Winston Lê : Notes from the Field : Poetic Summonings

 

 

 

 

There’s some necromancy happening in Vancouver. The Dead Poets Reading Series is a bi-monthly literary event held at Massey Arts Society in Chinatown.  This long-running reading series is a curated seance of living poets performing the poetry of deceased poets as means to pay homage to the poetic lineage the came before. In this unique reading series format, featured living poets share the work of dead poet they’ve long admired. These performances take place on the traditional and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations otherwise known as Vancouver, BC.

If you visit DPRS’ website and read the “about” section, you’ll notice there is sort of meta commentary happening in terms of haunted nature of this reading series and its many revivals throughout the years. Originally conceived by David Zieroth in 2007, DPRS has taken on many different forms through its organizing team and venue spaces. It feels quite fitting that this motif of “resurrection” runs through DPRS own history as an arts organization.

In its current iteration, Massey Arts Society has become the new venue for DPRS. Providing a summoning space for both the living poets and their conjured ghost-poem/poet companions. In a post-pandemic world where arts venues are becoming a scarcity, Massey Arts Society has provided a home for a plethora of Vancouver book launches, literary events, festivals, and workshops.

In July I was fortunate enough to be one of four feature poets at DPRS. Featuring at the DPRS is sort of a hybrid between presentation and performance. Readers are each given a twelve-minute time slot to briefly discuss the biography on their chosen dead poet and then read from their body of work.  The poet I chose was Lyn Hejinian. Hejinian’s work, particularly her famous craft essay on “open texts” have been quite pivotal in my own linguistic experimentations. Hejinian was founding figure of the Language Poetry Movement of the 1970s and influential force in the world of experimental and Avant Garde poetics. Through a variety of techniques such as the “new sentence,” and an embrace of the open text, Hejinian’s work sought to engage the reader in new ways, making them active participants in the process of experimental lyricism, language materiality, and meaning-making.

The readers at DPRS are tasked with providing biographical details of the life of their dead poet, usually before they get into the poems. I found this quite fitting because even though Language writing tends to be anti-confessional and anti-realist, Hejinian’s work doesn’t reject these modes, and instead repeatedly engages with biography or autobiography. Through her work, Hejinian insisted that alternative means of expression are necessary to truly represent both reality and that which is often considered confessional, exploring the relationship between such writing practices and the subjectivity that biographical genres often obscure. Through this sense of a defamiliarization Hejinian’s writing urges us to be attentive to the ways in which meaning is emergent as well as to the constant unfolding of possibility that constitutes our public and private lives.

It was a privilege and honor to represent the late Lyn Hejinian’s poetic body of work at DPRS. Great to take part in one of Vancouver’s longest running literary series. Such a flurry of poetic voices from my fellow readers.

 

 

 

Winston Lê is a Vietnamese-Chinese poet and interdisciplinary artist who resides in Langley, BC. His writing has been featured in Composed: anthology of poetry 2024, periodicities, Sparkling Tongue Press, Ekphrasis Magazine, pagefiftyone, and filling Station. His poetic practice encompasses different modalities concerned with language acquisition, including receptive bilingualism, translingualism, speculative poetics, and asemic writing. His debut chapbook, translanguaging was shortlisted for the 2018 Broken Pencil Zine Awards. translanguaging is now curated as part of the special collections at Colby College Libraries and Michigan State University Libraries, respectively. In March 2024, Lê spent a two-week tenure as the poet-in-residence at Studio Faire, an artist residency located in Nèrac, France.

 

Andrew Durbin : In memory of Lyn Hejinian

 

 

 

 

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.