My Life and My Life in the Nineties

by Lyn Hejinian

New edition of one of the founding works of Language writing

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties. An experimental intervention into the autobiographical genre, My Life explores the many ways in which language―the things people say and the ways they say them―shapes not only their identity, but also the very world around them.

Genres: Poetry, Memoir, Biography Memoir, 20th Century, Grad School, Nonfiction, American

152 pages, Paperback

First published March 7, 2013

About the author

Lyn Hejinian (born May 17, 1941) is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is well known for her landmark work My Life (Sun & Moon, 1987, original version Burning Deck, 1980), as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000).

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

A stable characteristic of books assigned for class is one can rest assured someone in the rest of the deskbound pack felt a lot more strongly one way or another about the work within as similar a context as one can get without flinging the work at roommate friends or familial relations, so I can go ahead and amass my participation grade in public and not care very much at all in private. Language poets! Feminism! Wannabe Barnes' and Loy's with a fetish for the "mad" and more skill with temporal dimensions than engaging literary experimentation. Maybe there's a compatriot of Hejinian who would have appealed more to my fancies, but I'm content to trip over them by chance later.

The name of the game is this triple aged year by sentence by part work in which youth is implied, knowledge is thrustm and the only nod to passage of time in one home city Oakland California United States is a father leaving with a cane and a daughter returning with Mace. Cute, right? Nah. It would've been more forgiveable had the references and the insights accumulated into something more profound than a haphazard tonal scale whose rhythms did more to exasperate than to swoop and grip and soar, but that's personal preference for you. I'm most certainly missing everything and then some, but when one's actually read Proust and Woolf and Walcott and Bâ and something despite all the encrusted gore of excited spittle and pontificating prats actually clicks, the second guessing's an exercise in waste. She doesn't have as many ratings as those others? Let me show you my library who is in the same way in addition to lacking a canonical position at Berkeley. Throwing a woebegone affirmative action composite and expecting me to play critical fetch is a shitty way to go.

The one good thing about this work is the escalation of anticipation for next-in-the-assigned-reading-lineup Dictee. Now that I'm foaming at the mouth for.


PS: Waking up to news of Svetlana Alexievich winning the 2015 Nobel Prize for Lit was one of the best things ever. Voices from Chernobyl, here I come.

[Jade Wootton · Rating 4 out of 5]

On this account we love reader-resistant modes of autobiography.

[rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

obsessed. so interesting!!! i had to read each sentence like three times lol. reeeaaaaally wanna read hejinian’s books on linguistics now, i feel like i could stand to learn a lot from her about command of the english language for memoir-esque writing, and ofc this is such a big source of inspiration for my own memoir project for eng360. SO AWESOME

[Claire Zhang · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5, this book is a beautiful recollection of life, told in fragments that Hejinian reveals later to be "sentences in a book that shake like leaves in the trees." I especially enjoyed the beginning half, with the recollections of childhood, and the small moments / images she highlighted that brought my own childish hopes and desires to the surface.

[Ella Barrett-McGuinness · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uhhh bit weird but nice vibes sometimes. Not an autobiography though 😔☝️

‘The river, clear and amber, like tea from a peat, ran deep through the bear circle in the forest. Mineral always turns animal in the machines it symbolises. Sometimes the will inspects the goodness of being and remains passive before it. In a socket of the earth it burns.’

[Catherine Goodrich]

loved tbh

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful stuff

[Travis Klunick · Rating 5 out of 5]

the slow-building glory of this work is unmatched .. years piling atop one another like slabs of light

as for we who love to be astonished .. ahh

[Caitlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was super interesting. I want to hate it but I can't.

When I first started reading it, I was so frustrated I didn't want to continue, but I forced myself to because I had to read it for class.

This book is written with no narrative structure. You can read whole sections of text and have no clue what you just read or have any idea how to summarize what you just read. That is what is frustrating about this book. You want the sentences to connect with each other, and create some larger picture or story, and they just don't. The speaker's thought process is not linear and random pronouns like "she" and "he" are thrown in there without any explanation for how "she" and "he" relate to the speaker's first-person "I". It's all very confusing.

I was told by my professor that each section corresponds to a year in Hejinian's life, and maybe you can see that a little, but it doesn't really help you overall. Eventually, I just gave up on understanding what I was trying to read, and just read the story one sentence at a time. Ironically, that's when I started to enjoy what I was reading. Weird, right?

If you read the story like this, phrases will start to stick out to you like:

"Solitude was the essential companion...the greatest solitudes are quickly strewn with rubbish."

"Vision determines view."

"You are not different from your friend, but with your friend you are different from yourself."

"There are always more leaves than flowers."

"The new cannot be melodic, for melody requires repetition."

Some may even be relatable like: "Math is like a joke I just don't get, whose punchline isn't funny."

And maybe you don't understand what they all mean, but you know you like them. So you make your own meaning since Hejinian doesn't give you any.

In class, our professor made us do this weird exercise where we took three random sentences and forced ourselves to connect them, to read between the lines, and see what we, ourselves, thought it could mean. It was really enlightening. One of my favorites was:

"What memory is not a "gripping" thought. Only fragments are accurate. Break it up into single words, charge them to combination."

Hejinian throws random sentences together and asks the reader to find meaning in them. She encourages active reader participation in her text. She uses the idea that "language speaks in a text" instead of "a speaker uses language to convey meaning." It's a concept I had never heard of until now but was a common thought in the Language Poetry Movement. Hejinian uses this concept called "open-text" which invites participation in the text and rejects the authority of the writer over the reader. In a way, Hejinian's text provides an occasion for your own thoughts to emerge.

It is not the most fun thing to read if you are looking for an easy story to get lost in, but it is super fascinating, and I admire Hejinian for her vision.

[Mina Widding · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reas this as an art project, reading one passage a day out loud and filming it with diary like commenting, linking it with my life and thoughts. As autobiography , I like it very much, though it's sometimes too jumbled and incoherent for me, and as inspiration and something to bounce thoughts on creativity and life against, it has its moments. Some passages a joy to read aloud, some very hard (especially some words were hard to pronounce!) and almost daily I found interesting synchronisities with the text and things going on in my life, though I didn't read in before hand.

[Alexa Harbaugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Response to My Life by Lyn Hejinian
My first thought of Lyn Hejinian’s tactile memoir is that it closely resembles the repetitive language and imagery of Gertrude Stein’s “Patriarchal Poetry“ and ”Lifting Belly.” It wasn’t until I read the article shared in addition to this text that I recognized the parallels and the acknowledgement of Stein’s writing as inspiration (also mention of Stein in the piece itself toward the end). There were several recurrent themes in the text, but the component that I felt most compelling was the address of memory—not solely as a tool to aid the reader’s comprehension of context, but additionally as a means of creating delirium, transcendence, and an image that exists outside of time.
“I was in a room with the particulars of which a later nostalgia might be formed, an indulged childhood,” (Pg. 11 of my ebook). Her writing throughout My LIfe addresses memory as something that occurs within the present moment, but also exists on its own. The linearity of time in this sense is challenged—making memory an active agent in present thought rather than something that only exists in nostalgia. How we examine Hejinian thus, is thrust upon us as an accumulation of memory, constantly revisiting thoughts (through repeated image or phrase/adapted association of the phrase with new images) to build a consciousness that is composed almost entirely of memory, much like a glass slowly being filled with water.
I think it's a powerful aspect of her writing to create a narrative around aging in this way—there are often moments that act like “remembering” as in seeing something and being reminded of something familiar or it trailing off into a thought about something connected to the familiar parts of it, etc. For example, “Those birds are saying, over and over, this tree, my branch, my field of seeds, my herd of worms. Thus was it told to me. I made signs to them to be as quiet as possible. It was at this time, I think, that I became interested in science. Is that a basis for descriptive sincerity. I am a shard, signifying isolation — here I am thinking aloud of my affinity for the separate fragment taken under scrutiny. Yet that was only a coincidence. The penny disk, the rarer dollar disk. Her hair is the color of a brass bedstead. We were proud of our expertise, distinguishing the ripe ears of corn from the green, speaking knowledgeably of tassels and the breeds of corn: Butter & Sugar, Country Gentleman, Honey & Cream, Silver Queen. The old dirt road, broken into clods and gullies, or clods and ruts, over which I was walking under some noisy trees, had been reversed in the dark. And so I was returning.” (I know that’s a big chunk of text, but bear with me. Pg. 51). Though stream of consciousness can be used as a descriptor of her language, there is far too much intentionality in a seemingly erratic text. She wants you to follow a train of thought, she wants you to make a connection, and in finding the connection throughout the sentence to end her own thought (or at least round it out) she encourages the reader to make connections as well; whether it be parallels from earlier in the text, or within themselves detached from the page. The importance of human memory transcends just her own.
I thought to bring to light some repeated phrases from the text that were striking, but the further I read and the more I recognized the pattern as all too intentional, the recurrence of “blue,” “rose,” “redwood,” etc., began to form an overarching memory of sentimentality, rather than themes that could stand alone. I find significance in ladybugs the way Hejinian finds significance in redwoods, because they remind me of home or a familiar space. The usage of these words and images work with the narrative to form a full human being from the text—one that is as layered as memory itself.
There are moments of sobriety that provide more context to a present tense that continuously moves along, such as, “I had always hoped that, through an act of will and the effort of practice, I might be someone else, might alter my personality and even my appearance, that I might in fact create myself, but instead I found myself trapped in the very character which made such a thought possible and such a wish mine,” (pg. 47). It’s almost as if Hejinian uses dreamlike imagery and visceral encounters to become a landscape for a pressing thought, like a quote written over a picture of the Grand Canyon (and much like the red hat from Stein’s Tender Buttons). They provide insight into an inner-world that is so striking it can’t be ignored, and in many cases are often the longest sentences in each prose poem.
On a technical level, I love the interchangeability in usage of verbs and nouns, as well as the personification of objects, giving them bodily function and form. “The traffic drones, where drones is a noun,” (pg. 53) is the most explicit example of this. Her challenging boundaries of language initiates the most engagement from the reader. I felt engaged because something I recognize is not doing an action that I recognize, and vice versa. I have more to say, but I feel like I could go on forever.

[Edith · Rating 3 out of 5]

It may be that "My Life" was innovative upon its release and that it's shine has worn off, or that it wasn't for me, or that I didn't sit with it for long enough, but I only thought it was ok. I will concede that my reading was a bit lacking; I tried not to worry too much about 'understanding' the poem, and instead listened for its effects, and saw how I responded to it. Reading it this way, I did not find it all of that difficult. Sometimes "My Life" was really breathtaking, but in short bursts, in small chunks of insight.

A lot of the futzing with idioms and verbal phrases felt overdone or dull to me. I get the impression that maybe they *were* clever, but also that I had seen a similar kind of play in a lot of grammar courses that I had taken during my time as a student. Something about it falls flat. Robert Grenier's line "I HATE SPEECH" is sometimes taken as a symbol of some of the ideas that powered Language writing--but the play in the ironic phrase is dampened if you only consider that sometimes people must do things they hate. It's like there's this promise that the text has taken on this project is prying into quirks of the language, but most of the time what materializes is trivial, kind of jokey. Yeah, you might "hit" a storm when you embark on a trip, so what, y'know?

Surprisingly, I loved "My Life in the Nineties," which, as its title demonstrates, is both a continuation of the project of "my life," and a retrospective on "My Life," a reading through of the work in its new context--the 1990s. This retrospective helped me to appreciate the original work. It makes explicit some of the ideas that were floating around in "My Life" and how they relate to the push of Language writing as a whole.

If you aren't initially sucked in by "My Life," I think it is still worthwhile to stick it out through "My Life in the Nineties." I don't think it'd be a good idea to read the latter before the former though.

[Samira Abed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foundational text!

I woke up feeling very awake. I'm maybe over-caffeinating, now at 2-3 cups of coffee a day, especially on such a rainy day, when maybe I should be slower. I wish I exercised more, it would be awesome to go to the gym every day when maybe these days I go only when I know someone else is going and would go with me.

What breath of fresh voice Lyn has. I enjoy how much of this feels like overheard dialogue. There is also the clear attention paid to grammar, the rules of language, etc, the philosophy of language. I wonder if there's something about Berkeley that really just forces you to think in these analytical ways about things.

I finished this after a strong feeling of overwhelm. I would read a few lines then get up in a tither. I hate how much I can become absorbed in my own private conversations. I find myself returning to them over and over again. At this point, I'm lucky to know it will go away, if I give my subject enough rest. Some 2-3 months. But it's just such a long patience. I really need to stay busy through it. Which feels sometimes just completely impossible. I want to be serious and genuine but that's so hard to do when the ironic and silly are more distracting.

I enjoy being outside before everything becomes day. It feels more real to me. But i've had a lot of frustration recently that has disrupted even that simple pleasure. Ugh. Idk. Thanks Lyn!

[James Askari · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a child or teen Hejinian read her father's copy of Anna Karenina and then 'wrote [her] name in every one of his books'--as one of the refrains of her auto biographical collection has it. This suggests the ambition of her LANGUAGE poetry projects, and the wit and perhaps elusiveness of its relation to norms of gendered authority. The book is in an avant-garde tradition, drawing inspiration most evidently from Gertrude Stein, and is a form of feminine as well as feminist writing, a heritage acknowledged in an even more double-edged refrain, 'the obvious analogy was with music'. At the same time, Hejinian has no intention of breaking entirely with subjectivity, direct reminiscence, writing in its most straightforwardly referential dimension. The registers of her writing are recollection, on one end, and poetics or self-conscious writerly self-reflection, on the other, with a vast and rewarding middle ground of pensées, philosophical, pseudo-philosophical, politically engaged, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes pensive, sometimes lighthearted. The most interesting lines are ambiguous between these contexts. 'A pause, a rose, something on paper'--which at one stage seems to be her degree certificate. 'As for those who wish to be astonished' attracts her mother's love for her and her own love for her children, but also some stringent cautions.

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

'A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal with cloth in the fourteenth century and gave humankind its first button. It was hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of one person, but nothing is isolated in history—certain humans are situations. Are your fingers in the margins.' (6)

***

'A pause, a rose, something on paper implicit in the fragmentary text.' (32)

***

'What is one doing to, or with, the statement (the language) or the stated (the object or the idea) when one means it. A bottle of wine is different from a wine bottle.' (33)

***

'Always infinity extends from any individual life, but eternity is limited between one’s birth and one’s death.' (40)

***

'A fragment is not a fraction but a whole piece. Pinched down to an inch within an inch of where it had been.' (70)

[Chris Merola]

a dazzling supercut of images, aphorisms, memories, and wordplay - a self in fleeting sketches, a portrait of bite sized life nibbles that can't help but juxtapose one another in their endless frolic.

Through these glimpses into Lyn's mind and sight, we build up a staggering tapestry of recordation - one that's infinitely rereadable. Seriously, it's nigh impossible to remember each passage in full as every sentence is a borderline non sequitir.

the coda, my life in the nineties, is Lyn at her most revealing, it's oddly affecting considering the fact that this autobiography is essentially just 1500 lovely out of context tweets smashed together

some faves -

There has always been only one day, and with it we are developing a lifelong relationship.

Existence precedes essence: we make our appearance and then define ourselves.

[Jacqueline]

On the surface is as nonsensical as it is beautiful. The real treasure is in between the lines — here are some of my favorite quotes:

“The entomologist, as she herself says, can tell you everything she knows about ants but nothing as to what ants know about themselves.”

“Some are crystal, some have membranes, but moments are bubbles drifting up, many go up at once.”

“I am a stranger to the little girl I was, and more - more strange. But many facts about a life should be left out, they are easily replaced.”

“Thinking back to my childhood, I remember others more clearly than myself, but when I think of more recent times, I begin to dominate my memories. I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.”

Not rating because I’m not sure how to quantify this one

[Mary Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

She almost seems to abdicate responsibility as an author and place the raw material of everything in her life at your feet. There is definitely structure there, but it's *subterranean* and excavating it is *exhausting.*

It isn't light reading; it isn't a narrative in the usual way - and she does it on purpose, which boggles my mind.

I think I'm very glad to be done with this book for a while - maybe forever.

[Cooch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult but sometimes illuminating

There are moments of greatness in both these poems, but you have to dig them out. My honest feeling is that some good editing could have made these poems better. On the other hand, to make a musical analogy a la Hejinian, some of the best musical moments come out of improvisation.

[Dean Oken · Rating 4 out of 5]

i’m fascinated by Hejinian’s philosophy of poetry. surprisingly, i found myself drawn more to “my life in the nineties” in which her form coheres more, allowing the disjointed subjects to become more embodied. it feels like her vision fully realized and executed by a fuller self. she is my walt whitman, this is her song of myself.

[Lila Rosen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was jaw dropping. So genuinely chaotic at the start, but by the end (especially by the end of the first section) it was such a beautiful mosaic of the author. Her language and composition is stunning. Not an easy read but SO worth it

[julieta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think what I like about this is that Hejinian writes about her life through sensations and images, not as a narration. So it can get somewhat exasperating, but that is what makes it so special. I just think it is something to read at different moments, not necessarily all the way through.

[Lex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for Experimental Poetry class. Wrote a paper on it.

[Madeleine]

100
AD

[John Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it!

[Laura Merlina]

Honestly enjoyed this a lot, you have to see every sentence as it’s own story

[Mac Bechtol · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was definitely enjoyable, but the writing style is going to be hard for Riley & me to replicate

[HD]

“Of course I want things to be real!”

[hjh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Perfect Book

[Melia Tessel · Rating 5 out of 5]

So hard to read but so worth it. Hejinian never lets you forget that you're reading in the best way possible.