Here, just below, is Lyn Hejinian's typescript of an untitled poem we've taken to calling "constant change figures" (click for a larger view):


To what extent does our notion of nature's picture--a picture of the many things we name "out there"--surpass the things we already know? We seem to deem memory nature's picture. So to what extent is experience the result of our living in time, a state producing senses that are familiar and yet move us forward toward new and different effects?
So, truly, constant change figures the time we sense. "Figures" there--a transitive verb at that point--enacts things: change makes things, shapes them, renders them, gets things just so.
As you can tell from the recording, we were astonished that these words could accomplish all that thinking about words? Can you imagine writing a poem of nine triads, 27 lines in all, each line this carefully rendered--a poem that in all uses far fewer unique words than the total number of words in the poem, far fewer than conventional utterances would need to employ. Fewer, let's say, than required by the language of philosophy telling of the same phenomena.
During our lively Hejinian PoemTalk, Tom Mandel in particular works out for us the way the shifting yet repeating triads are enacted. Bob Perelman focuses on Steinian memory (forgetting something himself along the way), Tom Devaney on the power of turned-every-which-way phrasal variations, Al Filreis on the Steinian mode (again) and the poem as a possible critique of the ideology of experience.
Is this poem itself--its very manner and form--an instance of what Hejinian famously observed in My Life - "the disquieting runs of life slipping by"? Yes. The four PoemTalkers seemed to agree on that at least. As Bob Perelman notes, the poem itself seems to slip by one. Succinct as it is, one can't seem to hold it all in one's mind at once.
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* Click here for a PennSound recording of Hejinian talking about and reading her own writings through Gertrude Stein.
2 comments:
After this, who needs pretzels?
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Seriously,
I did read the first "figures"
as a verb, and I did sense the
ending "experience" as having
a question mark after it.
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This kind of meditating on
"constant change" has long been
endemic in my writing because that is how my mind configures human being. Everything is of the moment. Now is where that which changes encounters that which does not change, where the ephemeral and the eternal meet.
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Maybe that is why, in spite of what little I know--largely due to my having spent 20+ consecutive years away from poets and poem-making, I find Lyn Hejinian's and Susan Howe's and Ron Silliman's work appealing.
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Wish this program attracted more, especially more comments.
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Thank you,
Brian
Thanks, Brian!
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