Lyn Hejinian

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

— Lyn Hejinian

“Long time lines trail behind every idea, object, person, pet, vehicle, and event.”

— Lyn Hejinian

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

— Lyn Hejinian

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

— Lyn Hejinian

A fragment is not a fraction but a whole piece

— Lyn Hejinian

The idea of the person enters poetics where art and reality, or intentionality and circumstance, meet.

— Lyn Hejinian

“Everything is a question of sleep," says Cocteau, but he forgets the shark, which does not. Anxiety is vigilant.”

— Lyn Hejinian

The 'open text' often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers.

— Lyn Hejinian

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

— Lyn Hejinian

People must flatter their own eyes with their pathetic lives. The things I was saying followed logically the things that I had…

— Lyn Hejinian

“The sky was packed which by appearing endless seems inevitable. The flag droops straight down. The horse in dry sand walks with…

— Lyn Hejinian

“A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal with cloth in the 14th century and gave mankind its first button. It was…

— Lyn Hejinian

Putting facts by the thousands, into the world, the toes take off with an appealing squeak which the thumping heel follows confidentially,…

— Lyn Hejinian

“In every country is a word which attempts the sound of cats, to match an inisolable portrait in the clouds to a…

— Lyn Hejinian

This poem is one of a series, all of them elegiac in intention, and subject to the strange forces of mourning that…

— Lyn Hejinian

“Writing’s initial situation, its point of origin, is often character­ized and always complicated by opposing impulses in the writer and by a…

— Lyn Hejinian