The Beginner

by Lyn Hejinian

Poetry. Across several decades, Lyn Hejinian has been constructing an exemplary and profoundly influential body of exploratory work, work of a discrepant lucidity that undermines commonplace assumptions of the permissible and the possible. Her poetry and her prose, as well as her frequent artistic collaborations, probe with incisive wit and formal invention fundamental questions of subjectivity and community, content and communication, gender and expressivity. THE BEGINNER was originally published in a limited edition in 2001 by Spectacular Books, and is now being reprinted by Tuumba Press. "I'm beginning, and thinking that I think myself launched into something, but the actual beginning has occurred long before and as a result the thought that "I'm beginning" is not a beginning but a pause, a phrase, though one incorporated into a beginning (the beginning concealed around it)."

Genres: Poetry

42 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

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

[Keifer May · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great long poem that considers beginning and the becoming being of a beginner. The abstractness synthesized with the voice in Hejinian's poem is really stunning, she performs a transcendental philosophy the event or a beginning and winds up discovering that "... the the things we're talking about—they've always existed." There is no beginning other than the play and the seeming beginning. Perhaps the beginner has always been, is becoming over and over. I can almost see reincarnation in this.

I'm glad I found this tucked between her small group of books at the library.