Whatever the objects of Lyn’s place, they are intended to give way to an experience of time that I find more unusual than it ought to be: it ought to be that one can be as situated anywhere as one is when there, visiting. There a chair is meant to be sat in for as long as it takes to listen to an entire CD of Ligetti or Braxton; a sofa is meant for a conversation with at least two glasses of inexpensive wine; a pile of books changes their spines infrequently: the simple dining table stretches into the early hours of the morning; the photographs in their frames have long been committed to the wall; a painting by Ostap Dragomoshchenko animates and arrests the passage of time.
—The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, 1975-1980: Part 8 (2009)
As she had done before, here and there in conversations over recent years, Lyn spoke about her pleasure in and appreciation for the life she had lived and also of dying and death the last time I saw her in person. We were drinking wine again in the Berkeley house she had partly raised her family in and shared with her husband Lawrence Ochs since 1977. The plan was to walk to an Italian restaurant a few doors down on College Avenue, which we did, and where she would continue on this theme. She was aglow with urgency, intensely and warmly present. Eventually the conversation shifted to our collaboration on “time,” which we had begun in January 2023, something that we had discussed attempting years before, after we had completed The Wide Road; but we didn’t get started on it until after the diagnosis of a rare cancer. She was well enough, responding to the therapies that could prolong her life and was able to concentrate on books she planned to finish. Among these were her second critical collection Allegorical Moments: A Call to the Everyday and her last book of poetry Lola the Interpreter, which Lytle Shaw has assembled for publication posthumously. With these priorities in place, we could get started—without an expectation of how far we would be able to take the exchange.
Our conversation about our collaboration on that August night concerned not how long we would be able to keep going with it, but rather her sense that, in writing on the subject of time, she wanted to include everything and she was wondering if that made her writing so abstract that it wasn’t about anything. In her last entry of our unfinished collaboration, she was clearly thinking about this question of everything as she processed something that had come up in our late-night conversation about abstraction and the concrete:
My ideas are concrete to me in many ways, and many of them are about the concrete stuff of the phenomenal world, but a term like phenomenal world belongs to the realm of ideas. Even, alas, of abstraction. And yet I see (or “see”) it spinning around me, I feel its plethora and chanciness.
I didn’t make it back to San Francisco that evening. Alone in the house, as Larry, a musician was on his way back from a European tour, we talked until we couldn’t stay awake. Lyn gave me a pair of pajamas to wear and I tucked myself into a bed in an upstairs room I’d slept in many times, often with my partner, poet-critic Barrett Watten. The first time Barrett and I slept at the house together was in 1980 or 1981 after we had been poisoned in our Oakland loft by a misapplication of pentachlorophenol. I think we stayed in an upstairs room in an office full of Tuumba Press and Metalanguage boxes. We had had to discard all of our earthly possessions, including clothing. Lyn gave me two long black dresses with floral patterns, apologizing to me that her entire closet was black. Other than jeans, I never saw her in anything but black dresses, skirts, and sweaters in those days, clothes that would not show the ink she applied to type with which she set Tuumba chapbooks on the Chandler and Price hand-letterpress stationed in a utility room at the edge of the kitchen. In the same Grand Piano essay, cited above, in which I focus on objects in her house, I indulge a reverie of Lyn setting the type of my first book:
Percentage (Tuumba 23) came out in fall 1979. I watched Lyn work on it, once or perhaps more than once, conscious of the stairs on the other side of the kitchen with children running, bouncing, trudging depending on energy and mood, up and down them. The pinto beans on the other side of the doorway had been cooking all day on the stove, slowly. I might have daydreamed an old fashioned, cottage industry convergence of spinning wool or weaving while observing Lyn set type. The wheel of the printing press doubles as the wheel of a spinning jenny. A loom rises up, like a platen to meet type.
No matter the activities, moods, and sounds, Lyn’s house felt calm and as orderly as the pressed, black clothes hanging in the closet. Our lives—Barrett’s and mine—even without poisoning, were more economically marginal and subject to the exigencies of rentals in various troughs of economic downturn. During our stay in this most hospitable region of time, significant plans began to brew, as it was during this prolonged visit that Barrett proposed a publication collaboration, which was soon to become Poetics Journal, a ten volume project that Lyn and he co-edited from 1982-1998. The international scope, experimentation, and variousness of this project, including its engagement with performance, narrative, visual art and music as well as its presentation of poetics as formal and informal essay, experimental prose, interview, poetry, and artist notes created a conversation across the boundaries of artistic practices.
Lyn describes the project in their introduction to A Guide to Poetics Journal:
It was no accident that, from its inception, one of our chief editorial aims was to articulate the linkages between this multicentered Language writing movement and parallel developments in other avant-garde practices. In the intervening years, Poetics Journal witnessed the development of writing on poetics from a wide range of aesthetic tendencies—language-centered, ideology-critical, performance-based, New Narrative, hybrid genre, new lyric, textual materialist, and conceptual/documentary, to name only a few.
In this was not only a spirit of making, activating, or proposing but of learning—across the boundaries of discipline, genre, identity, and nation. There is much to be remarked on the subject of learning in this milieu, but I write just now in and around the context of a house, which I have known to have held many meetings and gatherings related to publishing, arts administration, collaborative writing, and informal study groups. An early instance of learning involved rehearsals of Celia and Louis Zukofsky’s A-24. At Lyn’s and Larry’s there was of course a piano present and also children to attend to; thus, Kit Robinson, Steve Benson, Barrett, Bob Perelman, and I would converge at Lyn’s for rehearsals with Bob, on piano, patiently directing our attention to the tempo and dynamics of Handel’s music as we attempted to speak the polyphonic language of Celia’s score.
However murderous and deathward our time then and, even more precariously, now, Lyn persisted in addressing the historical moment in which she was living in a fashion that remained profoundly generative with regard to making works and doing deeds; and self-questioning and critical when it came to reflection on the current state of affairs. These multiple activations, productive and contemplative, were contingent on an ability to use time that as she has noted most people don’t possess; this access to time as a private and public good is a critical topic woven into her poetry and poetics of everyday life. I open Positions of the Sun (Belladonna, 2018) at random and here I find a thought sequence that weaves references to the very house I have been writing through with considerations of such concerns:
Reconciling a goodlife (whatever we might mean by that) with mortality is one of humanity’s many failed undertakings. Slaughter, assassination, war, injustice—or sheer immiseration—are the most prevalent forms that overtake this reconciliation. I am writing this at home, three doors down from the corner of College Avenue and Russell Street. In my home state (currently August 2013), there are 727 individuals on Death Row awaiting execution.
These historically construed times to which I have referred include Lyn’s trips to Russia before the end of the Soviet Union, her abiding friendships and collaborations with Russian poets before and during that time, and her learning Russian. Leningrad, a multi-authored book by Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, and Lyn Hejinian remains a striking testimony to the connection between samizdat poets and American avant-garde poets at the end of the Cold War. This engagement opened to remarkable intercultural exchanges across time and space that have included many poets; and this continues now despite the devastations of war and exile. At another juncture and as a Professor at UC Berkeley, Lyn became a dedicated activist during the Great Recession through the Post-Occupy period. She supported student protests, advocated against privatization, and observed and studied the processes through which economic collapse and neo-liberal privatization agendas were impacting public education in California, her region, and the neighborhood that she traversed on College Avenue, from the commercial blocks adjacent to her shady two-story house to the campus to which she commuted on foot. Our paths crossed quite regularly during this period, as much of my life, and Barrett’s, remains situated in California and we have shared an abiding interest in the fate of higher education.
Reflections on the topics of memory and history are often woven into Lyn’s engagements with a poetics of description, everyday life, and “allegorical moments.” I end this brief remembrance, which could have focused on other topics—her poems per se, her talks and pedagogy, Nietzsche, Gertrude Stein, William James, dreams and horses, an earlier house—with a quote from one of many addresses to time and memory in Positions of the Sun, a work that Lyn Hejinian identifies as “an essay with characters.”
The sun moves softly over much of the scene, but it is intensifying the rest. Our pace slows and becomes routine, we alter our route awkwardly. We need to hesitate but can’t, since now we concentrate our full attention on our goal—a cluster of blind buildings. We take our proper private and public bodies toward them. Memory informed knowledge is fallible, but at least it sustains historical consciousness. It is quite different from the omniscience of an ahistorical, or history-obliterating God.