Lyn Hejinian’s poem has the sonnet’s traditional 14 lines and even features the sonnet’s coupletlike resolution, but the length of its lines exceeds tradition, nearly reaching to the very edges of line itself. It borrows prose’s linear momentum but refuses the carelessness of prose’s wraparound ends. The power of these lines is, in part, generated by their quick liftoffs — each begins with a word of a single syllable. This is paired with cunning line breaks that enjamb, suggest, double the words that surround them and intensify the effect of the poem by giving it both vertical and horizontal motion. Throughout, there is thick sound stacked on thick sound, the diction mixed and surprising, the everyday and the erudite sparking like flint and steel. In my reading of the poem, it is as if the line is seeking to enact the poem’s proposition: that in the motion of scattering, in an orientation of disorientation, a possibility of liberation might be found. Selected by Anne Boyer
Time of Tyranny, 49
By Lyn Hejinian
We live in toppled times under a feat of tyranny; let’s not
fake getting lost, let’s do it, let’s not do it intermittently, let’s be
lost, disoriented and never to be bound so all can hear
the hiss of the adverbs we shoot into tyrants’ eyes, quivering
shafts slippery from limbs and aimed by eyes under feathered
lids. Our features are like stale bread, my headache bad
as a blueprint for butter. Windows: how stupidly the intensity
of glass returns to us the terror of love. Things diverge, separate
like the forks of the Eel River to which the competing lies
of two tyrants are but split stones shaken by earthquakes
of stupefying times, of minutes through a glorious forest, of women
who are personal friends, the flanks of a prevented rabbit: to scatter
and ambiguate, obviate, surreptitiously
flesh and hurry to find things to recombine.
Anne Boyer is a poet and an essayist. Her memoir about cancer and care, “The Undying,” won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Lyn Hejinian is the author of more than 25 volumes of poetry and critical prose, the most recent of which are “Tribunal” (Omnidawn, 2019), from which this poem is taken, and “Positions of the Sun” (Belladonna, 2018). Wesleyan University Press will publish her book of critical essays titled “Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday” (2023), and “The Proposition,” a critical edition of Hejinian’s uncollected early work, is forthcoming from the University of Edinburgh Press (2024).
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