Writing Is an Aid to Memory by Lyn Hejinian

Writing Is an Aid to Memory Reviews

• 
  Kimberly

  Like, 4.25-4.5 stars, really. A book like this reminded me of reading Tender Buttons--there's just something you have to let go in terms of total comprehension that for me renders it difficult. However, the more I read, the more into it I got. Some great lines, some really great sections. I was mining it, mostly, for her thoughts on genre, and I marked quite a few passages. Maybe after a few re-reads, a book like this for me would move its way into a 4.5-5 rating.
• 
  Christine

  magnificent
• 
  Jeff

  Suppose as we may that Lyn Hejinian was one of the major poets of her generation (I think the b. '41-51 decade is a useful frame, though circumstances beyond what I'll get into here point to January 1, 1953 as the edge I'm looking for), Writing Is An Aid to Memory (1978), her lyric sequence composed, we also suppose, at the same time as the first My Life volume, is a kind of edifice "describing" (the vaunted word here) all she would not do. Thus I find it interesting to consider peers like Louise Gluck and James Tate for all they would not do.
  
  As epigraph to this remark,"everyone cannot have the keys to nicety," it's more than evident in lines like: "fill up of and sentimental tickle | look foolish and know my prima golden weary | suitable for a mental might | of sentimental weep for into more | tickle little confess | the more regretted cozy paradise | the nature of my thirty-seven of whom | my own astonished sequel." [Section 16]
  
  The passage allows you a sense of the difficulty in the Moore-like procedural verse (that my quoting within paragraph format cannot reproduce), that does stay on the ear pretty well, but seems to be verging into an auto-poesis when we know the lyric-sequence we're reading came out the same year as My Life's 37 sentences for every year of Hejinian's (until then) life. Verse, then, as a backdrop to that sounding that would stay on the ear, is one thing that is ceded to writing. As a quite legitimate experiment, but one in which the binary, verse-prose, remains formidable.
• 
  Michelle Llewellyn

  And I thought Gertrude Stien's "Tender Buttons" was a tough read. At least Lyn Hejinian breaks up her prose with lots of line breaks and white space. For a writer, this long prose poem of the language poetry genre is just a lesson in semantics-making every word count which Lyn does very well here. Onomatopeia and musical references are also a recurring theme, no doubt influenced by her second marriage to musician Larry Ochs.
  This is not light reading, neither would I recommend it for pleasure unless you actually enjoy banging your head on a desk. I only read it for my English class. Now I'm off to write a short thesis on it. Perhaps the frustration of searching for leitmotifs in a jumble of abstract words? Wish me luck.
• 
  Caroline

  Cerebrally, there's a lot to like here. I respect the project and enjoy the line and word play. But I struggled to find an emotional toehold.
• 
  Tristan

  Once again, something I'm reading as part of my project to find out why I don't like this kind of writing--and once again I didn't like it. Writing Is an Aid to Memory was I think actually less enjoyable for me than Clark Coolidge's SPACE which I also just read. I'm finally beginning to understand some of this, which is that I need a way in--an emotional connection, a feeling, an image, an experience, beautiful sounds, a sense that the meaning is just behind the obliqueness--to be motivated to spend a lot of time wrestling with dense and difficult poems. Similarly, a tool common among these authors of wordplay where a string of nonsensical words sounds like something else (a kind of pun but with only the hidden meaning) is unpleasant and inaccessible for me since I slow down and get less auditory if I am confused, making such puns move farther from me as I try to understand them. I am reminded of this because Writing is an Aid to Memory had a few moments where I found that coming through.
  My big issue with Writing Is an Aid to Memory is that it was especially devoid of openings and handholds. Maybe it would be better in a class? Or perhaps my opinion will change once I read a well-argued interpretation of it, but it didn't motivate me to try and understand beyond Hejinian's broken words and near-non-syntax of lines like "apple is shot nod / ness seen knot it around saying / think for a hundred years" (and those are from the opening of the book, which is one of the easier of the 42 sections). Similarly, I didn't have much motivation to work with her erratic formatting. I will give Hejinian that she probably wanted, given that her claimed topic was Memory as a sort of additive process (I think--the Preface was very dense and had a number of sentences that I just could not comprehend Mute and blind at its disposal and each can express say moral attitudes does not have the power to say different things at one time with or without different parts, of view--a merchant, inventor, politician, and mechanics) to show a sort of appearance of the memory through the fragments of writing and writing from fragmented memory. I suspect she did that? The book felt like there were missing things, things that, I suppose, would have been filled in by her memories, the memories that the writing aided in bringing into existence and into material form.
  However, I am not the author and don't have access to her memories. And if an argument is being presented to us in the form of this poem, I cannot follow it--it isn't there in a followable form from where I sit; I can't get into the poem enough to even try to follow its argument (and I don't have high hopes about its coherence as argument if the Preface is any indication). An interesting experiment and one i look forward to reading about, but it didn't make for a good reading experience or a communicative work of theory or poetics, so I'm not convinced that, for me as a reader (and maybe scholar, although I wasn't really reading with my scholar hat on) that it was a successful one.