“Only fragments are accurate”: Lyn Hejinian’s Reflecting on Life through Mnemonic Autobiography

Abstract

This paper aims to explore how Lyn Hejinian’s My Life questions the dominant convention of autobiography and exemplifies stylistically prose-like and thematically philosophical autobiography as an open text of poetry. This paper argues that the poem deliberately refrains from shaping discrete sentences into a coherent narrative. Words and phrases serve as metonymic links to different moments in the poet’s life story. Hejinian’s poetic autobiography is filled with fragmentations, gaps, semantic shifts, and elliptical sentences; the poetic words freely move along the boundary between poetry and prose. My Life emphasizes language’s own capacity for a multiplicity of meanings and contexts. This paper points out that Hejinian pushes the poem beyond the conventional rules of form and content to the more remote possibilities of poetic practice. Thus, Hejinian’s poetry attempts not only to capture the experience of life, but to interact on a textual level with the process of remembering and recreating life-experience. Unlike the old-fashioned style of reflective autobiography, My Life is no success story; it does not recollect Hejinian’s personal achievement, but captures the growing interaction between herself and her world. Ultimately, this paper indicates that My Life serves as a re-writing of autobiography, and more specifically a re-defining poetic genre that shatters the boundary between poetry and prose and expands beyond the limits of “actual representation.”