‘It’s incomplete, perpetually’: Lyn Hejinian’s re-arranging texts
To read manuscript faces is to attempt to trace the processes of cognition materialised through pen on paper. In her essay “Reportless Places’: Facing the Modern Manuscript’, the textual scholar Marta Werner writes that ‘the word ‘manuscript’ designates only a general category of documents – i.e. documents that do not attain printed form. Within this broad classification, two kinds of manuscripts must be immediately distinguished: fair copies and drafts’ (‘Reportless’ n.p.). Where the fair copy prepares a text for print, for Werner ‘the allure of the draft is otherwise, issuing, oppositely, from the erring hand, from its labor, its risks, its inhabitation of time and history, from, that is, its very perishability’ (‘Reportless’ n.p.). The manuscript draft comes to emblematise both the inviting corporeality of the ‘manus’, the hand, as well as the more elusive germination of ideas quickly jotted down on paper. To read draft manuscripts is to open new interpretive trajectories to the printed text, oftentimes guided by the promise, and perhaps sustaining myth, of intimacy.
In the field of textual scholarship, too, the activities of the drafted page become a form of thinking. The textual scholar Dirk Van Hulle’s 2012 study of Beckett’s manuscripts for his poem ‘Ceiling’, for instance, considers the drafting process as a form of embodied cognition. In the poem, we stare at a blank ceiling (‘On coming to the first sight is of white’) whose expansive ‘dull white’ also make our eyes alert and sensitive to the ceiling’s small discolorations. The variation is occasioned by open or closed eyes, by the ‘dull whites’ of our eyeballs: ‘Consciousness eyes to of having come to’. The ‘arrival’ is also ultimately an awareness of ‘this dull white of body’ lying flat and inert parallel to the ceiling. Hulle writes:
The dull white of the ceiling is easily translated into the dull white of the paper, and cognitive philosophy has recently confirmed what writers have known for centuries: that writing is not just a form of thinking, but can also be regarded as a model of the mind – the so-called extended mind. In ‘Writing as Thinking’ Richard Menary argued that the creation and manipulation of ‘written vehicles’ is part of our cognitive processing and that ‘writing transforms our cognitive abilities’. The nexus between the mind and the manuscript is a constant process of interaction that helps constitute the mind in the first place.
(286)
Hulle explores the ‘Multiple Drafts’ model as well as more recent models of cognition like ‘The Expanded Mind’ and ‘Post-Cognitive Enaction’, which asserts that ‘the mind is not some "inside" separated from an "outside," but an interaction between – for instance – a bedridden organism and the ceiling above, or a writer and the paper on which s/he writes’ (Hulle 285). Hulle presents generative methodological possibilities for reading poets who are similarly interested in form as a process of cognition. Drafting as a poetic strategy can enact something of scattered cognition, which bounces between the expanse of the ‘dull white’ page, ceiling, and body. Hulle suggests that the iterative ‘On’ linking the prose paragraphs of ‘Ceiling’ re-figures the relations between a perceptual body and writing – that is, the mind is not securely ‘housed’ in the body but rather bounces through the reflective spectrum of ‘white’. Drafting is a continuous interaction between a subject position and its environments.
It is within the re-versioned thinking of the drafting process that I would like to situate the American poet Lyn Hejinian. Hejinian was central to an experimental group of poets emerging from late 1970s Bay Area San Francisco and New York grouped as Language Writing. In 1986, Ron Silliman inaugurated perhaps the most well-known of the Language Poetry anthologies, In The American Tree, with Grenier’s declaration: ‘I HATE SPEECH’ (qtd. in Silliman 17). As Ondrea Ackerman writes, Silliman formulated ‘a breach – and a new moment in American writing away from the ‘voice’ or the self-presence of the poet behind the text as the foundational principle of the lyric poem’ (137). Here, Silliman is responding to the popularity of mid-century confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, the overflow of Allen Ginsberg’s oration, as well as Charles Olson’s breath-based poetry. Against an Olsonian notion of the rhythms of the poetic line governed by the poet’s breath, Robert Grenier’s ‘I HATE SPEECH’ insists on the materiality of writing to interrogate ‘the ideology of transparent and referentially communicative language’, as Craig Dworkin puts it (116). Hejinian was central to the prolific output of Bay Area Language Writing, publishing numerous poetry collections as well as running a small press called Tuumba from 1976 to 1984.
Hejinian brings drafting very close to the processes of cognition – in fact, her texts formulate them as analogous activities. Rather than the sentence as a linear temporal unit, language in Hejinian’s work opens and makes use of the discrepant temporalities and spatial dissolutions of the cognisant mind. Further, Hejinian’s forms generate sensation, enacting processes of readerly cognition. Hejinian’s interest in cognition is evident in her work from the 1980s and 1990s, such as her Tuumba Press publications The Guard and Gesualdo. In The Guard, for example, Hejinian is interested in the almost unconscious, erring movements of the writing hand:
On my fist my fingers and they trace.
Introspection, cancellation, the concentric
session. Water stills the stalk
between drawing and doodling. The tree
stands up aching in the sun.
The car drives past whose we’ll never know.
A jet is the vanishing point
the contrail reaches.
(n.p.)
There are slippages between different types of concentric movement here – water ripples, doodling, drawing, writing, cars driving. The poem is formed of small, compact stanzas in eight sections. Between these stanzas, we find an overlapping of thought, writing, and sensation. Sensations seem to slip into one another in the space of the line – here, for instance, the plant ‘stalk’ that’s held upright in a mass of water morphs into the variant sways of ‘drawing and doodling’. The ‘stalk’ becomes a writing pen – the wanderings of a doodle almost enact or anticipate the line’s distracted drift from plant to pen. I am interested in how the poem changes its movements and gestures in the course of its formation. Even the writing hand seems to strangely dislocate as we encounter it: ‘On my first my fingers and they trace’. There is no clear connection here between physical movement (‘trace’) and body parts (‘fingers’, ‘fists’). The possessive ‘my’ awkwardly claims both ‘fist’ and ‘fingers’. Fingers are not substantially part of the body – they instead sit precariously ‘on’ the hand. The volition of ‘my’ is dispersed – the self does not quite command its writing apparatus, an intact ‘hand’ over which is has control. Instead, the hand is dismembered – fingers both form a fist as well as circuitously ‘trace’. Fingers, then, act in asynchronous movement. Just like ‘drawing’ becoming the more distracted ‘doodle’, the hand walks off its own wrist. Throughout the poem, then, we get an overlapping of body extensions and thinking. ‘Cancellation’ here works as a movement of the drafting process (crossing out unwanted or amended words). Hejinian is interested in different types of vessels or compartments: cars, jets, windmills, and how sensation enters or leaves a poem. Hejinian, then, signals the arrival and departure of sensation in her poem – the car disappears into something ‘we’ll never know’. The jet vanishes, and the car ‘drives past’ – thoughts depart into a poetic ‘vanishing point’. The ‘contrail’ is another form of line, a vapour trail made by airplanes in the sky. Rather than an enclosed mind, the poem undoes its own introspection by letting thoughts disperse, like the vapour trail of the ‘contrail’. The dispersed lines of Hejinian’s poem form a concentric return to the poem’s own form.
In Hejinian’s 1992 collection The Cell, we constantly find containers – boxed, lidded and open objects. The Cell is a strange and disjunctive text, harder to parse than her famous work My Life (1980), which was later updated and revised as My Life In The Nineties. The Cell began as a sustained collaboration with poet Kit Robinson. Over a period of two years, Hejinian and Robinson posted each other short, twelve-line poems in the mail every day. Until the publication of an essay by Kit Robinson titled ‘The Beginning of the Making of The Cell’ in 2016, its collaborative context was unknown, and critics such as Marjorie Perloff and John Shoptaw approached The Cell as a single-author work. Peter Middleton’s chapter ‘Collaboration and Authorship: Lyn Hejinian, The Cell’ outlines the effects of reading this work as a collaborative endeavour might have on critical attention: ‘What happens when we acknowledge that the poem, the practice, and the poetic intelligence of a text such as The Cell cannot be wholly ascribed to a single author?’ (176) Despite the segmentation implied by the title, The Cell is difficult to break down into ‘readable’ units. The title is itself a porous container, a small biological component of a shape we might read and understand as a person. We find lots of different ‘cellular’ forms in the text, like the architectural spaces of kitchens and prison blocks, to biological cells, boxes, containers, rocks, and the stanza form itself. The poetic text itself becomes a cell – not an airtight unit necessarily, but a vessel open to its environment. Each poem is formed of indented sentences, which are the smaller units or cellular forms of the poem. The first poem of The Cell opens with a container:
It is the writer’s object
to supply the hollow green
and yellow life of the
human I
The ‘human I’ is here like a stem, with a ‘hollow’ centre that sucks up the ‘yellow life of the / human I’. The poem begins, then, with a plant, which John Shoptaw likens to ‘an anthologized flower of speech […] unlike Sidney’s or Petrarch’s love objects, this I-stem has no hallowed soul or Platonic essence as its core but rather draws its inner productive life from abroad’ (65). Here, we are in the domain of the biological cell, or the human body. The ‘human I’ is also an eye, a way of looking. Here, the ‘human’ is itself a porous site, filled and emptied again. Similarly, language filters through the permeable stem of the poem, deposited into new pleated sections. The writerly ‘object’ is a hollow container that filters the materials of the poem through itself. The ‘supply’ is here a generative potential of material to be worked into, and through, the poem. The poem, in this sense, doesn’t just ‘replicate’ cells through its pleated sentences, but rather does the work of a cell through allowing language to pass through permeable membranes, focusing attention not so much on the individually demarcated ‘contents’ of a container, but rather the movement and slippages of materials between and through its units. In this way, Hejinian begins with the self as a kind of ‘container’ to be re-figured through the collection.
Gertrude Stein is an important precedent for Hejinian’s containers. In Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914), objects are not discrete things so much as processes that can be continually altered and re-versioned as we read the text. The processual quality of objects is evident in the very first poem of Tender Buttons, ‘A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass’:
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.
(11)
The poem is interested in ‘resemblance’ – the ‘kind in glass’ is a taxonomy to which the carafe might belong, but the relation of the ‘cousin’ suggests a more distant relation, once-removed. The poem pivots between resemblance and differentiation, such as the constant negations of ‘not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling’. Further, any organising system or taxonomy is itself pliable: ‘an arrangement in a system to pointing’. Here, ‘arrangement’ suggests that the carafe can be moved into new positions in the poem. Further, the carafe becomes an object itself capable of re-arranging the textual ‘system’ – an optic through which to view the text. The ‘spectacle’ turns the carafe into a kind of looking glass, and the ‘spreading’ difference suggests a continual refraction or dissemination of words from this poem throughout the entire collection. That is, looking into the carafe re-arranges the remaining poems. In fact, words from this poem do spread – such as ‘a difference a very little difference is prepared’ in ‘A Substance in a Cushion’ to ‘this necessarily spread into nothing. Spread into nothing’ in ‘A Little Bit of a Tumbler’, where the ‘Tumbler’ is a glassy companion to the carafe. Poems such as ‘Careless Water’ also suggest a language spillage from the carafe – here, ‘Careless’ is a literal ‘tumble’, an accident.
Stein’s objects often take the form of containers (boxes, carafes, cups, cushions etc) and seem particularly interested in the hollowness of seemingly solid objects – that is, how a reader might enter something solid. A box, for instance, might open a lid to disclose hidden interiors. The interplay between the inside and outside of objects is often figured through ‘covers’ throughout the collection, which are introduced in ‘Glazed Glitter’ (‘Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover’) and taken up again in ‘A Substance in a Cushion’: ‘A cushion has that cover. Supposing you do not like to change, supposing it is very clear that there is no change in appearance, supposing that there is regularity and a costume is that any the worse than an oyster and an exchange’ (12). A cushion is a fabric object that ‘covers’ a soft interior. The cover transforms the ‘substance’ that it envelops, or wraps around. In other words, a cover works in the same way as a box – an object that ‘contains’ other things. Here, Stein is interested in how an object is ‘hidden’ or ‘covered’, that is, how an object changes form. Stein imagines ‘covering’ as a ‘costume’ – clothing that hides or transforms the body, and ‘changing’ here takes on a practical implication of dressing and re-dressing. The ‘oyster’ too can be read as a shell ‘covering’ the animal inside. In fact, Stein seems to quickly follow this corporeal interest throughout this sentence, as a ‘cover’ becomes a kind of skin, an outer protective layer (later, we encounter ‘feathers’ of a bird or ‘cotton’ clothing layered over skin). However, we are then swiftly directed to a domestic setting, where the ‘cover’ becomes a kind of tablecloth: ‘Is there not much more joy in a table and more chairs and very likely roundness and a place to put them’ (12). Here it is the table that it ‘dressed’ to become a ‘very likely roundness’ – covering is a kind of magic trick, changing one object into another, and this sparks ‘joy’. ‘Covering’ is the continuous transformation of objects into new shapes, which, like the ritualistic dressing of a table, are also implicated in, and part of, social life – that is, a ‘cover’ is both object and event.
In ‘A Box’, Stein begins with a kind of linguistic ‘unboxing’: ‘Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle’ (13). Here, sentences themselves are boxes ‘out of’ which words emerge, each one a surprise. We question how each word spring from one another (‘kindness’ to ‘redness’ to ‘rudeness’ to ‘rapid’ to ‘research’ to ‘cattle’). Rather than ‘covering’, Stein thinks here about ‘uncovering’, instigating readerly surprise as each word phonetically darts into a new one. The box here sparks a similar response to receiving a gift, ‘covered’ in wrapping paper. We guess at the shape underneath: ‘So then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and it is disappointing’ (13). The ‘roundness’ is a vague, suggestive shape just like the table. Instead of happy surprise, though, we are left ‘disappointed’ with the form inside the box. The pin is a literal ‘point’ in the earlier ‘arrangement in a system to pointing’. The tiny circular form of the pin is like Hejinian’s picture hooks – an object for linking material together. What is ‘unboxed’, then, is rather a re-figured ‘system to pointing’, where parts are put together again in new positions. Like the carafe, the box becomes another object through which the entirety of the text can be disassembled, changed. In the second ‘Box’ poem, Stein wraps the box back up: ‘A box is made sometimes and them to see to see to it neatly and to have the holes stopped up makes it necessary to use paper’ (16). Tears and ‘holes’ are ‘covered’ with paper, therefore sealing the container once again. As a present, the box instigates readerly delight and disappointment through its continual covering and uncovering. Objects, throughout the collection, can be taken apart and put back together again.
Hejinian thinks about Stein’s ‘motif of containment’ in her ‘Two Stein Talks’, first delivered in 1985 during a residency at New College of California (The Language of Inquiry 102). In fact, there is a cross-fusion of ideas between these talks and the poems of The Cell, which were written contemporaneously from 1986-1989. Responding to Tender Buttons, Hejinian writes: ‘Across the motif of containment, there is a series of words relative to destruction, or, at the least, change – process, alterations, and natural transformations, as well as cracks, holes, punctures, piercings gaps, and breakage, as well as the possible spill with which the first poem ends’ (102). The special issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E dedicated to Stein was published ten years earlier, in 1978, and featured contributions from Michael Davidson, Bob Perelman, and Jackson Mac Low. Astrid Lorange writes that ‘December 1978 figures as a significant moment in which Stein is reintroduced to critical scholarship in the context of radical poetics’ (qtd in Spahr 115).[1] ‘Two Stein Talks’, Hejinian extends an interest in the object as a ‘thing containing itself’: ‘Box, bottle, carafe, cup, show, tumbler, book. Containers and their covers – concealment – colors, the dust, dirt, darkness, polish, shine […] Does a thing contain itself? Does it contain its own reality? Do we perceive a thing as it is in itself? Do the words in which we speak of a thing capture our perception, our thoughts of it?’ (The Language of Inquiry 104). Hejinian quickly moves on to consider the ‘object’ as less a separate, discrete container and rather a meeting point between ‘our perception’ or ‘thoughts’ and the ‘thing’. In this way, we can see how ‘containment’, for Hejinian, is one way of conceiving of a cellular form – an object re-arranged and structurally mobile. Further, we can see how ‘containers’ importantly, generate readerly affect – the process of revising objects throughout the course of the text instigates surprise, disappointment, even joy.
In a poem towards the end of The Cell, we encounter a container adrift on the sea:
She expected a letter
An abalone
I was walking on the
sides of my feet in
the sand, trying not to
make tracks identifiable as those
of female feet
Thus I’m completely unembarrassed
There’s a long way to
go judging
The waters are bulging with
description
Glossy with stillness, cups gliding
The waves sucking up the
rising sand close so it
stands but only into part
of the wave above which
there’s an effect of red
glints, as in green rock
Considering how the waters differ
The position prepositional, of deferral
So it’s inevitable to wait,
to be punctual
So it’s a theory of
duration
July 13, 1988
(180)
The ‘abalone’ resembles Stein’s oyster – a mollusc shell covering an animal inside. The abalone is a kind of ‘box’ or container anticipating the later ‘cups’ gliding on the surface of the water. The ‘abalone’ also sonically rings with words in the first section of the poem: ‘aboriginal’ and ‘A bundle or a burden’ – sounds are re-purposed. The abalone then becomes a letter (‘She expected a letter’) which brings us back to the collaborative contexts of The Cell, and the eager expectation of receiving a letter in the post. Like Stein’s interest in ‘covering’, things deftly change form throughout the poem, creating a mood of expectant revelation. Later in the poem, small ‘cups’ float on the water, emptied and filled again. The effect of ‘glossy with stillness’ captures the wet sheen of waves momentarily paused, or static. Hejinian is interested in the tension between movement (‘gliding’) and ‘stillness’, as the cups are ‘covered’ by the waters. The cup resembles a carafe, filled and drained again. The ‘bulging’ waters also configure the sea itself as a container, one that is abrim.
Through water, Hejinian creates a kind of surround to any discrete items or ‘things’, like the cups. As Christopher Nealon writes, ‘Language writing argues for understanding the medium of language as a kind of perpetually mobile surround, which Hejinian typically calls ‘context’: placement, situation, conjunction, animating constraint’ (21). Here, water is a ‘perpetually mobile surround’ to the cups. Nealon himself describes Hejinian’s ‘poetics of fluidity’ – in fact, the ‘waves’ become a Steinian ‘cover’, able to transform what they enclose. The ‘gliding’ cups are perpetually re-formed as water enters them, appearing both ‘glossy’ and ‘still’. Hejinian therefore enlarges the scale of Stein’s ‘cover’, as water envelops objects. Hejinian is interested in how water, as a ‘perpetually mobile surround’ can spatially transform the objects it interacts with. The sand, for instance, is ‘sucked’ into the body of the water (that is, enclosed inside a dense mass), and is then spatially reconfigured into a ‘standing’ structure – like, perhaps, the upright person of ‘the hollow green / and yellow life of the / human I’ that opens The Cell. The ‘waves sucking up the / rising sand’ integrates sand into the ‘rising’ swell of water – in other words, they form one mass. We then get a perceptual moment created from the fusion of sand and waves – under the surface of the water, the sand refracts light, appearing as ‘red / glints, as in green rock’. Hejinian signals a descriptive swell in the poem: ‘Whole sequences of perception like / water sliding in the cold’ (113). Here, it is ‘perception’ itself that is figured as a kind of cup or a container ‘sliding’ and ‘gliding’ in the waves.
The poem returns, however, to a site of compositional activity: ‘So it’s a theory of / duration’. Through the dated entry of July 13, 1988, Hejinian leaves a compositional stamp on the poem. We can hear echoes of the collaborative origins of this poem in ‘it’s inevitable to wait, / to be punctual’, particularly through the timings and missed timings of the epistolary exchange. There is a similar interest in word substitution here – for instance, the awkward equivalence of ‘A bundle or a burden’ as well as expressions like ‘There is heat in obesity’ and ‘It isn’t aboriginal to make’. Hejinian uses the structure of an aphorism but makes it non-idiomatic, substituting in an unexpected word. Peter Nicholls writes that in The Cell, ‘the aphorism, whose tone and form conventionally aspire to a high level of generalisation, constantly over-reaches itself, undermining the ground of commonsense to which it seems to lay claim. If there is a ‘dilemma’ here it is one which arises not from linguistic opacity and fragmentation (as in the earlier Writing Is an Aid to Memory), but from an insistent incommensurability between phrases and tonal registers’ (250). The poem itself ‘wobbles’ between different sets of ideas, which returns us to the fluid ‘prepositional’ movement of the hanging indents. Like Stein’s ‘unboxing’, word substitution creates a constant affective ‘shock’ for the reader as we encounter each new thing. Drafting is an extended, durational activity – book itself becomes a kind of ‘cell’, formed into new iterations continuously. Drafting, therefore, is a way to position the relationship between these poems as in fact central to their formation. For Hejinian, the book itself is a re-arranging object.
[1] As Juliana Spahr writes, ‘Tender Buttons might easily be thought of as the work that establishes the narrative of Stein the innovator. And the book has a significant impact on contemporary U.S. writing. It is hard to imagine Language writing happening without its influence’ (116).
Works Cited
Primary Works
Craig Dworkin. ‘The Stutter of Form’. The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound. Eds. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Print.
Hejinian, Lyn. My Life and My Life in the Nineties. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2013. Print.
---. The Cell. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1992. Print.
---. The Guard. N.P: Tuumba Press, 1984. Print.
---. The Language of Inquiry. Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2000. Print.
Robinson, Kit. ‘The Beginning of the Making of ‘The Cell”. Aerial 10: Lyn Hejinian. Eds. Rod Smith and Jen Hofer. Berkeley, California: Edge Books, 2015.
Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. Eds. Seth Perlow. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014. Print.
Secondary Works
Ackerman, Ondrea E. ‘Wandering Lines: Robert Grenier’s Drawing Poems’. Journal of Modern Literature 36.4 (2013): 133-53. Web. 12 June 2024.
Hulle, Dirk Van. ‘The Extended Mind and Multiple Drafts: Beckett’s Models of the Mind and the Postcognitivist Paradigm’. Today/Aujourd’hui 24 (2012): 277-289. Web. 20 July 2025.
Lorange, Astrid. How Reading is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2014. Print.
Middleton, Peter. Expanding Authorship: Transformations in American Poetry Since 1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2021. Print.
Nealon, Christopher. Infinity for Marxists: Essays on Poetry and Capital. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket books, 2023. Print.
Nicholls, Peter. ‘Phenomenal Poetics: Reading Lyn Hejinian’. The Mechanics of the Mirage: Postwar American Poetry, eds Michel Delville and Chrstine Pagnoulle. Liege, Belgium: L3, 2000. 241-253. Print.
Shoptaw, John. ‘Hejinian Meditations: Lives of The Cell’. Journal X 1.1 (1996): 57-83. Web. 3 April 2025.
Silliman, Ronald. In the American Tree. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986. Print.
Werner, Marta. “Reportless Places’: Facing the Modern Manuscript.’ Textual Cultures: Text, Contexts, Interpretation 6.2 (2011): 60-83. Web. 25 June 2025.
Serafina Lee is an AHRC funded PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she also works as a Visiting Tutor. Her PhD assesses the drafting process in relation to American avant-garde poetry from 1970 to 2020. Focusing on Lyn Hejinian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Susan Howe, the project maps drafting as a prominent source of poetic practice and theory, from Howe’s radical manuscript poetics, DuPlessis’ lifetime Drafts series (1986-2012), and Hejinian’s post-publication revisions.
