Lyn Hejinian

 

Hejinian on Experience

  
Hejinian believes in the notion of "nonclosure," the ongoingness of writing, thinking, and  living.  Her writing takes on open-endedness by demonstrating that “thoughts are always adjusting themselves, that thinking is always reinventing what’s already been thought.”  

Experience as motion, extending across time, timelessness in experience: "I am attracted to what moves, what comes into view, things have a presence because they occur in and as motion."

Ex. from Happily:

“Whatever I see in thought as life I come to coming to me in history”

Ex. from The Fatalist:

“Constant change figures the waking time we sense / passing on its effect, surpassing things we’ve known/ before making the case that memory of many things / is called experience, and that’s what we call nature without pictures.”

In the story / the cloud trembles like a pudding and grunts like a baby and tries to move / and can’t but in real life the teeth, the arms, the feet linger / in the realm of sensations.  Speed has tint, it tilts, it is admittedly / indistinguishable from the sky but do sensations stop in sleep / and merely remember? Is memory a halt? / Is the dream / not an orifice belonging to sleep?  The sun that lights the obvious / oblivion cannot stop it.  That’s what fate is: whatever’s happened – time regained.”