Lyn Hejinian

“Drinking Shirley Temple with my Mary Janes on, let's say that every possibility waits”

“Writing’s initial situation, its point of origin, is often character­ized and always complicated by opposing impulses in the writer and by a seeming dilemma that language creates and then cannot resolve. The writer experiences a conflict between a desire to sat­isfy a demand for boundedness, for containment and coherence, and a simultaneous desire for free, unhampered access to the world prompting a correspondingly open response to it. Curi­ously, the term inclusivity is applicable to both, though the connotative emphasis is different for each. The impulse to bounded­ness demands circumscription and that in turn requires that a dis­tinction be made between inside and outside, between the rele­vant and the (for the particular writing at hand) confusing and irrelevant—the meaningless. The desire for unhampered access and response to the world (an encyclopedic impulse), on the other hand, hates to leave anything out. The essential question here concerns the writer’s subject position.”

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

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

“The sky was packedwhich by appearing endless seems inevitable.The flag droops straight down. The horsein dry sand walks with a chirping noisefrom friction of the particlesand counterarguments like pack icepuff in the waves there, blowing fountainsof pearl. The ground.”

“A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal with cloth in the 14th century and gave mankind its first button. It was hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of one person, but nothing is isolated in history -- certain humans are situations.”

“In every country is a word which attempts the sound of cats, to match an inisolable portrait in the clouds to a din in the air. But the constant noise is not an omen of music to come.”

“Allegories are told with a purpose whose possibility is lostUntil a potato-eater appears and eats potatoes”

“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.”