The Language of Inquiry First Edition

by Lyn Hejinian (Author)

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ISBN-13: 978-0520217003

ISBN-10: 0520217004

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Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her autobiographical poem My Life, a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. The Language of Inquiry is a comprehensive and wonderfully readable collection of her essays, and its publication promises to be an important event for American literary culture. Here, Hejinian brings together twenty essays written over a span of almost twenty-five years. Like many of the Language Poets with whom she has been associated since the mid-1970s, Hejinian turns to language as a social space, a site of both philosophical inquiry and political address.

Central to these essays are the themes of time and knowledge, consciousness and perception. Hejinian's interests cover a range of texts and figures. Prominent among them are Sir Francis Bacon and Enlightenment-era explorers; Faust and Sheherazade; Viktor Shklovsky and Russian formalism; William James, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. But perhaps the most important literary presence in the essays is Gertrude Stein; the volume includes Hejinian's influential "Two Stein Talks," as well as two more recent essays on Stein's writings.

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Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"Hejinian's essays are a keystone of postwar North American poetics. They are also a great pleasure to read, for Hejinian is an extraordinarily resonant stylist whose work combines the lushness of her poetry with an engaging aesthetic and philosophical inventiveness. This is writing that avoids closure in the pursuit of unfolding, multifaceted, restive thought. The Language of Inquiry's meditations on the possibilities of poetry create an experience in which each reader is at the center. To engage with this work is to be put in touch with oneself as if anew."―Charles Bernstein, author of My Way: Speeches and Poems

"From 1975, when she wrote 'A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking' -- the first 'essay' in this collection -- Lyn Hejinian has always regarded poetry and poetics as intimately interwoven: her poetry has sometimes been highly theoretical even as her theoretical and critical peices are nothing if not poetic. The Language of Inquiry, the first collection of Hejinian's essays, lectures, introductions, and meditations, constitutes, in the words of Gertrude Stein, about whom she has written so brilliantly, Hejinian's own 'composition as explanation,' culminating in her new long Steinian poem, aptly called 'Happily.' This is an exciting and deeply moving book."―Marjorie Perloff, author of Wittgenstein's Ladder

"'Intelligence is romantic.' These essays, prefaces, lectures, aphorisms, portraits, and meditations, by one of America's most innovative poets, passionately explore, as did the critical writings of Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens, the philosophical foundations of contemporary American culture. [For Hejinian, the process of 'theorizing is . . . a manner of vulnerable, inquisitive, worldly living . . . very closely bound to the poetic process.'] The Language of Inquiry brilliantly demonstrates the myriad, paradoxical ways in which philosophy and poetry are indivisible and distinct." ―Susan Howe

From the Back Cover

"From 1975, when she wrote 'A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking' -- the first 'essay' in this collection -- Lyn Hejinian has always regarded poetry and poetics as intimately interwoven: her poetry has sometimes been highly theoretical even as her theoretical and critical peices are nothing if not poetic. "The Language of Inquiry, the first collection of Hejinian's essays, lectures, introductions, and meditations, constitutes, in the words of Gertrude Stein, about whom she has written so brilliantly, Hejinian's own 'composition as explanation, ' culminating in her new long Steinian poem, aptly called 'Happily.' This is an exciting and deeply moving book."--Marjorie Perloff, author of "Wittgenstein's Ladder

"'Intelligence is romantic.' These essays, prefaces, lectures, aphorisms, portraits, and meditations, by one of America's most innovative poets, passionately explore, as did the critical writings of Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens, the philosophical foundations of contemporary American culture. [For Hejinian, the process of 'theorizing is . .. a manner of vulnerable, inquisitive, worldly living . . . very closely bound to the poetic process.'] "The Language of Inquiry brilliantly demonstrates the myriad, paradoxical ways in which philosophy and poetry are indivisible and distinct." --Susan Howe

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Product details

Paperback: 391 pages
Publisher: University of California Press; First edition (November 6, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520217004
ISBN-13: 978-0520217003
Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.9 x 10 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 2 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,168,716 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1658 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Genres & Styles > Poetry
- #10199 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Criticism & Theory
- #16189 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry

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David Sahner Santa Cruz

Provocative

September 2, 2014

Format: Paperback

Lyn Hejinian is a language poet with a philosophical bent who has written a highly thought-provoking book. Although, at times, parts of The Language of Inquiry seem to lapse into obscurity, she offers penetrating insights and contentions bound to provoke, many of her own making and some fashioned by the authors she quotes (who must fill her prodigious library). I'm providing a few brief excerpts from her book below, interspersed by my own stray thoughts.

She quotes Bejamin Lee Whorf: "Every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyses nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness." My sense is that this is a somewhat extreme view. Translation is an imperfect art but there are many shared cross-cultural constructs. Some parts of foreign thought, nuances in particular, are, however, refractory to translation. So I think there is some truth in what Whorf says. The Whorf quote also glosses over different levels of consciousness, that is, the distinction between raw and primitive experience that is not, or has not yet been, parsed into language as contrasted with reflective language-laden thought. The "lyric dilemma" after all (which Hejinian mentions later in her book) posits that speech is inadequate to the description of experience.

Hejinian also writes that "language is an order of reality itself, and not a mere mediating medium" and that "poetry takes as its premise that language . . . is a medium for experiencing experience." Elsewhere she quotes Gertrude Stein: "After all one had known its name anything's name for so long, and so the name was not new but the thing being alive was always new." And Hejinian writes that "Stein based her radical challenge to the primacy and centrality of the noun. States of consciousness exist as full sentences; the topography of consciousness consists of a rich verbal landscape." Hejinian also places heavy emphasis on context as the basis for meaning, with which many people would agree, but has language has been excessively aggrandized here? In one spot, though, she wonderfully conceives of the "experience of the self as a relationship rather than an essence" and "subjectivity not as an entity but as a dynamic." This harks back to the idea of the importance of an embodied consciousness in vital interaction with the environment (Merleau-Ponty), with the reciprocal contingencies among body, mind an environment altering and, in some measure, defining each other.

David Sahner
Santa Cruz, California

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Jonathan Mayhew

Dense, productive essays

November 20, 2002

Format: Paperback

These are dense, stimulating essays by one of the most articulate and accessible of the "Language Poets."

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