Lyn Hejinian Quotes

A fragment is not a fraction but a whole piece

This poem is one of a series, all of them elegiac in intention, and subject to the strange forces of mourning that let loose illogical developments, into impossible configurations of thought. The poem is built of non-sequiturs, because that's what's left in the wake of the death. We cannot follow the dead, whether they are persons or ideas. Instead we remain, but in a situation that, in their absence, makes no sense.

To some extent, each sentence has to be the whole story.

The 'open text' often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers.

The idea of the person enters poetics where art and reality, or intentionality and circumstance, meet.

People must flatter their own eyes with their pathetic lives. The things I was saying followed logically the things that I had said before, yet bore no relation to what I was thinking and feeling.

Putting facts by the thousands, into the world, the toes take off with an appealing squeak which the thumping heel follows confidentially, the way men greet men. Sometimes walking is just such elated pumping.

I was eventually to become one person, gathered up maybe, during a pause, at a comma.