from THE FATALIST Time is filled with beginners. You are right. Now each of them is working on something and it matters. The large increments of life must not go by unrecognized. That’s why my mother’s own mother-in-law was often bawdy. “MEATBALLS!” she would shout superbly anticipating site-specific specificity in the future of poetry. Will this work? The long moment is addressed to the material world’s “systems and embodiments” for study for sentience and for history. Materiality, after all, is about being a geologist or biologist, bread dough rising while four boys on skateboards attempt to fly, spinning to a halt micromillimeters before I watch them, my attention riveted on getting tangled and forgetting the name of the chair, for example and the huge young man, he is covered with tattoos I think. Life is a series of given situations of which the living have to take note on site and the storytellers give an account as the wind tangles the rain or the invaders take over the transmitter. The exchange of ideas constitutes a challenge to the lyric ego. And so I am reporting that I was wrong. A real storyteller never asks what story one wants to hear, not the happy Joel nor the sleepy Clara nor the dreamy Jane, the seductive Sam, the sullen Robbie Jones. Nonetheless I have bought a bicycle. I have to remember to stop. Thank you. I hope you will enjoy it. A bike that is simply locked but freestanding will be immediately stolen. Of course there can’t be much wrong in helping people get what they want but creeps and purveyors of negativity and cruelty are tucked into every institution and most corners and though my inclination is to vote in favor of everyone’s dearest dreams of advancement I disagree with the remark that “deathlessness” and “fearlessness” don’t work. I think they do. “Deathlessness” immediately invokes the “breathlessness” we thought we’d half heard in the panting of deathlessness whose dashing is life. “Writhing” is self-indulgent however but the near-rhyme with “writing” is terrific. Don’t change that. Poetry can’t be about flight — that would make flight a perching instead of a flight. When one thing becomes another the other is free to become something else. I remember just where we were sitting under the influence of the wind watching a crow becoming something else in this case a crow. The state of milk in jars takes place and the state of world affairs can now change. No cereal manufacturer intentionally includes angels but marshmallow bits may look angelic in a bowl. Who knows? A poem full of ruptures could be one from which all kinds of things are flying. (Lyn Hejinian, 1941-2024)
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Thank you for this poem. RIP