My Life: A Poetic Autobiography

by Lyn Hejinian

Book Overview

Mother Bear hunts for roots and forest fruits. Soon she will return to her cave to hibernate. During the long winter two tiny bear-cubs are born. Life with the Bears tells the true story of how they grow up and of the bear family's life.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 155713006X
• ISBN13: 9781557130068
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Sun and Moon Press
• Length: 115 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

My Life

If you like poetry, disguised as prose, with sentences oddly juxtaposed enlarging their possible meaning (I do), then read this autobiography.

A Must

In order to fully understand the postmodern world, the subversive industry of autobiograpy, the collision between poetry and prose, the influence of hybridity, and the potential of revision any reader of contemporary poetry needs to begin here. The writing is complex without being hermetic. Difficult without being resistant. My Life is a necessary text. Generous in its insights, its complicated declarations. This is a perfect marriage of philosophy, poetry, and mathematics. Read this always and often.

A classic

The structure of this book with 45 poems of 45 sentences, one for each year of Hejinian's life, makes the reading of the book like a scale miniature (5 minutes to 1 year) life. It makes you think about your own life and about the relative duration of life events. I read this book right after my first kid was born and I was continually thinking about the possible effect of this event on my life through time.The book's stucture also allows Hejinian the freedom to stretch out without losing the reader. If you get lost on one poem, you are right back on track for the next one.

textures woven in an experimental pattern

One can't talk about this book without making mention of its remarkable structure and history: it was intially written when Ms. Hejinian was thirty-seven, and it consisted of thirty-seven poems, each one containing impressions drawn from the corresponding year of her life. Each of these poems was composed of thirty-seven sentences, as well. Eight years later, when Ms. Hejinian was forty-five, she revised My Life, adding eight new poems (to bring the total up to forty-five) and inserting eight new sentences into each of the previous poems, adding a new layer of understanding and complexity to the earlier work and questioning the idea that a piece of writing (or the evolution of the self) can ever be "finished." Additionally, the details that she focuses on in these poems and the way these details are ordered comprise a quiet subversion of traditional biographical structure. Ms. Hejinian avoids the normal biographical trajectories-- "here's how I became a success" or "here are the most important events in my life" -- instead she focuses on minutae like the pattern of tiles in a floor. She also resists the impulse to explain whether these details influenced her later self or even why they are important at all, leaving much up to the reader to determine. This all contributes to making this a wonderful, astonishing, surprising book; a new way of investigating the experience of being human.

Plucking away at the Postmodern

If you want prose and postmodern poetry which hasn't lost the integrity and beauty of image, then bring your intellectual shovel and dig in. Don't let postmodernism ruffle your feathers until you've let dutch rub you.