az- The Fatalist - by Lyn Hejinian| Omnidawn Publishing 2003:
From Publishers Weekly:
Readers have perhaps grown used to American poets writing ongoing, complex, symbol&reference-laden poems as if talking to themselves, making the reader a witness to the activity of a dynamic thinker's mind. Pound and Stevens, in their very different ways, are immediate forebears of this style, but Emily Dickinson before them and John Ashbery since are other obvious markers: poets who find as much poetic force in a symbol revealed hmm? as in an opaque reference to a current, but hidden, stream of thought. y. good. hidden bcs thought is hidden. not bcs poet is hiding it, no, I won't like that. phantom like in melville, not ghostly because seen thr a placed glass darkly but bcs what is seen ~ or, the seeing ~ is dark, is ghostly.
as also I want that we are really dealing with thought, that you are telling me (and~or telling yourself), there is a telling (where trying to tell = telling). what is meant by honest poetry. I think (roughly speaking) I'd rather you did not set out to write syntactically complex hypotactic poems (Moxley), I'd rather complex syntax & experiments & innovations be an expression, what you are trying to tell. (if what you are trying to tell is about syntax, 'possibilities of language', I don't know, maybe that doesn't do it for me.)
Hejinian's stature in this tradition increases with the publication of this book. Even more than her long poem A Border Comedy and the shorter pieces that have appeared since (Happily; Slowly and The Beginner), The Fatalist takes advantage of the tropes of fiction while admonishing narrative for not being able to contain the will of the poet.

2 cust rvws:
-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. 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.
-I can't say that I enjoyed reading this. only mildly witty. pseudo-intellectual. The language is too vague and the diction is anything but evocative. this rvw is ok too dismissively negative to be thtful, likely. thing is, I react against words she uses ~ too vague ~ 'immutable' 'fleeting', that kind of thing. to me feels like grandiose abstraction.
and maybe - only maybe I do not know yet - maybe I will not come to trust her ~intellectualism.