Jacket 36 - Late 2008 - William Watkin: on Lyn Hejinian and Giorgio Agamben
“Though we keep company with cats and dogs”: Onomatopoeia, Glossolalia, and Happiness in the work of Lyn Hejinian and Giorgio Agamben


a roe deer which, upon sensing my presence, lifted its head and gave a full throated cry, hoah, hoah
One cannot write the voice of the animal.
the voice can suffer no separation from the animal, which language demands, and remain its voice.
this bark of pure being. one wants to write it, because it is a rare example of the presence of a being’s truth to itself ~hmm~ not ~ well for one not rare ~ every animal every us even also when maybe not looking which our civilisation has been chasing for twenty five hundred years and more.


Hejinian, like Pascoli, takes dictation, but the voice she hears, which is her own as other, is made up of bits which only later find their own coherence.

take dictation. mm: My uncle is a lawyer's clerk. He calls me once a year. The __ takes dictation. naval boy down the chute.
(gosh that poem I think is so good - So good.)

ends, I believe, with the victory of language over the voice as Hejinian indulges again in pure sound: “more more than nine”. Is the nine really nine, numbers are mentioned more than once in the poem, or is it a suggestion of mine, the mouth wants to say this after the repetitious m’s, and the mind wants to say this because it makes more “sense” and because mine featured in the line above? Glossolalia stops the sign “mine” from coinciding with the referent mine such as one finds more openly in her My Life so that one could argue again that the two works are twinned, My Life being the autobiography of the voice, and Writing is an Aid to Memory that of language.

The last sentence of the “Preface” states: “Though we keep company with cats and dogs, all thoughtful people are impatient, with a restlessness made inevitable by language.”[15 Writing is an Aid to Memory] While we like to bark we prefer to write as we would rather make mistakes about who we are, what we did, what we remember, because we like to remember more than we like to have ontological, linguistic plenitude, which takes us on to what Hejinian’s poetry is all about: happiness. However, before we get to happiness and also the reasons for contemporary poetry to still exist in the world wow ok let's meet back here for that
~not trusting style here much, not thoroughly trusting the thinking ~ but helpful with noticing some things happening in Hejinian's text? and return to read, how Hejinian's poetry is all about happiness, and about happiness, and about why poetry
and about lang poetry too okay
as well as -dlcs pgmark notes- continental philos Heidegger int in ontological uses & implicatns of poetry - to do work of philos when philos not up to it at moment in history.
landed on this Jacket essay by way of looking for Hejinian re Heidegger (ggl).