for we who are alive

Looking in this library copy of Lyn Hejinian's Writing is an Aide to Memory, 1978, I see that someone has marked various lines with red pen throughout the entire book. The aim of this person appears to have been cohesion, since they picked out those words that add up to the impression of a thought taking place somewhere, about, e.g, water, or language use, or music ("in music" and "percussion" marked on different lines in section 16); or else they have discovered phrases that are something like aphorisms such as "indifference is the language of ennui" in section 13.

But there are so many other words and phrases in the book that I wonder how they made those underlinings add up to a point or an essay, unless they were working backwards from some larger overviewing perspective. "As a founding member of the Language movement, Hejinian has always been interested in the independence of aphorisms," I imagine they wrote. They have decided it already so they are looking for evidence. "This is clear even in her earlier works, such as Writing is an Aide to Memory (1978), which contains numerous aphoristic statements. She invokes "percussion," or the element of surprise. The sudden sound of a drum interrupting a double bass" – since they have underlined the word "jazz" in section 35 they are thinking of a double bass – "startles us with its detachment from the preceding sound. So, too, Hejinian uses surprising lines to jolt us out of our expectations. And yet she remains aware that her percussion is part of the same genre as the trumpet, ie, music, or, in the case of poetry, language. We see statements of disruption elsewhere in the poem. "In rhythm with that muddle | nor rock is sure in the air was once … most unities last too long," she writes in section 36.

'Please note," they write, "that her interest in music was indicated even earlier than Aide to Memory, when she spoke about "a new piece of mine, NUMBER PRESENT" during an interview with Vicki Hudspith in 1970. "And there was an analogy with music, too, in the 12 notes of the chromatic scale," she said."

Then they go on to list other parts of her oeuvre in which she explains sets of ideas behind the uncoupling of units of her text from dependence on the units immediately before and after, and they quote her 1983 talk, The Rejection of Closure (pub. 1985), and some other things; maybe her recent introduction to The Unfollowing, 2016. This will show consistency taking place over a period of decades.

The fourteen-line constraint was not the only one I imposed on the making of the poems. I also required myself to build them with non-sequiturs. Nothing was to follow – or nothing follow logically. I wanted each line to be as difficult to accept on the basis of the previous and subsequent lines as death is for we who are alive – a comparison that I make intentionally, since my intention in writing the series of poems I'm calling "The Unfollowing" was to compose a set of elegies.

They connect this to a line in Happily, 2000, "Tightly the hands of the clock turn but other elements also must conduct logic", through Rejection's discussion of the potential openness of a text. They compare this to Elizabeth Jennings in Timely Issues, 2001, whose rhyming lines are structured all towards promoting the ineffable aim of being glad through modesty and Catholicism.