Book Review

What this book cares about most:

• Hejinian’s final collection is a rigorous, playful, and meandering sequence of interwoven ruminations, narratives, and quotations, forming a textual collage that at once tantalizes and evades the reader.
• Hejinian’s major concerns revolve around the ways in which a hermeneutics that elevates skepticism, indeterminacy, radical subjectivity, and the imagination can integrate with the lived realities of daily life. The text engages with philosophical questions relating to our perceptions of reality; what time is and how it engages with the sequencing of events and causality; and the role of skepticism, interpretation, and the imagination in our human understanding of experience and reality, freed from the constraint of metanarratives.
• The collection does not prioritize one line of inquiry over another and often leaves readers wondering which insights are part of the text’s “thesis” and which serve as examples supporting those “theses” (if those two categories can even be separated).

Poems that moved me:

• The book is not divided into discrete poems; rather, it comprises seven long prose sections. Of these sections, “TWO” stood out the most. It mingles contemplations of memory, history, and the concept of the origin and conjoins content and form in a horizontal text. Section “TWO” also presents frequent mininarratives involving the titular Lola, who functions as a stand-in for (and provocateur of) the author.

Lines that lingered:

• “Interpretation is merely a quest for slower chaos. It departs from the center, it takes place in the margins and on the peripheries.”
• “I repeat: one thing interprets another; everything that happens is an interpretation, each thing that exists interprets: skyscraper, beetle, anxiety, infant at its restless guesswork.”
• “Uncertainty is the North Star, the seducer, the promise, the future. The earth will exist today and tomorrow as it did yesterday . . . we can say that we know things like this, we can start with them.”

Figurative language and formal feats:

• The staggering dexterity with which Hejinian moves between tones and registers, often without breaking paragraphs.
• Combining, collaging, and cancelling out various modes of inscription (philosophical, skeptical, poetic, playful, narrative, explicitly fictional) until the resulting text ripens into an assemblage. Hejinian gives this polyphonic assemblage an organic life that relies—but is not reducible to—its many formative elements.
• Hejinian’s engagement with the modernist trope of endlessness. She updates that drive for a perpetual poem into a post-structural masterpiece that implicitly questions its own organization and undercuts moments of self-seriousness. (Think of a non-monomaniacal, nonchronological riff on Ezra Pound’s Cantos, or a tweak on James Joyce’s Ulysses without consistent character or plot.)

This book is in conversation with:

• An eclectic compendium of Continental philosophers, critics, and theorists, primarily modernist and contemporary (phenomenology plays a dominant role throughout the text), but tracing back to early Greek thinkers such as Aristotle and Anaximander.
• Literary modernists like William Carlos Williams (particularly Spring & All) and Gertrude Stein, plus Language writers (particularly Clark Coolidge, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman, especially The New Sentence).

Questions this book made me ask:

• How many of the ways we perceive ourselves, our immediate realities, and the scope of our lives is based on contextual particularities and is driven by an unrelenting drive towards interpretation?
• What is the difference between perceiving an event, imagining an event, interpreting an event, and treating with skepticism any of an event’s attributes and premises?
• What is the difference between a “beginning” and an arbitrary point in a sequence of events?

Who I would give this book to:

• Fans of contemporary writing that is deeply influenced by the Language movement and who will applaud Hejinian’s final, ultimate rejection of closure.
• Anyone who contemplates the overlapping phenomena of living and perceiving our own lives and is left wondering what role the doubting, interpretive intellect plays in the formation of causality and sequence within lived experience.