Lyn Hejinian, leading light of language poetry movement, at 82

Lyn Hejinian, a central figure in the language poetry movement of the 1970s and ’80s who channeled the seismic social changes and avant-garde artistic climate of the 1960s into work that was both richly lyrical and groundbreaking in its experimentalism, died on Feb. 24 at her home in Berkeley, Calif. She was 82.

The cause was cancer of the bile duct, her husband, jazz saxophonist Larry Ochs, said.

As a poet, essayist, publisher, and professor, Ms. Hejinian was a central figure in a subversive literary movement that aimed to explode the first-person confessional strain of mainstream poetry — as epitomized by the likes of Robert Lowell and John Berryman — through artful deconstructions of language and form.

Language poetry, also known as language writing, was largely centered in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. Ms. Hejinian, who lived on 80 rural acres in Mendocino County, Calif., about 140 miles north of San Francisco, helped to seed the movement in 1976, when she acquired a manual letterpress and started Tuumba Press, a showcase for similarly inclined poets including Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Ron Silliman, and Charles Bernstein.

Such writers were influenced by early-20th-century modernists such as Gertrude Stein, as well as by contemporary European post-structuralists such as Roland Barthes, who shook the long-held assumption that a literary work necessarily comes from a single, stable, authorial point of view, with a coherent, generally recognizable meaning.

“These poems are as much about how they make meaning as what they mean,” Bernstein, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Pennsylvania who co-edited the newsletter L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E during the movement’s early years, said in a phone interview. “Often the poems evaded any direct message in favor of an attention to the language of the poem and its sonic rhythms.”

Influenced by the revolutionary spirit of the antiwar, civil rights, and feminist movements of the 1960s, Ms. Hejinian and other aligned poets sought to overturn the social order at the literary level by exploring the open text — a literary work that allows for a multiplicity of points of view and meanings.

In doing so, “The writer relinquishes total control and challenges authority as a principle and control as a motive,” Ms. Hejinian said in “The Rejection of Closure,” an essay she delivered at a 1983 panel discussion of poetry. Therefore, she explained, the language poem “resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification.”

Ms. Hejinian savored her place among the literary mavericks. “We attended and participated in poetry readings that took place two or three or sometimes four times a week, talked until late at night at bars, launched literary journals, hosted radio shows, curated readings and lecture series,” she said in a 2020 interview published by the University of California, Berkeley, where she served on the English department faculty for two decades starting in 2001.

“We had very little respect for official academia,” she added, “which, in turn, had very little respect for us.”

In 1980, she published her best-known work, “My Life,” a book-length prose poem written when she was 37 that included 37 sections, each composed of 37 sentences. (When she turned 45, she expanded its structure to 45.)

With its use of ambiguous language and disjunctive sentences, the book forsook the traditional language of autobiography, beginning with a haunting evocation of Ms. Hejinian’s earliest memory, her father returning from World War II:

A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned home from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left, was purple — though moments are no longer so colored.

Seemingly incongruous, “a moment yellow” was an impressionistic, if nonspecific, characterization of the moment, she later said in an interview published by Wesleyan University. “Purple” conjured images of a purple blanket or similar object that she hazily recalled.

“Lyn was experimental not in the sense that her work is austere or especially hard to appreciate, but because her work plays with form and pushes against the borders of genre,” Armantrout wrote in an email. “It contains snippets of narrative, philosophical meditations, and Whitman-like catalogs in a unique and engaging combination that points to a world without limits.”

Carolyn Frances Hall was born on May 17, 1941, in Alameda, Calif., the eldest of three children of Chaffee Hall Jr., an administrator at Berkeley, and Carolyn (Erskine) Hall, a book editor. When she was 13, her father accepted a job as the administrative director of Harvard’s master of business administration program and the family settled in Wayland, Mass.

When she was in the third or fourth grade, she spent countless hours huddling over a typewriter her father gave her, churning out her own stories and plays.

“Pounding the keys and seeing sentences emerge on the page, I felt important and powerful,” she said in the Berkeley interview. “I was, in effect, escaping the limitations of gender. I could imagine myself as anyone and make it ‘real.’”

After graduating from Concord Academy in Massachusetts in 1959, she enrolled in Radcliffe College. Two years later she married John Hejinian, a medical student. She graduated in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature.

The couple had two children, Paull and Anna, and divorced in 1972. Within a year she had met and moved in with Ochs on a vast tract in Willits, Calif,, that he described as “real back-tothe-land, Whole Earth Catalog country.” They married in 1977, around the time that he was helping to form the eclectic Rova Saxophone Quartet.

In addition to her husband and children, Ms. Hejinian is survived by her brother, Douglas Hall; her sister, Marie Katrak; and four grandchildren.

In 1982, Ms. Hejinian, with poet Barrett Watten, started Poetics Journal, which for 16 years published book-length volumes featuring the work of language writers such as Bruce Andrews and Leslie Scalapino.

In 1980s, she made several trips to the Soviet Union and learned Russian, eventually translating Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, a prominent Russian Language poet, who became a close friend.

Her own work continued to evolve, with her later output becoming “looser and wilder,” Armantrout said, including her syntactically challenging booklength poem “The Fatalist” (2003), which probed the mysteries of fate and chance.

I adventure and consider fate as occurrence and happenstance as destiny, I recite an epigraph

It seems as applicable to the remark I want to make as disorder is to order.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Ashbery called “The Fatalist” “breathtaking,” citing the line “That’s what fate is: whatever’s happened.”

“In this sense, we are all fatalists,” Ashbery wrote, “since ‘whatever’ has happened to us all, and we all recognize it when we see it. Yet it has seldom been more sumptuously tallied, tabulated and illuminated.”

In 2003, Ms. Hejinian returned to familiar ground, publishing the 10-part work “My Life in the Nineties,” in which she wrote that “everyone is out of place in a comedy.”

“We are all clowns,” she said in an interview with the Poetry Foundation. “And we feel that.”