You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.89 AVERAGE
3.89 AVERAGE
reflective
slow-paced
This peice of art inspires and prompts me to write. It is of Hejinian's poetic autobiography, personal narrative, a woman's fiction, and an ongoing dialogue with the poet and her experience. She reveals an artist at work, and I feel one-of-the-same. ONE OF MY FAVES!!
second five-star read of the year so far. and it is another poetry collection. which you would be excused from not guessing at seeing the title. my life sounds pretty memoir-like after all. although, poetry collection doesn't quite do the trick either. the best possible definition i can consider is for this to be a poetic recollection. or recollections. in the same way, virginia woolf's [b:The Waves|46114|The Waves|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1439492320s/46114.jpg|6057263] doesn't quite fit in with the notion of a novel yet it can't be a poem strictly speaking either, lyn hejinian's life story defies proper conventions as well.
written in her 37th birthday, the book consists of 37 parts, each made of 37 sentences. if you think i figured out the amount of sentences while reading it, you're giving me way too much credit. it was pretty visible each part had the same length (two pages tops each) but the amount of careful work into making the same amount of sentences all around was beyond me. based on that idea and dedication, this could have been another memoir into the big pile of poetical texts. however, lyn hejinian belongs to the so-called language poets which means things aren't as easy as they look.
in fact, things are meant to appear the complete opposite. for language poets, the reader's role was essential to the co-construction of a poem's meaning. think reader-response theories if your mind is plagued with literary theory like mine is. if it isn't, let me give you an example:
take symmetry. red mother, red father, many red and rosy children, most of them women of stability. that word.
now, try to make sense of those three sentences put together. you can blame me for taking them out of context but you can also trust me that this isn't about context. it's about what you build-up inside your own head based on the written stimulus provided by the author. as you can imagine, language poets are a controversial sort. after all, it must be quite difficult to determine a group of poetry that actively declares to be indescribable. take another (yet clearer) example from the book:
i have said, and meant, that i want people to "get" this, and yet, with expansive sensations, i hate to "lighten up".
basically, i could make this much straight-forward for you to understand my point. but what would be the fun of that?
which was what this book set out to do. it wants you to know the author's life. it tells it to you throughout 37 mini-chapters. her life is all in there; it just won't give you the clues to figure out. it's a challenge, i'll say--and perhaps, in the end, you might feel like you didn't get the full picture. maybe you weren't meant to to begin with. maybe you need to read it again. and again. or maybe, you take away with you all your first impressions and consider the text itself reveals more of the author's life than its actual anecdotal content. who's to say? the author will certainly not tell you.
written in her 37th birthday, the book consists of 37 parts, each made of 37 sentences. if you think i figured out the amount of sentences while reading it, you're giving me way too much credit. it was pretty visible each part had the same length (two pages tops each) but the amount of careful work into making the same amount of sentences all around was beyond me. based on that idea and dedication, this could have been another memoir into the big pile of poetical texts. however, lyn hejinian belongs to the so-called language poets which means things aren't as easy as they look.
in fact, things are meant to appear the complete opposite. for language poets, the reader's role was essential to the co-construction of a poem's meaning. think reader-response theories if your mind is plagued with literary theory like mine is. if it isn't, let me give you an example:
take symmetry. red mother, red father, many red and rosy children, most of them women of stability. that word.
now, try to make sense of those three sentences put together. you can blame me for taking them out of context but you can also trust me that this isn't about context. it's about what you build-up inside your own head based on the written stimulus provided by the author. as you can imagine, language poets are a controversial sort. after all, it must be quite difficult to determine a group of poetry that actively declares to be indescribable. take another (yet clearer) example from the book:
i have said, and meant, that i want people to "get" this, and yet, with expansive sensations, i hate to "lighten up".
basically, i could make this much straight-forward for you to understand my point. but what would be the fun of that?
which was what this book set out to do. it wants you to know the author's life. it tells it to you throughout 37 mini-chapters. her life is all in there; it just won't give you the clues to figure out. it's a challenge, i'll say--and perhaps, in the end, you might feel like you didn't get the full picture. maybe you weren't meant to to begin with. maybe you need to read it again. and again. or maybe, you take away with you all your first impressions and consider the text itself reveals more of the author's life than its actual anecdotal content. who's to say? the author will certainly not tell you.
It was intriguing for about 50 pages, but after that, the disorientation of language poetry made it a slog to get through. I can appreciate its importance in the postmodern canon, but I can't really recommend this to anyone. 4/10.
mysterious
This is one of my favorite literary treats that I return to when I want perspective, when I want to be lifted out of the linear and escape into freewritten bliss. It feels like a stream-of-consciousness Woolfian-Kundera daydream.
It is a strange thing to read an autobiography as poetry.There are some fabulous singular thoughts contained within the poems.
I think my only issue with this book is who I would recommend it to for fear of them not liking it.
I think my only issue with this book is who I would recommend it to for fear of them not liking it.
An interesting, very heady read. I read it quickly for school and dashed off a response paper, so I didn't get a lot out of it. There are many beautiful images and sentence fragments but I didn't get a sense of coherence from the work as a whole. I respect Hejinian's craft, but at the same time, I'm not likely to pick up the book again anytime soon because it seems so formidable and intellectual. I'd be interested to hear what other people got out of it, other than the fact that she counted sentences and chapters, measuring them out so precisely.
Volvería tantas veces. Nunca con intenciones de comprender, si con pretensión de jugar.
I can understand why some people would love this book, it just wasn’t for me.