My Life Lyn Hejinian Recognized today as one of the great works of contemporary American literature, My Life is at once a poetic autobiogra- phy, a personal narrative, a woman's fiction, and an ongoing dialogue with the poet and her experience. Upon its first Sun & Moon publication-expanded from the 1980 Burning Deck edition-Library Journaldescribed the book as one that "is an intriguing journey that both illuminates and perplexes, teases and challenges, as it reveals an innovative artist at work." Poetry Flash observed that it has "real, almost hyp- notic power, obvious intelligence, and Iis] astonishingly beau- tiful." lt received the 1987 San Francisco State Poetry Cen- ter Award, and was a finalist for the Bay Area Book Review- ers Association Book Award. Since !987 , My Life has been taught in hundreds of col- lege and university courses around the world, and is a favor- ite book of thousands of readers. This current, reedited edi- tion represents its sixth printing. LYN H EJ!N IAN (;) ;u GREEN INTEGER 39 $11.e5 tlt Irt rsBN 1?A-L-111ePq3-33-3 L=; My LLfa -l rrt 6) nr ,illJllJltlttl[ruuuil llrflrrir[nur )J 0) (t:) GREEN INTEGER 39 POETRY/AUTOBIOGRAPHY/WOMAN'S LITERATURE BOOKS BY LYN HEJINIAN AThought Is the Bnde of What Thinking (Tuumba Press, 1976) A Mask of Motion (Burning Deck, ry771 Gesualdo (Tuumba Press, r978) LYN Witing Is an Aid to Memory fihe Figures, 1978/ HEIINIAN Sun & Moon Press, 1996) My Ltf, (Burning Deck, r98o) The Guard (Tirumba Press, r984) Redo (Salt-Works Press, r984) My Ltft and updated] (Sun & Moon Press, 1987) My LLfa [revised Individuals (with Kit Robinson/Chax Press, r988) Leni.ngrad (with Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten/Mercury House, r99r) The Hunt (Zasterle Press, 199r) Oxota: A Short Russian Nouel (The Figures, r99r) The Cell (Sun & Moon Press, r99z) The Cold. of Poetry (Sun & Moon Press, 1994) Two Stein Talks (Weaseisleeves Press, r995) A Little Book of a Thousand Eyes (Smoke-Proof Press, 1996) Wi.ckerlwith |ack Colloml (Rodent Press, 1996) tEl Guid.e , Grammar, Watch and The Thirty Nights (Folio [Sa1t], r996) A Bookfrom A Border Comedy (Seeing Eye Books, 1997) The kaveler and the Hill and the Hill [with Emiiie Clark] (Granary Books, 1998) ( r Sight lwirh Leslie Scalapinol Edge Books, 9 9 9 ) Chartings [with Ray Di Palma] (Chax Press, zooo) Happily (Post-Apollo Press, zooo) SunJlower fwith Jack Collom] (The Figures, zooo) The Beginner (A Spectacular Book, zoor) A Border Comedy (Granary Books, zoor) The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, zoor) GREEN INTEGER TRANSLATIONS KaBENHAVN & LOS ANGELES D escription, Arkadii Dragomoschenko 2002 [with Elena Balashova] (Sun & Moon Press, r99o) Xenia, Arkadli Dragomoschenko [with Elena Balashova] (Sun & Moon Press, 1993) GREEN INTECER THE MARJORIE G. PERLOFF Edited by Per Bregne SERIES OF INTERNATIONAL POETRY Kabenhavn/Los Angeles Distributed in the United States by Consortium Book zooz Sales and Distribution, ro45 Westgate Drive, Suite 9o Saint Paul, Minnesota 55n4-ro65 (fi I'i Yang Lian $4) 857 -ttt5 / http: / /www. greeninteger.com Ml Lrft Lyn Hejinian ro98765432r Copyright @Lyn Hejinian,ry87, r98o, zooz Green Integer printing D Published originally as My Life (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, r987) An earlier, shorter version was published by Brrrning Deck Press in r98o. Back cover copy @zooz by Green Integer A11 rights reserved. This book was published in collaboration with The Contemporary Arts Educational Project, Inc. a non-profit corporation, through a matching grant from the National Endowent for the Arts, a federal agency. :J"',;;"Jli o,,otlrro A RT S Design: Per Bregne Typography: Guy Bennett Photograph: Photograph of Lyn Hejinian by Caroiyn Andrews LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICAT]ON DATA Hejinian, Lynltg4rl My Life rcaN: 193124333-6 p. cm Creen Integer: 39 r.- Title rr. Series Green Integer Books are published for Dougias Messerli A pause, a rose, A moment yellow iust as something on paper four years later, when my father returned home from the war, the mo- fo, ment of greeting him, as my m.other Qmyfother he stood at the bottom of always the stairs, younger, thin- there then ond here ner than when he had left, for them was purpie-though moments are no longer so col- ored. Somewhere, in the background, rooms share a pattern of small roses. Pretty is as pretty does. In certain families, the meaning of necessity is at one with the sentiment of pre-necessity. The better things were gathered in a pen. The windows were narrowed bywhite gauze curtains whichwere never ioosened. Here I refer to irrelevance, that rigidity which never intrudes. Hence, repetitions, free from all ambition. The shadow ofthe redwood trees, she said, was oppressive. The plush must be worn away. On her waiks she stepped into people's gardens to pinch off cuttings from their geraniums and suc- culents. An occasional sunset is reflected on the windows. A little puddle is overcast. If only you could touch, or, even, catch those gtay great crea- tures. I was afrard of my uncle with the wart on his come. "Everything is a question of sleep," says nose, or of his jokes at our expense which were be- Cocteau, but he forgets the shark, which does not. yond me, and I was shy of my aunt's deafness who Anxiety is vigilant. Perhaps initially, even before one was his sister-in-law and who had years earlier fallen can talk, restlessness is already conventional, es- into the habit of nodding, agreeably. Wool station. tablishing the incoherent border which will later See lightning, wait for thunder. Quite mistakenly, separate events from experience. Find a drawer as it happened. Long time lines trail behind every that's not filled up. That we sleep plunges our work idea, object, person, pet, vehicle, and event. The into the dark. The ball was lost in a bank of myrtle. afternoon happens, crowded and therefore endless. I was in a room with the particulars ofwhich a later Thicker, she agreed. It was a tic, she had the habit, nostalgia might be formed, an indulged childhood. and now she bobbed like my toy plastic bird on the They are sitting in wicker chairs, the legs of which edge of its glass, dipping into and recoiling from have sunk unevenly into the ground, so that each is the water. But a word is a bottomless pit. It became sitting slightly tilted and their postures make ad- magically pregnant and one day split open, giving justment for that. The cows warm their own barn. birth to a stone egg, about as big as a football. In I look at them fast and it gives the illusion that May when the lizards emerge from the stones, the they're moving. An "oral history" on paper. That stones frirngray, from green. When daylight moves, morning this morning. I say it about the psyche we delight in distance. The waves rolled over our because it is not optional. The overtones are a denser stomachs, like spring rain over an orchard slope. shadow in the room characterized by its habitual Rubber bumpers on rubber cars. The resistance on readiness, a form of charged waiting, a perpetual sleeping to being asleep. In every country is a word attendance, of which I was thinking when I began which attempts the sound of cats, to match an the paragraph, "so much of childhood is spent in a inisolable portrait in the clouds to a din in the air. manner of waiting." But the constant noise is not an omen of music to As for we You spill the sugar when little airplane had forgotten to notify the airport of who "love to be you lift the spoon. My fr- his approach, so that when the lights of the plane astonished" ther had fi.lled an old in the night were first spotted, the air raid sirens apothecary jar with what went off, and the entire city on that coastwent dark. he called "sea glass," bits He was taking a drink of water and the light was ofold bottles rounded and growing dim. My mother stood at the window textured by the sea, so watching the only lights that were visible, circling abundant on beaches. over the darkened city in search of the hidden air- There is no solitude. It buries itself in veracity. It is port. Unhappily, time seems more normative than as if one splashed in the water lost by one's tears. place. Whether breathing or holding the breath, it My mother had climbed into the garbage can in was the same thing, driving through the tunnel order to stamp down the accumulated trash, but from one sun to the next under a hot brown hill. the can was knocked offbalance, and when she fell She sunned the baby for sixty seconds, leaving him she broke her arm. She could only give a little shrug. naked except for a blue cotton sunbonnet. At night, The family had little money but plenty of food. At to close offthe windows from view ofthe street, my the circus only the elephants were greater than any- grandmother pulled down the window shades, thing I could have imagined. The egg of Colum- never loosening the curtains, a gauze starched too bus, landscape and grammar. She wanted one stiffto hang properly down. I sat on the windowsill where the playground was dirt, with grass, shaded singing sunny lunny teena, ding-dang-dong. Out by a tree, from which would hang a rubber tire as a there is an aging magician who needs a tray of ice swing, and when she found it she sent me.