We’re juiced to read this except from Lyn Hejinian’s forthcoming book of essays POSITIONS OF THE SUN (Belladonna 2018) in @literaryhub. Author photo by Gloria Graham. / # “What about this: The hills rising at the eastern edge of the urban area provide a perspectival panoply, while to the west the bay offers an endless prospect, a scintillating distance. One wide ugly avenue is the only major street running between them; uninviting squat commercial buildings, cheap motels, copy shops, and then a stretch of Indian restaurants and a cluster of sari shops line it from end to end. Or this: A man approaches, his feet and legs encased in armor made of shining silver scales. The front edges of his armored boots are decorated with curling silver claws much as the prow of a ship might bear a masthead in the form of a nymph whose long curls blow out over the waves. Each element of the work, every particular, exists as a point of encounter, rather than of separability; each particular serves as an intersection, a portal, a source of energy, and a point of departure (rather than terminus).” / Lyn Hejinian teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, where her academic work is addressed principally to modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social practices they entail. She is the author of over 25 volumes of poetry and critical prose, the most recent of which is The Unfollowing (Omnidawn Books, 2016). With Barrett Watten, she is the co-editor of A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field 1982-1998, and the related Poetics Journal Digital Archive (Wesleyan University Press, 2013/2015). She is the co-director (with Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets, and the co-editor (with Jane Gregory and Claire Marie Stancek) of Nion Editions, a chapbook press. In addition to her other academic work, she has in recent years been involved in anti-privatization activism at the University of California, Berkeley. / https://lithub.com/lyn-hejinian-ever #poetry #lithub #lynhejinian #essay #lyricessay #essayist
