Customer Reviews

The Fatalist

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The Fatalist is a terrific instance of Hejinian's work in recent years: a lush re-purposing of sinuous, elegant syntactic constructions to hoover up just about anything that happens in the mind in time. Everything from childhood Victoriana to John Zorn ensembles get gathered up into the poem, which becomes a field of surprise and play in every sense: play of signifiers, mind at play, the play's the thing, play that funky music, you name it. Because her lines push clauses through time with the variety and complexity usually attributed to "fine" writing, the poems slip easily past the centurions of craft--there's no doubt among the doubting that this counts as poetry. But beneath the surface shine, The Fatalist in fact works as "a site of resistance to resolution" that refuses any logic (of mortality, of fate) that insists things have to end.

I can't say that I enjoyed reading this. It is too much like a diary and the lines are quite plain. It is very dry and only mildly witty. There are hints of Ashbery's introspective yadda-yadda-ing and some general observations. I do not think Lyn could've published this had her name not been accompanied by a tiny bit of scholarly repute (and the street cred by association that she has via John Zorn). Even in Ashbery's blurb on the back cover one almost get a sense that Ashbery was yawning as he wrote it. It is too self-indulgent and pseudo-intellectual. The language is too vague and the diciton is anything but evocative.