Some insufficient notes on Lyn Hejinian's My Life

"The obvious analogy is with music." Hejinian's is not a minimalist poem, but like a minimalist musical composition it allows us to notice its unfolding repetitions at our own rate, to focus our attention on this or that rhythm of repetition as we choose or as our minds allow us, to be struck by the changes in the repetition as we are struck, to make of the interaction between what repeats and what does not what we will. In a minimalist composition, we make the music at least as much as the music is presented to us already made.

"It is hard to turn away from running water."

Somehow, as Hejinian constructs her Life, I construct my own: out of similarities, differences, gaps, repetitions. But she already knows, is perhaps laughing. "An extremely pleasant and often comic satisfaction comes from conjunction, the fit, say, of comprehension in a reader's mind to content in a writer's work."

"Now such is the rhythm of cognition."