Convention holds that the overall importance of a life can be understood by chronologically recounting its significant events. Lyn Hejinian’s seminal My Life, recently reissued by Wesleyan University Press, upends the conventional form of autobiography. Through a series of prose poems, My Life tells her story by attempting to replicate the way life unfolds moment by moment, each saturated with a limitless number of occurrences—memories, perceptions, ideas, stories, conversations, and more. The poems pressure language to contain this vast flux while keeping it as open-ended as our lives. In doing so, Hejinian makes language one of her primary subjects, and shows that only through it can we know ourselves.
The first version of My Life, written in 1978 when Hejinian was 37 years old, consisted of 37 prose poems, each comprising 37 sentences. When she was 45 years old, she revised it, creating 45 poems, each with 45 sentences. And in 2003, she published a 10-part, closely related work called My Life in the Nineties. The new Wesleyan edition brings together all this work in one volume. The Poetry Foundation recently corresponded with Hejinian via email, and an edited, condensed version of that correspondence follows.
What was it like returning to My Life at intervals over several decades? Did you laugh at some of the sentiments of your 37- or 45-year-old self?
My returns to My Life did not provoke me to laugh at my earlier manifest self. Nor did I delve into the pathos of (my) lost innocence. Because the work isn’t, in fact, a narrative account of my life, I didn’t feel obligated to account for its sentiments (to use your term—which is a good one). They were/are cultural artifacts as much as they are “mine.”
I do regret not bringing the darker, scarier perceptions more into the foreground, so that they would have been evident from the outset. I didn’t intentionally hide them. I see them at many places, but something in the work’s tone has veiled or recolored them, so to speak.
The poem, in both versions, begins darkly, with a father returning from the war. Yellow, which is at the very least a “sunny” color, gives way to purple.
A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned home from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left was purple—though moments are no longer so colored.
Something somber has taken place and done so unconsciously or inadvertently, in a realm beyond my control—in reality.
Did revisiting the book let you play with one of its central paradoxes—that we continuously circle back to memories as a way of shaping our identities, yet always in a new context, thus altering our identity and memories?
In essence, you are asking, and quite rightly, about the very possibility of a first memory. The “moment yellow” refers, in fact, to my real first memory insofar as I remember validly or accurately, and to the extent that I can locate a first one. A subsequent early memory, from when I was two or three, is of a purple blanket or something purple—glimpsed as a door opened and I saw my father for the first time in two years, home from naval duty in the Pacific.
But the nature of memory isn’t what was of primary interest to me in My Life. As you suggest, it is the processes of perception, and of description, the shaping forces that construe identity through its contexts—the public and private spaces into which a specific person enters. It is important to me politically that the subjectivity or sensibility at the center of My Life not be read as typical or exemplary; I want to resist putting a universalist (and by implication authoritative) voice in play. It is within that orbit of a strangely anonymous, language-masked specificity that I would hope My Life unfolds. Convention holds that the overall importance of a life can be understood by chronologically recounting its significant events. Lyn Hejinian’s seminal My Life, recently reissued by Wesleyan University Press, upends the conventional form of autobiography. Through a series of prose poems, My Life tells her story by attempting to replicate the way life unfolds moment by moment, each saturated with a limitless number of occurrences—memories, perceptions, ideas, stories, conversations, and more. The poems pressure language to contain this vast flux while keeping it as open-ended as our lives. In doing so, Hejinian makes language one of her primary subjects, and shows that only through it can we know ourselves.
The first version of My Life, written in 1978 when Hejinian was 37 years old, consisted of 37 prose poems, each comprising 37 sentences. When she was 45 years old, she revised it, creating 45 poems, each with 45 sentences. And in 2003, she published a 10-part, closely related work called My Life in the Nineties. The new Wesleyan edition brings together all this work in one volume. The Poetry Foundation recently corresponded with Hejinian via email, and an edited, condensed version of that correspondence follows.
What was it like returning to My Life at intervals over several decades? Did you laugh at some of the sentiments of your 37- or 45-year-old self?
My returns to My Life did not provoke me to laugh at my earlier manifest self. Nor did I delve into the pathos of (my) lost innocence. Because the work isn’t, in fact, a narrative account of my life, I didn’t feel obligated to account for its sentiments (to use your term—which is a good one). They were/are cultural artifacts as much as they are “mine.”
I do regret not bringing the darker, scarier perceptions more into the foreground, so that they would have been evident from the outset. I didn’t intentionally hide them. I see them at many places, but something in the work’s tone has veiled or recolored them, so to speak.
The poem, in both versions, begins darkly, with a father returning from the war. Yellow, which is at the very least a “sunny” color, gives way to purple.
A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned home from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left was purple—though moments are no longer so colored.
Something somber has taken place and done so unconsciously or inadvertently, in a realm beyond my control—in reality.
Did revisiting the book let you play with one of its central paradoxes—that we continuously circle back to memories as a way of shaping our identities, yet always in a new context, thus altering our identity and memories?
In essence, you are asking, and quite rightly, about the very possibility of a first memory. The “moment yellow” refers, in fact, to my real first memory insofar as I remember validly or accurately, and to the extent that I can locate a first one. A subsequent early memory, from when I was two or three, is of a purple blanket or something purple—glimpsed as a door opened and I saw my father for the first time in two years, home from naval duty in the Pacific.
But the nature of memory isn’t what was of primary interest to me in My Life. As you suggest, it is the processes of perception, and of description, the shaping forces that construe identity through its contexts—the public and private spaces into which a specific person enters. It is important to me politically that the subjectivity or sensibility at the center of My Life not be read as typical or exemplary; I want to resist putting a universalist (and by implication authoritative) voice in play. It is within that orbit of a strangely anonymous, language-masked specificity that I would hope My Life unfolds.
Read more here.
“Interview with Lyn Hejinian” by Vicki Hudspith for The Poetry Project.