A Border Comedy
Lyn Hejinian
publisher: Granary Books, 2001
isbn: 1-887123-37-7
price: $15.95
I thought I could, as it were, follow a poem, that kept itself apart from me
And from itself
A short lyric of shifts
A page or two at most
A poem of metamorphoses, a writing in lost contexts
I would write a line or two
No more
And go away
And come back another day only to add something that would change everything
[63]
This "lyric of shifts" is the fifteen-book sequence of Hejinian's marvellous new poem, as close to a ars poetica as she has come, mixing daily reflection with modes of theory, drama, epic and fable.
Hejinian has made a career of publishing virtuostic long poems, including the early Writing is an Aid to Memory (her most "language" school book), the acknowledged classic My Life, and Oxata: A Short Russian Novel. A Border Comedy is the most fluid and natural of the series, as it adopts many of the themes that she develops in her essays (recently collected in Language of Inquiry), one of which is the pushing of the conscious mind to the borders of experience, and yet the poem allows itself to wend at apparent whim along the byways of a very interesting mind with no formatlistic strictures -- the new-sentence rigors of My Life, the Pushkin-inspired "sonnets" of Oxata -- to trouble the connections.
The capacious, yet self-reflexive setting allows the disconnections to have their meanings too; while this poem has some of the wave-like activity of an Ashbery poem (such as Flow Chart, to which it can be compared), it doesn't rest anywhere for long, sometimes flying off on a tangent spurred by a single word.
We do not want all loss of boundary
At boundary is a body of experience
It affirms our solitude but it negates it too
It makes conjunction, has beauty and clue
It makes of the body an erotic talisman
Then the woman sewed it into a silk pouch and tied the talisman to her thigh
And there it was sidetracked
Slapped
Producing a great sensation
[59]
A Border Comedy asks that you learn the special meanings of several of its recurring terms -- pleasure, boundary, barbarian, comedy, etc. -- and though the poem often digresses into mini-essays describing the poets sense of each, the meanings are always fluid, words appearing in new contexts that torque the old:
A comedian is a foreigner at border
Or comedienne -- antinomian
Performing the comedy known as barbarism
This
An encounter
(Encounters, after all, are the essence of comedy)
With forge and link
Which doppelgangers (perfect matchers) match
[78]
Everything about this poem, including it's variable lineation that is mile-high in song at one moment and is violently asymmetrical the next (a Jack Spicer-ish tactic), contributes to the impression of a mind treating the world as if it were a foreigner to it, and the poet's own mind and body as if it were something of a cosmos itself.
This is more than a speculative poem, in the manner of Wallace Stevens' later writing, but one that seriously challenges philosophical rhetoric and modes of poetic discourse while it rides along its capacity for creating playful mental architectures, a truly redescriptive, pragmatist exercise.
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