Oxata: A Short Russian Novel

"Hejinian has been based for many years on the West coast, teaching at the University of California, Berkeley—another important institution for the study of poetry and poetics. She’s one of the most important figures in a movement we call ‘Language’ poetry, which is a concentration of writers and writing that began to take place in the late 1970s and took off in the early 1980s. She’s probably best known for her book My Life (1980), which is now canonical. It’s a kind of anti-autobiography written in prose lines: each section consists of 37 sentences, the age she was when the book was initially written. The book has continued to be written; there’s an updated version called My Life in the Nineties (2013). Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Lyn is considered not only one of the foremost practitioners of Language writing, but also one of its primary theoreticians. She’s also written essays about what Language poetry is, what its primary features are, including a very famous essay called ‘The Rejection of Closure,’ which I teach to undergraduates. If one of the primary questions about late twentieth-century US poetry is ‘Why is this poetry?’, it’s because it is never really clear that prose and verse are distinct from one another in Language poetry, insofar as its primary reflection is on the language itself, not on any prearranged or pre-perceived forms of verse or meter. It makes its own way primarily by virtue of the sentence. Oxata: A Short Novel is an old book which has been reissued. This book is conceived in 270 ‘chapters’ of 14 lines each, and thinks about the experiences that Lyn had while she was a frequent visitor to Soviet Russia between 1983 and 1981. (These are all facts you can find out on the book’s jacket.) She’s been one of the primary translators of the Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoschenko. I remember seeing it and thinking, ‘What is this?!’ And my friend, another poet, Benjamin Krusling, said, ‘Oh, Wesleyan has just brought out Lyn Hejinian’s Oxata .’ And it had come to me in the mail, but I hadn’t opened it! So it was a happy accident that it was revealed to me in this way. “Hejinian’s work has so much verbal energy; it’s as if there’s an unending supply of words and thinking” What’s so incredible about Hejinian’s writing is that she never seems to run out of energy. One of the things that formal devices do for us, it seems to me, is allow us to fill in the lacks of our own imagination. All of us have lacks or blanks where we don’t have anything to do or say, and so as a poet you work in conversation with this formal device which gives you something to say; it is an engine of its very own. It has always seemed to me that Lyn doesn’t need that. Her work has so much verbal energy; it’s as if there’s an unending supply of words and thinking. And yet she returns frequently to these formal devices, most recently in The Unfollowing (2016), which she calls an ‘anti-sonnet’ book. It’s fascinating that she’s returned to the sonnet form after Oxata , which was published in 1991—these 14 lines obviously mean something to her. And what do they mean? There are many important and interesting things to note about this book, but one of them is that it’s a record of a time that none of us will ever be able to return to—pre-breakup Soviet Union. That world was gone by the time I was an adult. It’s a record of a kind of cross-cultural experience—the experience of going behind the Iron Curtain—that’ll never happen again. In a way, the book remains mysterious to me, not only because of that but also because it’s a document of Eurocentrism that I think is also no longer possible, where the object of fascination is what’s going on behind the Iron Curtain. I suppose what you’re saying is that this represents a political consciousness that is nostalgic. That’s interesting. Her writing is so beautiful, in a way I just don’t know what to say about it. Maybe you’re right—maybe it’s not possible to write such a book now, because of pressing domestic and political concerns in the United States. Although maybe there is no such thing as a ‘domestic’ political concern. But I want to show you this page of chapter 109, which is incredibly delightful. When I said it was fourteen lines—you would look at this page and ask ‘How is this 14 lines?’ There must be over 400 words here. And this is one of the sentences: And so in a truly magical manner it has come about in apparently one continuous morning that I have become, he said, the possessor of multitudes of wide open windows and of sunlight tumbling into other minute fissures of an almost invisible brightness—why not see in this a special meaning That one line actually takes up four lines of text on the page. Like all the books I’ve chosen, it makes me think about what it is that poetry’s trying to achieve inside its own world. Obviously poetry is bigger than any small conception of it could ever be, but Lyn’s capacity to explore all the possibilities of poetic writing astounds me. What is poetic writing? Not necessarily poetry, but what can we do when we set out to do something that has poetry as its center? She’s just continually surprising in this way."