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Lyn Hejinian’s Republic of Readers

In the poet’s last work, Lola the Interpreter, she treats her readers as true interlocutors, inviting them into the act of interpretation alongside her.

The act of interpretation is usually situated as a recovery—of original meaning and authorial intent. The goal is to translate what is unfamiliar into something legible, adding clarity until other readers reach consensus. Lyn Hejinian’s posthumous work, a book-length prose poem titled Lola the Interpreter, does just the opposite: Instead of trying to close the gap between writer and reader, it invites us to play in a terrain of language. Every line vibrates with alternative meanings, daunting the reader with its multiplicity. Tracing the evolution of Hejinian’s experimental style from My Life (1980), her most celebrated work, to Lola the Interpreter, her final book, we can see a lifelong endeavor to craft a text that is open enough to let the world in. 

Hejinian was a leading figure in the Language poetry movement, a loose tradition that emerged in the Bay Area and New York City in the 1970s that included Charles Bernstein, Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Hannah Weiner, Fanny Howe, and many others. Frustrated with lyric poetry and “its smug pretension to universality and its tendency to cast the poet as guardian to Truth,” the Language poets sought to highlight the materiality of language and the reader’s role in the process of meaning-making. In her essay “The Rejection of Closure,” first delivered as a talk in 1983, Hejinian writes about the difference between a closed and an open text. While a closed text tries to impart a single meaning, an open text is one in which “all elements of the work are maximally excited” and multiple interpretations are made possible. The invitation is extended to the reader to fill in the gaps and fissures, a dynamic process that is “generative rather than directive.” 

The “I” in Hejinian’s writing never asks for deference or obedience, but she does ask us to come with her as she stretches the semantic possibilities of a sentence. “A simile is like the happy smile with which Narcissus comes face to face with his beautiful self at a woodland pool,” she writes in Lola the Interpreter. In one line, Hejinian seamlessly compares a simile to a smile to a mirror, using prepositional phrases to make affective leaps across time and space, uniting unlike clauses and trusting the reader to form the connective tissue. Or consider this passage from My Life:

The artichoke has done its best, armored, with scales, barbed, and hiding in its interior the soft hairs so aptly called the choke. I suppose I had always hoped that, through an act of will and the effort of practice, I might be someone else, might alter my personality and even my appearance, that I might in fact create myself, but instead I found myself trapped in the very character which made such a thought possible and such a wish mine. 

The artichoke has done its best, armored, with scales, barbed, and hiding in its interior the soft hairs so aptly called the choke. I suppose I had always hoped that, through an act of will and the effort of practice, I might be someone else, might alter my personality and even my appearance, that I might in fact create myself, but instead I found myself trapped in the very character which made such a thought possible and such a wish mine. 

This succession draws a parallel between an artichoke and the speaker’s metamorphosis, how the armor that protects her from external incursion can also be the form that constricts. In her next line, she writes, “Any work dealing with questions of possibility must lead to new work,” extracting the word possible from the previous sentence and placing it in a new context, showing the inevitability of transformation despite herself. 

While inconclusive on a macroscopic level, Hejinian’s sentences are microscopic landscapes, each one testing the sentence’s ability to contain experience. Or, as she puts it, “Language which is like a fruitskin around fruit.” The poet Tim Wood describes the effect of Hejinian’s prose poems as “all volta”: Instead of a vertical inflection of power where the writer is the producer and the........

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