describing a life. You can't just tell the whole life in the conventional terms that have been handed down to you and, thereby, create a conventional narrative. "Who came first? Napoleon I." 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, the self 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 on that period when she said things like "peachy." We get a myriad of perspectives on family and self and we are languaged; that's the point.
