A Border Comedy

by Lyn Hejinian

Poetry. "Lyn Hejinian's work increasingly explores poetry's relation to knowledge...But rather than abstract frameworks, one finds coyotes, geese, didactic asides, horses, philosophical anecdotes, hawks, intercourse, wasps, goats, pigs, ravens, and a great deal of urinating. It is through this particularity that Hejinian invents a poetic pedagogy at home with its forgiveness to itself, poised both to topple and attain intellectual authority...One of the interesting oddnesses of the book, one that forces us to catch our breath and occasionally to huff, is that quasi-transcendental or a priori insights find their way skillfully and unpredictably into what is otherwise a radically nominalistic, context-dependent intellectual setting" - Lytle Shaw.

Genres: Poetry

224 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1999

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

[Claudia Savage · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lyn Hejinian is such a damn brain! I don't even know how to rate her book. I'm glad I own it. I'm glad I spent a month of evenings reading sections of it aloud. Completely wild. My favorite part of the book might be her "SOURCES" in the back of the book. It made me realize how far I need to go to compete with the big dogs. Good poets=good philosophers, but too much Heidegger and Derrida and Goethe could make you forget how to speak normal-like. :0

[Amira Hanafi]

I'm still trying, but boy is it hard.

Update: Haven't gotten back to it. Perhaps now is not the time. Perhaps only part of it was what I needed. Only time will tell.

[Joanna]

again, two renewals at the local library doesn't cover.

[Shanxing · Rating 5 out of 5]

showed me the possibility and excitement and freedom in writing poetry for the first time