like every autobiography

I don't trust my essayist; they're too selective, they're bouncing across too many years and too few books, they had their hypothesis worked out too tightly before they began, and they're too much in love with it. They're completing an assignment, that's the trouble. The essay would have to be called Music in the Work of Lyn Hejinian to narrow it down but even then, what value does that have? I was aware of myself picking out selective quotes; I didn't care; it took nothing at all.

They continue their essay by pointing to a line the poet riffs on several times in My Life, 1987, "The obvious analogy is with music as with words." See p. 128 in the 2002 Green Integer edition I have here, for instance. Pointing to the autobiographical nature of My Life, they write, "The connection between 'music' and 'words' was a recurring theme in Hejinian's inner life, both as a child and as an adult. The 'words' being described in the lines adjacent to 'analogy to music' in Life are often uttered aloud" - and – then they back themselves up by quoting the one in which young women are taught to "murmur" clearly when they speak, but I can't find the page. The line on 128 has, "little dialogue, heard on the street. Baby! baby! baby!" just before it but that's not as good. They go on: "- though of course 'words' can also mean the written word. We may observe that she often tries to find a descriptive word to accompany the invocation of sound, 'murmur' (Life), 'percussion' (Aide), and so on." This "often" is a handwave but they hope you buy it.

"Noticing that she repeats the line in several different, dissimilar contexts, we may suggest a further twist: that Hejinian is critical of her own habits, that she believes this connection between words and music is mechanical, reflexive, and perhaps unexamined and unworthy.

'Repetition may function as a medium of sneering.

'Music for her always has a form. It is constrained or defined by some quality: loudness, suddenness, gentleness, etc. 'How long is that ball – of sound,' she asks in Life (p. 164). Looking at the explanatory statements she has made in reference to her own poetry, we see that form, in her mind, has a possibility of meaning that goes beyond arrangement. Yet arrangement, definition, is essential. To disconnect one line from another recreates the form of death. (Unfollowing.) Music 'speaks' by shape and form. Both means of utterance, music and words, are essentially communicative, pointing to vital meanings beyond their surface existences as print on a page or noises. There are times when we can see her test the ability of words to suggest meaning through their rhythmic qualities. 'Repercussion' coming four lines after 'percussion' in section 16 of Aide, for example, is a sign for the text to abandon strict dictionary meaning for something closer to scat singing: 'bit scrap of that roll broom.'"

I'm hesitating here because the essayist has actually written, "Playing with words" next to their red underline at this point in Aide although they also identify "roll broom" as an "instrument;" and "keys of nicety" in the previous line has "of music" written in the margin next to it. If the broom is an instrument then they're not drawing conclusions about scat singing, though. Go back and get rid of the Aide reference. Instead the essayist finds "and though the parrot speaks but says nothing this has the impact of an aphorism" on p. 7 of Happily, 2000. That seems useful. Then they look for the page in Life where the poet says that different countries have to find their own words for the sounds that cats make, but this is not necessarily a prelude to music-making … I don't know where that is, myself, and I'm not even completely sure that it appears in Life and not some other book, but the essayist discovers it successfully. I congratulate them.

They tell you something about the notion of form being complicated by this inclusion of animal-noises. "In these two excerpts we can see the poet grappling with the integration of animal-noise into the comprehensible lexicon of human-noise. The integration takes place when the animal sounds are recreated in human-oriented descriptions," they write, and then they look for more nonhuman creatures to back up their point.

Eventually they come across birds again on p. 52 of Happily: "words, birds, words birds blurred, birds in words […] The birds' words | might have been love laugh loss toss long – isn't | every explanation like every autobiography […] sentimental?" Now they can say that Hejinian is expressing an awareness of the effort she makes, as a human, to integrate the animal sounds into human form-understandings, etc, etc, the absence of animal-meaning in her "sentimental" human-meaning, the devouring nature of autobiography, swallowing everything into itself, etc, etc (should they write something about the falcons, eagles, goose, etc three years after Happily in The Fatalist, 2003?), but I am distracted by the list after "birds' words | might have been" because it has made me think of Miss Flite in Bleak House and her list of bird names, Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach. On the Happily page above "birds' words" there is a line fragment that reads, "He personifies the literature of the West;" on p. 54 there are the words, "Christmas tree." They take on a new meaning.