My Life and My Life in the Nineties by Lyn Hejinian

My Life and My Life in the Nineties Reviews

• 
  Aubrey

  A stable characteristic of books assigned for class is one can rest assured someone in the rest of the deskbound pack felt a lot more strongly one way or another about the work within as similar a context as one can get without flinging the work at roommate friends or familial relations, so I can go ahead and amass my participation grade in public and not care very much at all in private. Language poets! Feminism! Wannabe Barnes' and Loy's with a fetish for the "mad" and more skill with temporal dimensions than engaging literary experimentation. Maybe there's a compatriot of Hejinian who would have appealed more to my fancies, but I'm content to trip over them by chance later.
  
  The name of the game is this triple aged year by sentence by part work in which youth is implied, knowledge is thrustm and the only nod to passage of time in one home city Oakland California United States is a father leaving with a cane and a daughter returning with Mace. Cute, right? Nah. It would've been more forgiveable had the references and the insights accumulated into something more profound than a haphazard tonal scale whose rhythms did more to exasperate than to swoop and grip and soar, but that's personal preference for you. I'm most certainly missing everything and then some, but when one's actually read Proust and Woolf and Walcott and Bâ and something despite all the encrusted gore of excited spittle and pontificating prats actually clicks, the second guessing's an exercise in waste. She doesn't have as many ratings as those others? Let me show you my library who is in the same way in addition to lacking a canonical position at Berkeley. Throwing a woebegone affirmative action composite and expecting me to play critical fetch is a shitty way to go.
  
  The one good thing about this work is the escalation of anticipation for next-in-the-assigned-reading-lineup
  Dictee. Now that I'm foaming at the mouth for.
  
  
  PS: Waking up to news of
  Svetlana Alexievich winning the 2015 Nobel Prize for Lit was one of the best things ever.
  Voices from Chernobyl, here I come.
• 
  Jade Wootton

  On this account we love reader-resistant modes of autobiography.
• 
  Claire Zhang

  4.5, this book is a beautiful recollection of life, told in fragments that Hejinian reveals later to be "sentences in a book that shake like leaves in the trees." I especially enjoyed the beginning half, with the recollections of childhood, and the small moments / images she highlighted that brought my own childish hopes and desires to the surface.
• 
  Caitlin

  This book was super interesting. I want to hate it but I can't.
  
  When I first started reading it, I was so frustrated I didn't want to continue, but I forced myself to because I had to read it for class.
  
  This book is written with no narrative structure. You can read whole sections of text and have no clue what you just read or have any idea how to summarize what you just read. That is what is frustrating about this book. You want the sentences to connect with each other, and create some larger picture or story, and they just don't. The speaker's thought process is not linear and random pronouns like "she" and "he" are thrown in there without any explanation for how "she" and "he" relate to the speaker's first-person "I". It's all very confusing.
  
  I was told by my professor that each section corresponds to a year in Hejinian's life, and maybe you can see that a little, but it doesn't really help you overall. Eventually, I just gave up on understanding what I was trying to read, and just read the story one sentence at a time. Ironically, that's when I started to enjoy what I was reading. Weird, right?
  
  If you read the story like this, phrases will start to stick out to you like:
  
  "Solitude was the essential companion...the greatest solitudes are quickly strewn with rubbish."
  
  "Vision determines view."
  
  "You are not different from your friend, but with your friend you are different from yourself."
  
  "There are always more leaves than flowers."
  
  "The new cannot be melodic, for melody requires repetition."
  
  Some may even be relatable like: "Math is like a joke I just don't get, whose punchline isn't funny."
  
  And maybe you don't understand what they all mean, but you know you like them. So you make your own meaning since Hejinian doesn't give you any.
  
  In class, our professor made us do this weird exercise where we took three random sentences and forced ourselves to connect them, to read between the lines, and see what we, ourselves, thought it could mean. It was really enlightening. One of my favorites was:
  
  "What memory is not a "gripping" thought. Only fragments are accurate. Break it up into single words, charge them to combination."
  
  Hejinian throws random sentences together and asks the reader to find meaning in them. She encourages active reader participation in her text. She uses the idea that "language speaks in a text" instead of "a speaker uses language to convey meaning." It's a concept I had never heard of until now but was a common thought in the Language Poetry Movement. Hejinian uses this concept called "open-text" which invites participation in the text and rejects the authority of the writer over the reader. In a way, Hejinian's text provides an occasion for your own thoughts to emerge.
  
  It is not the most fun thing to read if you are looking for an easy story to get lost in, but it is super fascinating, and I admire Hejinian for her vision.
• 
  S P

  'A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal with cloth in the fourteenth century and gave humankind 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. Are your fingers in the margins.' (6)
  
  ***
  
  'A pause, a rose, something on paper implicit in the fragmentary text.' (32)
  
  ***
  
  'What is one doing to, or with, the statement (the language) or the stated (the object or the idea) when one means it. A bottle of wine is different from a wine bottle.' (33)
  
  ***
  
  'Always infinity extends from any individual life, but eternity is limited between one’s birth and one’s death.' (40)
  
  ***
  
  'A fragment is not a fraction but a whole piece. Pinched down to an inch within an inch of where it had been.' (70)
• 
  Mina Widding

  Reas this as an art project, reading one passage a day out loud and filming it with diary like commenting, linking it with my life and thoughts. As autobiography , I like it very much, though it's sometimes too jumbled and incoherent for me, and as inspiration and something to bounce thoughts on creativity and life against, it has its moments. Some passages a joy to read aloud, some very hard (especially some words were hard to pronounce!) and almost daily I found interesting synchronisities with the text and things going on in my life, though I didn't read in before hand.
• 
  Mary Sue

  She almost seems to abdicate responsibility as an author and place the raw material of everything in her life at your feet. There is definitely structure there, but it's *subterranean* and excavating it is *exhausting.*
  
  It isn't light reading; it isn't a narrative in the usual way - and she does it on purpose, which boggles my mind.
  
  I think I'm very glad to be done with this book for a while - maybe forever.
• 
  Lex

  Read for Experimental Poetry class. Wrote a paper on it.
• 
  Tallon Kennedy

  It was intriguing for about 50 pages, but after that, the disorientation of language poetry made it a slog to get through. I can appreciate its importance in the postmodern canon, but I can't really recommend this to anyone. 4/10.
• 
  Naomi

  i read this a long time ago for a contemporary & modern poetry class, one of my favorites i ever took in college. this one stood out for me from all the others. a book u can page thru and find something valuable in almost every chapter, equally valuable as stand-alone pieces or as a whole in reference to the authors life (hence the name “my life”)
  
  some bits i rly like in it:
  
  “i was eventually to become one person, gathered up maybe, during a pause, at a comma.”
  
  “i found myself dependent on a pause, a rose, something on paper. it is a way of saying, i want you, too, to have this experience, so that we are more alike, so that we are closer, bound together, sharing a point of view - so that we are ‘coming from the same place’.”
  
  “things are real separately”
  
  “as for we who love to be astonished”
  
  “i always thought my grandmother would complain no matter what until i finally asked her just what kind of weather do you want and she said without hesitation 72 degrees and no breeze.”
  
  “i remember my fear of personality, which was so similar to the fear of forgetting that the tiniest idea became a ‘nagging thought’ until i could write it down and out, preserved, but, in a sense, too, eliminated.”
  
  “happiness is worthless, my grandfather assured me when he was very old, he had never sought it for himself nor for my father, it had nothing to do with whether or not a life is good.”
  
  “do you know what middle-class people expect from poetry?” “a glimpse of eternity.”
• 
  Kirsten

  not even going to sugarcoat it; language poetry is not my shit
• 
  Susanna

  We read this book for a hybrid forms writing class -- well, an excerpt, and I grabbed the whole thing. At first I found it hard to get into, then I described it as learning to swim (especially for a poor swimmer like myself) -- struggling and thrashing about as I read, then beginning to understand what this "water" thing is about, and eventually floating, noticing all that was around me. I found myself observing certain lines and watching others drift by, keeping an eye out for the sections where Hejinian repeats herself again and again, drawing together threads for the reader to catch, themes that recur through a life. The "My Life in the Nineties" update was interesting as well, particularly how she alters the form somewhat for the time.
• 
  Isla McKetta

  If I read this book strictly for the language, I would be underwhelmed. If I read it for the narrative, I would be misguided. But if I read the book to get lost in some magical collision of universal experiences, I'd be delighted.
  Getting lost in this book helped me uncover my own stories and to think more deeply about what form is and what it can be.
• 
  Ellissa

  It is a strange thing to read an autobiography as poetry.There are some fabulous singular thoughts contained within the poems.
  
  I think my only issue with this book is who I would recommend it to for fear of them not liking it.
  
• 
  Rebecca

  I have a lot of Thoughts on this one in a v good way
• 
  Q

  Dense autobiography that rejects the form of autobio. Too beautiful to read awake.
• 
  Jessica

  The density and parataxis (thanks Ann for teaching me this word!) of this book made it a challenging, absurdly rewarding read. I look forward to revisiting this book for many, many years.
• 
  Simon

  Extremely interesting experimental work, but not a cover to cover read.