“The next work I’m gonna read,” Lyn Hejinian says, peering into the webcam, “is from a work in progress that I didn’t mean to write. I didn’t mean to start it, and I don’t mean to keep writing. But I keep doing so.”
It’s April 2021. She is 80 years old. I haven’t seen her in person for years, but on camera, in this Zoom poetry reading, she looks and sounds as I remember her. Her white hair hangs just over her shoulders. Her voice is soft but steady—glad, surprised. She’s at home in Berkeley—on the wall behind her hangs a blue-and-gold collage made by her father.
“And the one thing I can say to its credit,” she says, shuffling papers, “is that I have no idea where it’s going, or what’s going on some of the time. Which is a new adventure in poetics for me, I guess. The title is Fall Creek.”
The day I learned she had died was bright and windless. I drove to Target, as I’d planned to, and pushed a shopping cart down the diaper aisle. Eventually I realized I was crying. I tried to hide my tears, while also hoping someone would notice and wonder why.
At home, I searched for her name in Gmail, scrolling through old email threads with Lyn. I opened interviews with her on YouTube without watching them. I had the impulse to write to her about the famine in Gaza, forgetting, for a second, that that was impossible now. I resented certain other octogenarians who were somehow still alive. Twice, I dreamed about her. In both dreams, I was waiting with rising dread for her to tell me what she thought of something I’d written.
I felt greedy. I drove over to Stanford to scan PDFs of her out-of-print books, and then to the main branch of the Berkeley Public Library, to check out others. Back at home, I scoured my shelves for every book of hers that I owned, pulling them out, piling them on the living room floor. There was the copy of My Life that I’d bought on my lunch break at Moe’s Books when I was 19, with a hazy photo of Lyn on the cover, taken decades before I knew her. She gazes into the distance through her long, Mendocino-in-the-1970s hair. There was Positions of the Sun: “Time should be free of chronology—chronology is not the proper syntax of time.” There was The Unfollowing: “And so we come to chapter LIX, in which I learn that I have failed / Can you believe this shit.”
I came to Berkeley in 2006, unsure if I’d be able to stay. Pell and Cal and Blue and Gold Grants covered some but not enough of my tuition; I worked two or three jobs at a time, convinced I wouldn’t last beyond my first year. Sometimes I’d calculate how much I was paying—that is, going into debt—for each hour spent in a seminar room. The arithmetic became increasingly nauseating; by the time I finished, in 2011, in-state tuition had nearly doubled.
At the start of my first semester, I registered for a course with Lyn, not knowing who she was. It was a lecture class of around a hundred students called Modern and Contemporary Literature, which I think she was teaching for the first time. Her lectures were never egotistically freewheeling, and certainly not avant-garde. The word that comes to mind, rather, is conscientious. They were like her handwriting: precise but unfussy, urgent but never rushed. We read a lot of Gertrude Stein, Shklovsky and Freud and Benjamin Lee Whorf and William James, and Mrs. Dalloway, Cane, and The River Between. I recognized her as a fellow Californian simply on the basis of her low-key affability, the way she’d stand to the side of the long table at the head of the room, smiling and shifting through her notes.
I transcribed her lectures verbatim, as I initially did in all my classes—even if I had no idea how to write in a way that would meet my TA’s expectations, this, at least, I could do—but I figured I’d never talk to her. Near the end of the semester, though, she sat in on my TA discussion section, and in the hallway afterwards, she told me she appreciated something I’d said. I can’t remember what it was—something about time. But she invited me to stop by her office and talk some more.
Lyn excelled at calling bullshit in various registers, and I keep worrying about what she’d say about what I’m writing now. I can hear her. OK, that sounds good. But does it actually hold up?
We used to talk about something we called inarticulability. (“Did we just coin a term?” I remember her saying in her office on the fourth floor of Wheeler Hall, as I filled out the independent study form that I’d brought for her to sign.) We meant the overwhelming sense that speech is, can be, unequal to its circumstances, incapable of adequate description, performance. That was what I wanted—to pursue what couldn’t be represented. I was earnest and eager and wanted to know everything.
We talked about Wittgenstein (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent”) and Cordelia (“Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth”); about breakdowns in politics; about nonsense, exile, Foucault’s lectures on parrhesia, fearless speech. I made long lists of neologisms in Moby-Dick, and of the Oulipian constraints that appear in Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, and how these hint at dreams of liberation. (Adorno: “The moment a limit is posited it is overstepped, and that against which the limit was established is absorbed.”) I marveled at enormous, incomplete undertakings: The Arcades Project, The Making of Americans.
As a condition of receiving one of my scholarships, I had to make phone calls requesting donations in the Berkeley Alumni Office. Whenever someone picked up the phone, my voice brightened weirdly. I was playing the poor kid who couldn’t believe his luck. Tell your story, my supervisors would say. Sell yourself. In their pursuit of a language of what Lyn, echoing her friend and collaborator Leslie Scalapino, called “continual conceptual rebellion,” the books I read with Lyn and the books she wrote seemed to me like an antidote to any sort of shilling verbiage. I was adamant—then, now—that the present world must not be allowed to represent all that we can desire, and below all the contested (if niche) efforts to characterize what Language poetry is about lies a simple promise: that writing might offer a way of discovering “interminable and nonheroic possibilities.”
And I was totally lost. What was I trying to figure out? Beginnings, I think—what a beginning is, what one must do in order to start.
Another one of my jobs was as a security monitor in the dorms. I needed the money, so whenever I could, I’d schedule myself for a double shift, clocking in at five in the afternoon and leaving at three in the morning. I swiped students’ ID cards when they came in; occasionally, I checked out board games and racks of pool balls to dorm residents. But mostly I just sat there. I wasn’t required to patrol the grounds. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I’d ever had to provide the building with actual security.
That’s where I first read My Life—in one sitting, perched on a wobbly drafting chair in the security booth at Norton Hall. It was a quiet night. By the time I finished the book, I had been alone for hours. I looked up at the clock and saw that it was a few minutes after three. A hum filled my ears: the inner noise of tiredness, and the pipes, vents, and ducts of a midrise dormitory in the early morning.
My Life, first published in 1978, obeys a simple constraint: thirty-seven sections, one for each year of Lyn’s life at the time of writing, each comprising thirty-seven sentences. A kind of autobiography—kind of:
The sunlight must be spilling since one can see where it plunges into the river and spreads out bobbing on its broken surface. Some bird was saying that ha-ha-who, anaphora. It is hard to turn away from moving water. Who’s to see a radio wave over the mountained landscape, while a bird remains in view. The trucks pushed up the road down below, following the tracks, overloaded so slowed down, in a louder gear. To town. The plow makes trough enough. Shadows “fill” the checkered, vegetable creek.
The paratactic clicking between images puts an enjambment-like pressure on each sentence. This doesn’t mean nothing follows. You can regard some sentences as extensions of what immediately precedes them: “The trucks pushed up the road down below, following the tracks, overloaded so slowed down, in a louder gear. To town.” And the coordinating of various repetitions allows you to read certain passages as fractured scenes or events. There’s a distinct sense of place, often in the shade of redwoods, or the Berkeley Flats. But these ways of aligning the parts into some sort of whole are never definitive or complete. My Life is full of gaps, which is to say openings, which is to say beginnings.
When I looked up from the book, the linoleum floor glowed under the faultfinding lights. The grungy lobby—whitewashed walls, smudged glass doors—felt like a vessel floating in the dark.
Lyn wrote of her desire “to deploy consciousness . . . as an agent of beginning, mobilizing thought and perception not only forward but outward,” and in the security booth, silently packing up my stuff, I was gripped by a feeling of incipience.
For three consecutive spring semesters, we met every other week. I’d find Lyn in her office in the early afternoon, when the Bay fog had mostly burned off, persisting only as a whitish texture that made the sunlight even paler. I’ve forgotten a lot about our conversations, stuff I should have written down. But I remember her describing Edward Said’s thoughts on late style, the modes that emerge in the work of certain artists as they approach death. Lyn was fascinated by such works, not those that exhibit “a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity,” in Said’s words, but those animated by “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.”
The work she was publishing then was itself “late,” but that thought never occurred to me. She seemed very far from the end of her life.
She had blue eyes and pale eyelashes and blinked often, rapidly. The first time I read a description of Freud sitting behind his analysands as they lay on his Qashqai-carpeted couch—out of sight, to facilitate free association—I thought of Lyn. We faced each other, of course, but her expression was often neutral, almost blank. It was freeing but unnerving. As I embarked on the near-total resocialization demanded by academic life, I soaked up everything around me. Talking to Lyn, though, I became painfully aware of just how quick I was to follow the lead of whomever I was speaking to, whichever conversational drifts they signaled by means of their nods, frowns, smiles. She put a stop to that. It was a gift.
Both of my grandmothers went to Berkeley as undergraduates. One, who studied English literature during the Depression, lived with her parents in San Francisco and commuted to the East Bay by ferry; the Bay Bridge hadn’t been built yet. (She may have been in classes with Lyn’s father, who also studied English there in the early 1930s.) My other grandmother majored in political science; later in life she became well-known to listeners of KGO Newstalk 810 AM as Pat from San Francisco, a frequent, drunkenly rambling caller. She used to brag about her membership in Mensa, her Phi Beta Kappa key.
“Thanks to my father’s crediting of Gertrude Stein, a woman, with genius, I took it that gender would not be a bar to my own attempts to be a writer,” Lyn once wrote. (She added: “Gender did seem to preclude my becoming a scientist.”) Several decades older than Lyn, my grandmothers, despite their education, must have felt blocked from doing much other than leaving their jobs once they had children, playing dominoes and bridge, reading mystery novels, getting drunk. I used to think of them on my way into Wheeler Hall, whose marble steps were worn round at the edges by almost a century of feet. What were they thinking when they walked up these steps?
It’s April 2009, and Lyn is telling me how, in her view, Said’s concept of late style needn’t be confined to biological age. Think of cultural lateness, she says. Late capitalism, for instance. Or for that matter, life on this planet. Maybe we’re living in a time that demands—requires—difficulty, intransigence. Incomprehensibility, even.
She smiles, squints. But what do you think?
Fall Creek, published two months after Lyn died, consists of a single long poem, which begins:
Long hawk the protest
procession catching the wind
made memory’s macadam
for a chant, a song, an attic,
to a façade
under claws of the bird
prong without concession
wringing pan-syllabic
hieroglyph from sky
or is that time it’s in
or out of
sync
if sync there is or was or could be
long on the or an horizon
with sun up
and down dark on
and on as life continues
ending with urgency
The lines continue like this, skinny and starkly enjambed, to the poem’s end, eighty-seven pages later. Terminal punctuation is also scarce. That’s common enough in the work of other poets, but Lyn was an avid maker and punctuator of sentences, so part of the shock of the first page is in simply discovering their disappearance. Which words and phrases go together in these opening lines?
Long hawk the protest
procession catching the wind
made memory’s macadam
You can try to read sequentially, which yields confusing but suggestive phrases (a long hawk?). But working your way down, you might discern a braiding movement. Clusters of words separated by other words seem to call to each other. Perhaps the hawk is what’s “catching the wind”; maybe its activity is intertwined with that of “the protest / procession,” which has made—or been made into—“memory’s macadam.”
“Time’s flow is dammed and the past comes back,” Lyn wrote elsewhere. But while making sense of Fall Creek may slow you down, the poem keeps changing, requiring recalibrations like those prompted by “as life continues / ending.” Such hinges of sensemaking occur even within individual lines. “Hoc fieri in truth accidental,” Lyn writes, simultaneously advancing a decree or a pledge (Hocfieri—“this must happen,” or “this should happen”—in truth: that is, the poetic discourse currently underway must not tell any lies) and a correction (what’s purportedly necessary is in fact a long series of “accident[s]”). We rush to keep up.
The writer Peter Cornell describes Le Livre, which Stéphane Mallarmé conceived of but never finished:
The pages, according to an intricate system, could be reordered so that new combinations and contexts of meaning would be ever arising. As such, Le Livre had neither a beginning nor an end, no fixed meaning, only perpetual circulation.
As if a book can be like that species of jellyfish that forever recycles itself, going from adult to polyp and back, again and again. Fall Creek isn’t so elaborate. But is it too much to suggest that in the specific manner of its reversals, it approaches a condition like the one he dreamed of? The poem can’t lift us out of our own timebound course and into “perpetual circulation,” nor does it pretend otherwise. But it can still create a feeling of abeyance, even as it keeps crashing ahead.
It’s 2021 and Lyn is still onscreen, reading from Fall Creek. She glances up every few seconds, pausing only to inhale.
water of phenomenal jetsam raptor
feather bubble orange
peel gum wrapper moss scrap latex
glove in gutter and fallen autumn
leaves of littoral life a moving image bit
by bit.
“I’d like it to be like a creek,” Lyn says shortly afterward, in response to a question. “The proposal for myself was to keep it flowing, letting debris fall into it.”
a cult of pigeons shitting
Shamelessness from the eaves
Devoted to creekside horsemanship
Moving—
Her voice is rhythmically steady, almost chanting. After eight minutes or so, she finally stops, coughs into her fist, and goes on:
as Herodotus
to history rides easy atoms
of noncombative liquidity
whose unforeseen linkage locks
the woman under hefted time
to atoms that weep
the fall that has always started
She pauses again, longer this time, and reaches outside the frame for a large yellow mug. She swallows and laughs. “It’s merciless to read out loud.”
Fall Creek enacts and charts but above all participates in what Lyn refers to as “the impossibility of disconnection,” which, she writes,
should be taken
over dams and through interstices
obliged to left-hand composition
with a grilled cheese sandwich
and skipping some
might say skidding evidence
inland for granted
at the very facticity
of gladiolas and anemones (perfect
accomplishments)
speaking their own
patois of a sea bed
hostile to a life of facts
The book is shadowed by the past and its debris—grilled cheese sandwiches, gladiolas, anemones—but also by the future, or the future’s exhaustion. A hint of Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil, taunting Orson Welles: Your future’s all used up. And yet this isn’t quite the case. “Any moment is, in fact, many moments,” Lyn once wrote, “colliding with each other, at each juncture new and brief.”
Late artworks, Edward Said maintained, can render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them. What arises instead is a curious impasse, he writes, a complex of “irreconcilables,” hanging together in “nonharmonious,” “nonserene” tension.
Still—and here’s what I find marvelous—such artworks do cohere. They are not, or not only, heaps of fragments, even if we lack names for the shapes that they assume.
I readFall Creek in the first days of July 2024. It was stunningly hot in Northern California. My older kid was at preschool; I read the poem in hourlong blocks while the younger kid napped. The air smelled of smoke, but not overwhelmingly. As my neighbors and I left for work in the mornings, we’d ask each other where the fires were, blinking at each other, not quite sure.
For Said, late style derives its power from its negativity. “Thus the power of Beethoven’s late style is negative, or rather it is negativity: where one would expect serenity and maturity, one instead finds a bristling, difficult, and unyielding—perhaps even inhuman—challenge.” Those adjectives all describe Fall Creek, yet the book augments and lightens them. It’s awash in negativity, but the negativity floats, flows. Gertrude Stein: “Why is grief. Grief is strange black. Sugar is melting. We will swim.”
At the end of July, I woke up early one morning and drove to Felton, a “census-designated place” ten miles north of Santa Cruz—the location, Google Maps said, of Fall Creek. It was a Saturday and traffic was light. I cruised through Berkeley, Oakland, and San Leandro, heading south, into a desiccated corner of Silicon Valley. The roofs of tract homes peeked up from behind beige sound walls. I passed many cylindrical office buildings with mirrored façades like wraparound sunglasses.
The highway rose into the Santa Cruz Mountains, past a gold rush cemetery and a Safeway and faded banners for Bible schools. About two minutes west of Felton’s main drag, I arrived. I’d pictured Fall Creek as remote, deserted, but the parking lot was full of cars. The slope from the trailhead to the creek was narrow and bulging with the roots of old-growth redwoods. The trees seemed to rise as I descended, as though I was walking in time-lapse. I thought of Vertigo and La Jetée, but the references felt forced. OK, that sounds good. But does it actually hold up?
I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I’d brought a notebook and a pen; without really planning to, I started scrawling descriptions of what I saw.
There are many other Fall Creeks: in Oregon, Wisconsin, New York, Tennessee. I knew I might have driven hours to a place unconnected to Lyn’s book. But if so, I didn’t want to know. I could have asked around beforehand, but I didn’t want to be disabused. I just wanted to see Fall Creek for myself. The water is crystalline, but because it moves so rapidly, it sometimes appears murky. Creek is a misnomer; you can hear the current rushing from the road.
A desire path led down to the edge of the water. Stretches of creekbank, and of the buffer zones of the trails, consisted only of roots. Elsewhere, the fat gray roots of fallen trees reached into the air. The canopy was uneven, and curtains of light exposed swaths of floating dust. Because the light was so pale and so shifting, everything looked a little provisional. I went on scribbling in my notebook. When I finally stepped back onto the trail, a man nodded at me. “Hey, that looks like science!” he said.
In 1984, Lyn is 43. Her son and daughter are both away at college. It’s horrible at first: she writes to a friend that she feels “old, useless, finished, ugly, etc.” The poetry scene in the Bay Area is fragmented, petty. She won’t complete the long poem she’s been working on for several more years, and finds its form—if it even has one—perplexing, daunting. Because she’s “very miserable in character,” as she puts it, she feels “the necessity of stepping out of character,” and so goes to see a psychic reader, an idea she would’ve previously dismissed as absurd.
Let’s say she leaves her cedar-shingled house one afternoon and walks a few blocks west, down to Telegraph Avenue. She turns left, away from the bars and headshops by the university. Telegraph widens here: you see fewer shady trees, more space between buildings. And let’s say this psychic works out of a dilapidated house, maybe somewhere near Alta Bates Hospital.
The psychic looks the part—small and hunched, with gray-streaked scraggly hair and silver rings. Her living room is crowded with ochre velvet armchairs and frilly floor lamps. Lyn sits down on the couch and listens to a series of unremarkable divinations until just before the session ends, when she asks one more question, about literary form. The psychic smiles, shuts her eyes. The only sounds are the hum of traffic and the whir of a box fan.
The psychic finally speaks. Your poems are life projects, she says. Consequently, they must have a form that’s very large and clear, in which many variations are possible. Like the sea, she says, which has tides, but also waves, and small ripples.1
In 2011, I left Berkeley and moved 6,000 miles away to Berlin, having never left the United States before, then to Baltimore, then Minneapolis. Lyn and I emailed sometimes, and once, while visiting the Bay Area, I spotted her while eating at Fenton’s, the old ice cream parlor on Piedmont Avenue. She stood alone on the narrow sidewalk, waiting for a bus. I thought about running outside to say hello, but felt self-conscious about being at this kitschy restaurant, and not having accomplished whatever I thought I should have by then. I figured I’d talk to her when I had more to show for myself. She was wearing all black, as always, and smiling faintly. It was the last time I saw her in person.
Viktor Shklovsky––whose writings Lyn loved for their defiance of pessimism, their way of sharpening one’s sensation of the world––compared the whirl of inquiry that comprises human intellectual life to falling down an extraordinarily deep well. We’re each holding a torch, Shklovsky says, and as we fall, we try to parse the signs carved into the damp stone walls. Whatever we discern as we drop is what we claim to know. The fall seems endless, but eventually we reach the bottom.2
It’s 1981, and Lyn has just published “The Green,” a poem concerned, in part, with all that she couldn’t perceive, everything she knew was always escaping her. Near the end, she writes:
At Fall Creek we built dams which were self-defeating across the small branching streams, since the pool forming behind the dam had inevitably to overflow it, making our barrier of rocks and pebbled mud a mere line constructed in the water.
This account of Lyn’s visit to the psychic is partially speculative; I drew many of its details from her letters to Alice Notley and Kit Robinson, but have also imaginatively filled in what I now have no way of knowing. ↩
Perhaps this is apocryphal—although I suspect I simply haven’t managed to track the metaphor down in Shklovsky’s work. I encountered it, attributed to Shklovsky, in an interview with John Jeremiah Sullivan. ↩
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