Happily [Paperback]

Lyn Hejinian (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2000

Poetry. Hejinian's characteristic linguistic intensity and philosophical approach are present in this book-length poem. "Reading Lyn Hejinian's HAPPILY can make one imagine a second, somewhat happier Stein telling stories in single long or short lines that are aware of one another as they go about their own affairs"--Bob Perelman.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This small book-length poem by Hejinian (My Life; The Cold of Poetry; etc.) presents a loosely linked series of everyday, abstracted pleasures where time is tactile yet immeasurable; when recognized, though, it is a revelation: "Now is a blinding instant one single explosion but somehow some part of it gets accentuated/ And each time the moment falls the emphasis of the moment falls into time differently/ No sooner noticed no sooner now that falls from something/ Now is a noted conjunction/ The happiness of knowing it appears." The reader is expertly guided through this neo-Bergsonian time-space by stresses that don't fall into regularity; likewise, conclusions appear, but lead only to the promise of further discoveries, of possible futures. The American pragmatist-like guiding principle here seems to be that one should not linger over thoughts or linguistic structures that could not, in fact, survive the exigencies of the quotidian, yet we are assured that this process is not mere relativism: "There is no 'correct path.' " The poem nonetheless ends beautifully, clearly coming down on the side of uncontaminated, yet non-solipsistic pleasure as a quality worth fighting for: "No, happily I'm feeling the wind in its own right rather than as of particular pertinence to us as a windy moment/ I hear its lines leaving in a rumor the silence of which is to catch on quickly to arrange things in preparation for what will come next/ That may be the thing and logically we go then it departs." This near-treatise by one of our major experimental poets succeeds on its own terms, "in its own right." (Mar.) FYI: The Post-Apollo Contemporary Poetry Series has published perfect-bound, 6 1/2 x 5 3/4 books, among others, since 1994.
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Review

Happily
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Hejinian distills thought down to its most basic--and elegant--necessities: chance, logic, happiness. Tragedy, longing--truth. -- Katherine Lederer, St. Mark's Poetry Project

Hejinian's discussions of Gertrude Stein, dreams, consciousness, and the relationship between languge and perception are lucid and thoughtful. Her poems are palpable explorations of the space between consciousness and language... -- Rain Taxi

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Product Details

• Paperback: 39 pages
• Publisher: Post Apollo Press; 1st edition (January 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0942996380
• ISBN-13: 978-0942996388
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 4.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,021,798 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ruminative and glad, April 9, 2000

By 

Patrick F. Durgin (the midwest) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Happily (Paperback)

Happily is a long / short poem (about 40 pages) in which Hejinian's "language of inquiry" tackles one of the more prevelant inquiries a person is bound to undertake: happiness. Happiness does not equal banality or "prettiness." In fact, in "Happily," Hejinian has distilled the sensuality of reason, the phenomenology of history / chronology, and the last century (from Stein to Mac Low) of poetic experiment and cleared space for a new conception of beauty. One which is pointed, poignant, and pleasantly difficult -- the poem posits happiness as a choice implicating a context: "history with a future" -- the book is necessary. And that's more than I can say for many other books on the subject.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars happy to toil through "happily", February 3, 2006

By 

Zachary A. Hanson "Jazzpunk" (Tallahassee, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Happily (Paperback)

It takes me a while to truly feel "the pleasure of impossibility" (404) in Hejinian's essay, but after reading it several times I begin to settle into the hurdy-gurdy rhythm of her "accordioning" sentences (384). Then I begin to be less resistant to "take what happens to be happening to value finitude" (400). I'm unaccustomed to thinking of a poem in terms of its ability to help me resign myself to the quotidian, though this is of course what a lot of modern poetry tends to do, if one reflects on it. Still, a modern poet is unlikely to come straight out and articulate the contours of her relationship to ordinariness in no uncertain terms.

This is an aspect of Hejian's ostranenie, or "making strange," that Perloff mentions when she discusses her (185), though she does not discuss this aspect of the essay. Many tend to think of essayistic style and the didacticism that often results from "it" as outside the purview of "good poetry," at least since Alexander Pope and such feel-good hits as "Essay on Man." Sentences that lead us to question a thesis such as "Is happiness the name for our (involuntary) complicity with chance?" (387) seem alien to writing with no set right margin. The essay is made doubly strange when one realizes that the thesis that implores us to be happy with happenstance can never really arrive at a set thesis, a stable emphasis or accent. The only proofs she can offer us for her argument are disproofs to the attitude in us which invents a "future [that] looks back to trigger a longing for consonance" (386). The perpetual "suspending judgment" that results (386), brings us to what Derrida calls an "athesis," a thesis that posits nothing.

Despite her essayistic tone and her arguments that can never fully arrive at themselves, Hejinian is, after all, well within one of the classic spaces of the modern, the same continuous or eternal present that Stein and Beckett, say, interrogate ceaselessly, alongside of countless New Age figures. In doing this in her personalized accordioning style that never stops making strange, she explores one of the cruxes of modernist poetics as well as I've seen, which may be boiled down to this question: What makes poetry poetry in the lack of its conventional trappings (meter, rhythm, rhyme, sense, sensibility)? Hejinian seems to think that this occurs in something like a "poetics of space," as Gaston Bachelard puts it in a book I have yet to read, a space where the poet feels disjunctive meter, rhythm, rhyme, sense, and sensibility as it occurs within her consciousness, rather than yoking these into preconceived form on page. While workshops have long since given up considering matters having to do with meter and rhyme, the poetic crux I stated above does not quite go away. Again, what makes poetry poetry? Doesn't an essay accomplish the same thing that so many published poems do? Some of the poems in popular periodicals like New Yorker may as well be flash fiction (often making them rotten poetry). Hejinian's answer might go something like this. One just feels poetry differently, feels its disjunctive meter as it splays across internal time:

Now is a blinding instant one single explosion but somehow
since part of it gets accentuated
And each time the moment falls the emphasis of the moment
falls into time differently
No sooner noticed no sooner now that falls from something
Now is a noted conjunction
The happiness of knowing it appears
We see this argument put into praxis in her poem My Life to wonderful effect.

Question:
Is the "de-liberating" that occurs by placing a hyphen at the end of the first line here one of these happy accidents? If it is or if it is not, what is the effect?

There is activity in a life, i.e. conduct asserts the power of de-
liberating without knowing how a state of being is brought
into existence every so often often