When I imagine living and writing in the time after Lyn Hejinian, I remember a line the poet Ed Roberson said in a recent conversation with Lyn: You damn well better think. It’s not something that Lyn said, but it’s a comment that unfolded in the social zone of poetics, a space in which she was eager to participate. Returning to Lyn’s writings today, I appreciate the ethical dimensions of this task—thinking—and how radical and subversive it is now to choose to think as part of a rigorous aesthetic practice. What Lyn set out to experience in and through writing was difficult, but I get the sense from the work that she pursued the task, thinking in the real world, happily. What’s more is that she did this while inviting density into the poem, thought as a meandering wayward force. The chaos unearthed there teaches me the seriousness of the call that is this thing we do—writing. This is not to be overshadowed by the many moments in Lyn’s work that are direct and unambiguous in their ambition (though multidirectional in their implications). From her well-known essay “The Rejection of Closure” (1983): “Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces;”... or The Cell (1992): “Mention rain and grammar follows.” In writing these lines, Lyn didn’t just write poems—she developed a theory of the practice (poetics) in the medium of the practice (poetry), and in doing so, scrambled what we thought we knew of prose (!). As a pioneer in the form of the book-length poem, a writing that goes beyond the time of the lyric instant, she stretched the duration of writing, challenging the idea of the brief and the tidy. All this is so contrary to so many of the underdeveloped and honestly lazy pseudo-lyric impulses that dominate contemporary practice today. Not that others hadn’t done that before (besos a William Carlos Williams), but Lyn ventured into some really strange territories returning to the line and the book as a medium to explore the postmodern ways we co-create sense, beauty, and meaning. She was hard-pressed to describe this work as a kind of realism and disavowed the label of philosopher (“‘Hard science’ / isn't my field. I have other preoccupations.”). Lyn’s commitment to “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction,” to use her words, is undeniable, and I only wish someone had handed me a copy of My Life when I was twenty years old rather than assigning those canonical works by Descartes, Nietzsche, and so forth. While I was not yet a zygote in the era of Langpo and I did not know Lyn personally, I am not ashamed to say I loved her because in the time that she was on this Earth she spoke sentences like “One can’t undo one’s life”—so matter of fact, and by turns tragic that it need be said at all, while introducing us to the beauty and force of clauses like “—a flowering focus on a distinct infinity.” She did this while venturing into the unknown, recognizing, “Undone is not not done.”