Jenna Wilhelmi
Postmodern Poetry
Lyn Hejinian
Train of Thought, Car Crash, Wild Ride
Lyn Hejinian is a firm believer in playing with language and how it is used. The title of her essay in the Poetics, The Rejection of Closure, shows that playfulness. She takes Charles Olson’s concept of open verse and applies it to her own work. Her poetry is a long stream of seemingly unrelated sentences and she invites you as the reader to find a way to connect them. In a way, she talks about how poetry is a form we as humans use to describe the world around us. We try to connect with the things around us by using the words we have labeled them with. But that this interaction is never truly complete. Hejinian brings up what happens when children learn language and when they realize words aren’t always enough to adequately express the world. “They discover that words are not equal to the world, that a shift, analogous to parallax in photography, occurs between things (events, ideas, objects) and the words for them – a displacement that leaves a gap.”
However, Hejinian doesn’t suggest that we fill this gap, but utilize it to garner something new. Instead of following a set poem structure, or even a narrative line, she uses a string of seemingly disjointed sentences. It reads almost as though she has found some way to pour her train of thought onto the page. Trains of thought rarely make sense to an outside party or the person the train belongs to for that matter. This ‘train’ is simply how your brain connects, categorizes, and files all the information you have come in contact with. Each of these words flying around in our brains, eventually ending up in the air or on the page, “has spatial properties as well as temporal properties.”
A word takes up ‘space’ and ‘time’ according to Hejinian. A words ‘space’ is where it sits on a page in relation to the words around it. It takes up ‘time’ because of when it was born, altered, and when it pops up – either as a contemporary use or a historical reference. Then the ‘time’ ties back to the ‘space’ the word takes up when Hejinian explains, “ the idea of reference is spatial: over here is the word, over there is the thing at which word is shooting amiable love-arrows.”
Words unquestionable hold some power. The postmodern poets like Hejinian and Olson knew this and wanted to play with that power, turn it on its head, and see what happened. They focused more on the experience of actually writing poetry instead of just how it sounded. They broke language down, studied its structure, and then tossed it aside and tried to build a new structure from scratch. Postmodern poets let the words tell them how they wished to be organized and ignored the traditional fathers of syntax, form, and line. Focusing instead on the syllable (Olson) and the word itself (Hejinian). Open verse effectively opened all new doors for poetry the same way sign language opens the door of language to a deaf person. There is an underlying structure, but what you notice more is the image or symbol the words invoke. It’s not about telling a story and at the same time it is – its just not telling a narrative. It is highlighting sounds, moments, movement, time, and the flow of life. In a way it tells a story much the same way as a musical number. The line of music invokes an emotion without saying anything in particular; just like a line in a postmodern poem.
Really good, Jenna! You're grappling with some pretty heady concepts here, and I think you express yourself very clearly and cogently.
ReplyDeleteIn particular, I like the way you're pulling quotes from Hejinian, then trying to interpret what she's talking about. This is such an important element for using quotes, I can't emphasize it enough. It's not enough just to quote your source material; you must also put it in context with the rest of your argument.
This one works really well: "This ‘train’ is simply how your brain connects, categorizes, and files all the information you have come in contact with. Each of these words flying around in our brains, eventually ending up in the air or on the page, “has spatial properties as well as temporal properties.”"
You then go on in the next paragraph to explain how you see her using the terms "space" and "time." This movement from one idea to the next, is very effective. I would say that there's probably more to the "time" issue than you're suggesting here. Time in poetry also functions on the level of reading. As our eye moves across the page and down the stanzas, one word comes before the next--there's a physical aspect to this, but also a temporal one. This is expressive of the connection between space-time. Each reader brings their own time to the space, though the poet can insert sign posts of sorts to suggest the velocity at which the reader approaches the line, the word, the syllable.
Not to suggest you should have put all of this in here. But I want to focus on the idea that, when you're writing a longer paper, this kind of thing is an opportunity to suss out the complexities and nuances of a particular concept.
But, seriously, really nicely done, Jenna. Keep it up=10
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