Like nature (at least until humans mucked with it so mercilessly that it became unnatural out of sheer self-defense), memory is self-stabilizing, but only because time is on its side. He sings something, a short refrain, hardly more than a mumbled melody—or memory—embedded in his voice. Those pleasured visitors, reveling in their competency, are probable tourists, business people, politicians, entrepreneurs. Epiphanies negate particularity. My Life by Lyn Hejinian. The poem descries the bases of imagination, all the harm that can come to, imagination's dreams, and it beautiful looks. She is the co-director (with Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets, and the co-editor (with Jane Gregory and Claire Marie Stancek) of Nion Editions, a chapbook press. Or we could call it esprit, and that might entail panache, éclat, or, antithetically, despondency, dysphoria, ire. Lyn Hejinian Omnidawn. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. The gravitational force of weeping pulls at one’s inner world, from which it picks up scraps of the past. And also probably predictable. Lyn Hejinian is a poet, translator, and essayist. "—Bob Perelman Her work has experimented with our perception of the pick-up, the point of up-take, the beginning of conscious attention across the gap between stop and start. To the degree that it’s unconscious, so-called natural, or, rather, to the degree to which, as far as oneself is concerned, it’s formative (constitutive of how one is, the determination of one’s manner)—it’s adverbial. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. My Life and My Life in the Nineties includes the entirety of the forty-five-part prose poem sequence, My Life, as well as the ten-part work, My Life in the Nineties. She is perhaps best known as one of the founding figures of the language writing movement, a loosely affiliated group of writers and poets active in California’s Bay Area in the 1970s. The gravitational force of the happy imagination pulls at the outer world, dragging material into perception. Lyn Hejinian’s poem “Elegy” is a profound commentary on the relationship between life and death, flesh and imagination, and beauty and freedom. Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. The Language of Inquiry is a comprehensive and wonderfully readable collection of her essays, and its publication promises to be an important event for American literary culture. I’m in an academic office. Our poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected an excerpt from Lyn Hejinian's forthcoming "Positions of the Sun" for her monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers. She is often associated with the Language poets and is well known for her landmark work My Life (Sun & Moon, 1987, original version Burning Deck, 1980), as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000). She was editor of Tuumba Press from 1976 to 1984, when it pioneered in issuing a series of fifty Language poet chapbooks. How to Recognize Right-wing Dog Whistles and Symbols, From Viking Hats to Flags, Plan to Sell Diego Rivera Mural at San Francisco Art Institute Draws Backlash, Listening to the Joy in James Baldwin’s Record Collection, The California Studio at UC Davis Is Accepting Applications for Artists in Residence, Breathing With Zarah Hussain at the Peabody Essex Museum, Proudly powered by Newspack by Automattic. Support Hyperallergic’s independent arts journalism. That comes with the ways in which she sets every idea, feeling, variety of situatedness into motion. Lyn Hejinian reads from The Beginner, The Fatalist, Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, and some work in progress. In the press materials, Omnidawn publisher Rusty Morrison tells us that the poems are “a sequence of elegies” although “they are not sonnets but antisonnets.” Part 1: To close the streaming eye . Aerial 10 : Lyn Hejinian ( Book ) The nonconformist's poem radical "poetics of autobiography" in the works of Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe and Leslie Scalapino by Kathy-Ann Tan Hejinian avoids any semblance of narrative structure or … Lyn Hejinian, My Life Note: This is the sixth section of My Life, "marking" Lyn Hejinian's sixth year, 1947-48.It appears on pp. I’m subject to the weather, to aging, to gravity, to thirst. Something ordinary and everyday, just as much as something outrageous or surprising, can be transformed into an aesthetic event, undergo an aesthetic realization, but it does so precisely by remaining particular. Poet, essayist, translator, and publisher Lyn Hejinian is a founding figure of the Language poetry movement of the 1970s and an influential force in the world of experimental and avant-garde poetics. In Happily Hejinian presents life as untempered. Memory has to cast about, so as to establish a connection with fate. Through style, the deployment of our adopted syntax, we (humans) forge connections. Lyn Hejinian (born May 17, 1941) is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. Without the network of connections that result, we, as solitary individuals, are pathetic, innocuous, blank, weak, incapable of defending or even taking care of ourselves. Lyn Hejinian was born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1941. These remain of interest and inform her continuing research and writing. It’s more than adjectival or predicative; it’s self-definitive, a mode of transit. Connectivity is the advantage humans have over happenstance. As such, their functional identity is in abeyance; who knows what’s possible. This addition isn't her major philosophical innovation. of the Sun & Moon edition (). Weak as we are, it’s our principle instrument of defense. He pushes a grocery cart, the bottles and cans in it clink and clatter. Editor: Bernadette Keating The first time I had the pleasure of hearing Lyn Hejinian was her lecture ‘The quest for knowledge in the western poem,' (free under the Naropa University Archive Project and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets) which introduced me to her particularness about language. This video is unavailable. “Endlessly”—that’s how I characterize my effort in the dream—endlessly, I “phrase.” I have to pace and place the semantic arrival of the words, their “meaning units.” But I’m not sure where to insert divisions. And yet, one of the great pleasures for a visitor comes from gaining competency in the everyday life (free-ranging repetition) of the strange, new, foreign place he or she is visiting—discovering where and how to get groceries, mastering the public transportation system, figuring out how to use the bathing and toilet facilities, etc. A work of slow art, as well as one of the few collections of Language poetry that has aged well, My Life in its original form consists of 37 sections, 37 sentences each, that condense the first 37 years of the life of avant-garde poet Lyn Hejinian into verse. Read More. Become a member today », Transverso, part of 100 Years of Athos Bulcão at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Belo Horizonte (photo by Elisa Wouk Almino / Hyperallergic). If you are still unsatiated, click here . Indecision leaves intact the power of hallucinated particularity. Lyn Hejinian teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. "Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. It’s dark, very late, a man is passing slowly through the neighborhood. Her groundbreaking book of poetry, My Life, published by Sun & Moon / Green Integer, has had five re-printings from 1980-2002. Editor: Bernadette Keating The first time I had the pleasure of hearing Lyn Hejinian was her lecture ‘The quest for knowledge in the western poem,' (free under the Naropa University Archive Project and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets) which introduced me to her particularness about language. Here perhaps we can note “the power of nature,” a subtle version of nature’s destructive capacity: the tumult of storms, the geological upheavals of earthquakes and volcanoes, etc. Take this little poem of Lyn Hejinian’s, for example. The children are wielding wooden sticks like swords, jabbing at the pigeons, shrieking. Poet, essayist, translator, and publisher Lyn Hejinian is a founding figure of the Language poetry movement of the 1970s and an influential force in the world of experimental and avant-garde poetics. Roy Robinson Trelaine has a raw blister on his right foot and this may be what’s preventing him from moving swiftly forward again into the battle (his term), which, however, hasn’t yet begun. Accident, chance, lawlessness or uselessness are equal to reason, logic, knowledge, fair play, etc., in terms of their ability "to happen," "occur," "be." Lyn Hejinian is the author of numerous books, the most recent of which is The Unfollowing.She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, where her academic work is addressed principally to modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social practices they entail. Memory presents itself conceptually as something very like nature, as all one thing, largely contingent, autonomously rational, with cycles of recurrence that are never the same. The stars are fading. From "The Rejection of Closure" My title, „The Rejection of Closure," sounds judgmental, which is a little misleading˜though only a little since I am a happy reader of detective novels and an admiring, a very admiring, reader of Charles Dickens‚ novel. A melancholy admiral. His breath is slightly stale; she turns over, the comment “I’m changing my olfactory orientation” crosses her mind and amuses her, and she falls back to sleep. One night, I dream thirty words. I’m not responsible for the words, they just show up in the dream. More by Wendy Xu. Representations tend toward the metaphorical when they monumentalize. Gates swing with creativity, familiarity exerts creative sway. Loss and forgetting are intimately bound to the affective life of married love, with its intricate temporality, its persistent (though sometimes hard-won) lack of closure. Allegories, on the other hand, are not made out of parts, and the captioning of an allegorical image or situation activates what was in abeyance, latent, dormant—but not fragmented. The copy I have of Hejinian's My Life esteems both its wide readership by 'hundreds … Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. She was editor of Tuumba Press from 1976 to 1984, when it pioneered in issuing a series of fifty Language poet chapbooks. Maggie Fornetti is asleep on her side, right leg straight, left leg bent and drawn close to her body, left arm across her chest, right bent and tucked close to her side. 19-20 of the Sun & Moon edition (1980). I am tasked with situating them, placing them. Wendy Xu is the author of the poetry collections Phrasis (Fence, 2017), winner of the 2016 Ottoline Prize, and You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013). Still, it’s difficult to resist the pull of seductive totality, which even the particular can exert. These remain of interest and inform her continuing research and writing. The refugees, exiles, fugitives, or the merely stranded, confused, lost, or even, often, merely homesick—they suffer nausea, loss of appetite, agoraphobia. At Café Roma, Alice Milligan Webster and Judge Lorna Kelly Cole are sharing a convivial moment of misanthropy. The poem talks of nothing but imagination. Hyperallergic is a forum for serious, playful, and radical thinking about art in the world today. Lyn Hejinian (born May 17, 1941) is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher.She is often associated with the Language poets and is known for her landmark work My Life (Sun & Moon, 1987, original version Burning Deck, 1980), as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000). Interrelated objects, producing occasions and prompting responses, can assemble into riddles. But they are only a crutch. Watch Queue Queue Elation gives way to calm, grief to acceptance or the lassitude of depression. Cretaceous thimbles, metal delectables, sporadic blankets, and effigies en croute? Tagged: Lyn Hejinian, poetry, Reviews, Weekend Karla Kelsey Karla Kelsey is author of four books, most recently A Conjoined Book (Omnidawn, 2014) and Of Sphere (Essay Press, 2017). Longtime friends despite living vastly far apart – Lyn in Berkeley and Ed in Chicago – they’ve been in close dialogue for almost 20 years. Waking, I quickly write the dream words, lineating as I do so, increasingly uncertain that what I’m writing down are actually the words that came to me, displayed on the dream screen. We are not talking about oblivion here, nor safety, nor domesticity, nor the familiar; interiority is much more likely to present one with troubles. Much of everyday life in the nineteenth century took place in interiors—in the domestic sphere. in rectangles of unaffiliated violet The helicopters compete for the acoustic space, cops loiter on the fringes of the crowd, one leans against a sycamore tree. Indeed, who knows what’s happening, what has already happened? The Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and the American poet Lyn Hejinian have collaborated on a number of projects, including the translation of each other’s work. Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day both articulate a domestic quotidian devoted to what Rita Felski in calls “the repetitive Doing Time tasks of social reproduction.” Mindful of the over-determined relationship between gender and the everyday, Hejinian and Mayer use the long poem to convey the elusive Somewhere non-freedom lies, too. from Writing Is an Aid to Memory: 17. Either way, one adopts style on behalf of its survival value. An overview of My Life and an introduction to the idea of the non-narrative or anti-narrative prose-poem memoir, an audio file that includes a partial interpretion of this sixth section, is available here. In the opening lines (in the first number’d section) of “The Distance”—in Lyn Hejinian’s two-poem book Saga / Circus (Omnidawn, 2008)—is an implicit nod to William Carlos Williams’s “no ideas but in things” follow’d by an emphatic (and rather uncharacteristically petulant (a foot-stomp for Hejinian)) dismissal of the powers of metaphor: An overview of. He is holding them out to me; none have return addresses (they are “unmarked”), and the authority is both offering and withholding them. Founded in 2009, Hyperallergic is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York. Lyn Hejinian teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Lyn Hejinian on her groundbreaking My Life and reordering time. The revised edition (which I read) was written when she … Lyn Hejinian (b. By Lyn Hejinian. We animalize them, so that we can turn them loose, unleashed, except in the case of drought, an ongoing devastating non-event. When will it rain? She has also been co-editor of Poetics Journal for over twenty years. Freedom lies in dreams. And even then, though riddles arrange the sensible, they withhold the sense: A birch tree with ideas Please consider supporting our journalism, and help keep our independent reporting free and accessible to all. Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, and translator. We develop syntax, take on style, so as to prevail. Her autobiographical poem My Life, a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. For twenty years, Lyn Hejinian taught in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where her academic work was addressed principally to modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social practices they entail. Poet, essayist, and translator, she is also the author and coauthor of several books of poetry, most recently Tribunal (Omnidawn Publishing, 2019). “If you abolish the whole, you abolish its parts; and if you abolish any part then that whole is abolished.” What am I? As arts communities around the world experience a time of challenge and change, accessible, independent reporting on these developments is more important than ever. She has also been co-editor of Poetics Journal for over twenty years. Gears mesh, systems circle. Lyn Hejinian’s poetic investigations of the non-linear, of the non-sequential have familiarized readers with stops or endings that are not closure. Among the more mild of them are doubt and ambivalence, since they are indigenous to interiority, which is, after all, an arena for muddling. The music may be luscious, and its intentions may be innocuous, while the effects are insidious, producing the mollifying effect of an all-encompassing ideology. Waking solves nothing—quite the opposite. Extract. Watch Queue Queue. More Poems by Lyn Hejinian. The blue everywhere is sky. For twenty years, Lyn Hejinian taught in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where her academic work was addressed principally to modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social practices they entail. An authority (dressed in blue) is in the doorway with three large yellow envelopes. ), it might consist of 1,000 poems; more likely of 310 or a few more of them (the number she had … Lyn Hejinian’s Language Poetry. Tagged: Lyn Hejinian, poetry, Reviews, Weekend Karla Kelsey Karla Kelsey is author of four books, most recently A Conjoined Book (Omnidawn, 2014) and Of Sphere (Essay Press, 2017). Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. We can reason our way onto a path of expectancy, but given nature's oblivion such reasoning, she argues, is fantastically imprecise. Interviews, praise from fellow poets, more links to poem excerpts, Hejinian's essays from The Language of Inquiry (a collection of essays she wrote on poetics), other bits of info on her. Come into that moment, meant to make the world happen, take place differently. Lyn Hejinian teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, where her academic work is addressed principally to modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social practices they entail. LYN HEJINIAN is a poet, essayist, and translator. My own contribution to what has become a poem, is an account, in prose, of a dream I had on January 27, 1996, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama: 8. In addition to her other academic work, she has in recent years been involved in anti-privatization activism at the University of California, Berkeley. Lyn Hejinian's My Life is one of the foundational texts of Language Poetry. As, for example, in minimalist painting—and, perhaps, more problematically, in minimalist musical compositions, whose micro-modulations can become as pervasive as dust. In the twentieth century, it moved increasingly into the streets, at least in cities. It’s almost December. Dispersed parts are reunited into their apparent whole. Time goes by. As he sings, he gains something: weeping—he weeps. In an essay on circuits and screens, capitalism’s inventiveness is acknowledged, along with the complexities of its flow, over filigrees, planes, and curls. In whatever one does, one deploys or proffers or expresses or articulates or displays both conscious and unconscious style. Her most recent books include A Border Comedy (Granary Books, 2001), Slowly and The Beginner (both published by Tuumba Press, 2002), and The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003). Askari Nate Martin sighs in his sleep, and Maggie Fornetti feels his breath on her face before she realizes she’s heard it. Her poetry presents the same problems to me that Gertrude Stein’s does. Or I hallucinate them (they have the convincing force of perceptual truth when it grabs reality and won’t let go) and see: a pronoun dog along, an adverb on “The stars have […] virtue for the allegorist: they belong in constellations. Style allows us to link ourselves, even if negatively, to other beings. She is often associated with the Language poets and is well known for her landmark work My Life (Sun & Moon, 1987, original version Burning Deck, 1980), as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000). Lyn Hejinian (born May 17, 1941) is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. A beautiful autobiographical prose-poem, and, like any life, a continuous work in progress and revision. Lyn Hejinian's "The Distance" (the second of two long pieces in her new book, Saga/Circus) adds the rarely-considered emotions and passions, regret, pathos, cowardice, enthusiasm, forgetfulness, understanding, shock, love. In 2003, Hejinian published a related, ten-part work called My Life in the Nineties. With Barrett Watten, she is the co-editor of A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field 1982–1998, and the related Poetics Journal Digital Archive (Wesleyan University Press, 2013/2015). The real pleasure comes from the illusion of restored order. By Lyn Hejinian. She is often associated with the Language poets and is well known for her landmark work My Life (Sun & Moon, 1987, original version Burning Deck, 1980), as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000). 1941) is a poet, editor, and professor in the English department at UC Berkeley. Lyn Hejinian's "The Distance" (the second of two long pieces in her new book, Saga/Circus) adds the rarely-considered emotions and passions, regret, pathos, cowardice, enthusiasm, forgetfulness, understanding, shock, love. It uses count-less personification to place imagination as a human-like being. Having a capacity for grammar hardly justifies our thinking we have mastered the world. In 2005, Lyn Hejinian was a Writers House fellow. for every idiocy perfection of the abstract sea Michael said: A work of slow art, as well as one of the few collections of Language poetry that has aged well. Here are some of the many useful instruments of a late November day around the Thursday of Thanksgiving: baster, bed, belt, blanket, book, boots, bra, bread board, broom, bus, candlestick, carving knife, cash, cell phone, chair, Clingwrap, coat, coffee maker, colander, comb, computer, deodorant, desk, dishwasher, doorknob, dust pan, envelope, faucet, file folder, garbage can, glass, glasses, gravy boat, hairbrush, hair dryer, hand lotion, jar, key, knife, mouse, mug, notebook, paper, pen, pencil, pie dish, pillow, plate, platter, postage stamp, pot, printer, radio, rake, refrigerator, roasting pan, rolling pin, shampoo, shirt, shower, sink, skillet, skirt, soap, socks, sofa, spatula, sponge, spoon, stapler, stove, sweater, table, toaster, toilet, toothbrush, towel, umbrella, underpants, waste basket, watch, wine glass. Her poetry is characterized by an unusual lyricism and descriptive engagement with the everyday. In the twenty-first century everyday life has moved again, onto screens. One Poem by Lyn Hejinian. Grammars—by which I mean all kinds of connecting tactics—are our instruments of invention, as well as of power. She is the author of over twenty-five volumes of poetry and critical prose including HEARING with Leslie Scalapino (Litmus Press, 2021), AERIAL 10: LYN HEJINIAN (Edge Books, 2016), THE BEGINNER (Tuumba Press, 2002), POSITIONS OF THE SUN (Belladonna*, 2018), and SLOWLY (Tuumba Press, 2002). The funeral for the dead boy is over. In the world Hejinian unfolds, context, our surround sound, can exist for itself alone. Lyn Hejinian’s recent poetry sets a trap for its reader and, particularly, for a reviewer or commentator—a trap to say what her poems mean, or, to ask the question with an overly valued word in Western and modern U.S. society, what “knowledge” do we “take” from her poems? But freedom is always qualified—dedicated, flaunted, overseen, negated. Poetry. Pleasures? This addition isn't her major philosophical innovation. My Life has ratings and 62 reviews. In the course of a day, through the myriad small temporal increments, power relations in the domestic sphere shift, fading only temporarily as everyone sleeps. "Reading Lyn Hejinian's HAPPILY can make one imagine a second, somewhat happier Stein telling stories in single long or short lines that are aware of one another as they go about their own affairs. It provides one with a way to practice overcoming something, even perhaps oneself, or the moods that seem identical with oneself, self-determining. Lyn Hejinian teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Lyn Hejinian's portion of the reading (12:07): MP3 Lecture and Reading - produced by Poem Present , University of Chicago, May 10 and 11, 2005 Lecture (51:23): MP3 , Video They are fourteen lines long and, more importantly, poems of love and loss. The original book, written when Hejinian was 37 years old, contains 37 chapters of 37 sentences each. Askari Nate Martin is asleep on his back, arms folded, legs straight, toes pushing at the bedding at the end of the bed. I’m subject to myriad objects. Composed of forty-five sections, titled, each containing forty-five sentences, My Life is an experimental memoir poem. A spasm of memory—physical, physiological, geographic, and seemingly perpetual. But isn’t midnight intermittent. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to School... Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, A Quick and Simple Summary and Analysis of The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod, No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Proven Plan for Getting What You Want in Love, Sex and Life, An American Marriage (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel, 33% found this document useful, Mark this document as useful, 67% found this document not useful, Mark this document as not useful. The recipient... from My Life: Reason looks for two, then arranges it from there. for every idiocy perfection of the abstract sea, The Hard-to-Find Chapbooks of Geoffrey Young. Introspection is not a retreat; it’s an advent, into an unquiet space, generally gloomy, certainly not restful. Poet, essayist, and translator, she is also the author and coauthor of several books of poetry, most recently Tribunal (Omnidawn Publishing, 2019). It is one poem in a series Hejinian has been writing, a project she currently calls The Book of a Thousand Eyes. They are known from the earliest times to move in a strictly ordered system of mutually dependent relations.” Dawn is not far off. Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Note: This is the sixth section of My Life, “marking” Lyn Hejinian’s sixth year, It appears on pp. But there are exiles there too, expert at exile, old hands at getting by. 1 F rom Lyn Hejinian’s long poem Happily: « The event is the adventure of that moment » (Hejinian 2000a, 9).Come. Yes! wilt As such, the performances of it become an elaborate advertisement for something that its listeners can’t name but begin to long for—something that constrains their freedom, even as their minds wander. A flash of pathos. Lyn Hejinian was born in Alameda, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and educated at Harvard. PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.s. Military History, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't. Lyn Hejinian, essay, 2 prose poems. Recent books Her academic work is addressed principally to modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social practices they entail. Lyn Hejinian teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Her autobiographical poem My Life, a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia.The Language of Inquiry is a comprehensive and wonderfully readable collection of her essays, and its publication promises to be an important event for American literary culture. AMERICAN LITERATURE Summary of Oblivion by Lyn Hejinian Lyn Hejinian • American poet, essayist, translator and publisher • Founding figure of the language poetry movement of 1970s • Influential force in the experimental and Avant-garde poetics • Poetry characterized by an unusual lyricism and descriptive engagement • Author of many poetry collections including “My Life and My Life in the Nineties” • “The …