Sight

by Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino

Poetry. A collaborative effort by two of today's most famous poets. Equal parts poetry and philosophy, Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino's collaboration is organized around the act and idea of seeing, written in the form of a literary dialogue. We were interested in a joint investigation into the workings of experience, writes Hejinian in the introduction, how experience happens, what it consists of, how the experiencing (percieving, feeling, thinking) of it occurs, what the sensation of sensing tells us. Visual descriptions interact with meditations on contemporary life, Western intellectual history, dream, film, poetry, and collaboration itself. Scalapino: the sight is the/ reverse of the occurrence Hejinian: Sight is lyrical, because its subtext is annihilation.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published April 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

[Amira Hanafi]

Reading this made me think a lot about revision. It seems the back and forth process of writing this series of small texts doesn't allow for revision at all, so each of the poems reads like notes, not necessarily hurried but certainly not picked over for precision. There's a rawness that's appealing: here are seeds, raw texts, in a perfectly linear exchange between the two authors.

Is there a way for two authors to collaborate that is not so closely akin to a kind of correspondence? I wonder what the results of a collaboration that asked each author to revise the other's texts might read like. Or what if a collaboration started with some text not authored by either collaborator, but changed by one, then revised by the other, then sent back and changed again? Or what if a group of writers got together and revised in a loop?