A few years ago, when I moved from New York to London, I was faced with the worst sort of problem: what to do about all my books. By then, I had turned a room in my apartment into a library, and many hundreds more books were in boxes in a storage unit in South Carolina. The cost of shipping them all to the UK was too high, and anyway, I was beginning to doubt the value of leaving my books in boxes down south. What good were they if no one could read them?
After shifting through piles for weeks and weeks, unable to choose, I decided I would give almost everything away. At least then there would be some hope of these novels and poems finding readers again. When news broke on February 24, 2022 that Lyn Hejinian had passed away, I immediately went to my bookshelf to look up some favorite lines, forgetting for a moment that, of course, I’d given all her books away. After the initial spasm of regret passed, I searched my computer for quotes I’d typed up—how many of us have a .doc of Hejinian lines for possible epigraphs?—or had sent to friends over the years. I read poems, passages, lines others posted online. So many memories of The Fatalist and A Border Comedy and My Life returned to me. I hoped that somewhere, someone was thumbing through my old copies.
One line from My Life quoted by Trisha Low lingered in my mind: “I had begun to learn, from the experience of passionate generosity, about love.” It’s the perfect description of what I’ve always adored about her work; that “passionate generosity”—her “poethical wager,” as Joan Retallack would put it—has inspired me for years. I spent the night finding signs of it in old PDFs of her books, in her PennSound recordings from the past four decades. I fell asleep to the sound of her voice. It was so familiar, but in truth I hadn’t listened to it in years because I hadn’t needed to. She was just so intrinsically part of my mental landscape.
I always felt well-prepared for Hejinian’s death by her writing. Her embrace of life seemed to depend on our acceptance of dying’s centrality to everything. After all, her poetry was spectral, inclusive, a kind of cosmic dance for which there seemed to be no beginning and no ending, and so was all beginnings, all endings. This made her poetry a deliriously open form of thinking, a thinking that belonged to us all. Somehow, the idea that The Book of a Thousand Eyes or Oxota was authored by one woman in Northern California always seemed a little funny to me; weren’t her books really ours, with a bit of us in each line? Not that I’d want to dismiss the singular brilliance of Hejinian, only I don’t think she was especially taken with lonely singularities: “…to reach behind that, and again behind that, into the unclear brine of the mind itself,” she once wrote, a line I always took to nod to a collective mind, the mind, as if, below us, there lies an ocean of thought to which we are all connected. The sort of water—“dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free”—that Elizabeth Bishop describes toward the end of “At the Fishhouses.” That always comforted me.
After Hejinian’s death was announced, Ed Luker wrote on Twitter, “The loss of Bernadette Mayer [in 2022] and Lyn Hejinian in such close proximity feels like the loss of an entire attitude: one built from a sense of care for language, an intrigue, an irreverence about who else gives a damn as long as YOU DO.” Above all, I do mourn this—that attitude. Perhaps it is always the case that when we get older, we start to notice, and grieve, the disappearance of whole sensibilities. Oh well. “Time is filled with beginners,” Hejinian once wrote. I like to think that Hejinian was circumspect about how life tends to move on without us. She asks in Happily, “Does death sever us from all that is happening finitude?” Her poems always seemed to resist an easy answer to this old question. But I suppose the answer is some form of yes, it does; the thread is snipped. Reading Happily in 2006, Claudia Rankine writes that this poem, one of Hejinian’s most expansive explorations of death,
embodies a mind in conversation with its context, its ambient circumstances. This is happening: thoughts are relating in part to the limit of thought—a limit approached when the body asserts its physicality over the ever-present existence of the self in thought, in sensation. In the moment when the mind and the body become fixed and the body supersedes the mind by asserting its stasis, its mortality, the ever-expanding power of thought and sensation can no longer propel us forward—but this happens only once.
And you don’t survive it. Others do, at least for a while. I will miss Lyn Hejinian, knowing that more poems are on the horizon, just as I still miss my copies of her books, but lately they have become part of my “ambient circumstances”—and life itself. That feels deeper and more free than anything on paper.
Andrew Durbin is the author of MacArthur Park (2017) and Skyland (2020), both from Nightboat Books. His book on Peter Hujar and Paul Thek is forthcoming from FSG in 2025.