The Proposition

Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, translator, and publisher and is a founding figure of the Language poetry movement of the 1970s and an influential force in the world of experimental and avant-garde poetics. She is the author of many poetry collections, including My Life and My Life in the Nineties (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), The Book of a Thousand Eyes (Omnidawn, 2012), The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003), and her landmark work My Life (Burning Deck, 1980). A native Californian, she teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

[headline]A remarkable collection of Lyn Hejinian's previously uncollected early poems from 1963 to 1983 Lyn Hejinian is considered one of the most important avant-garde poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with five poems written from 1963 to 1965, The Proposition collects Hejinian's previously uncollected works from 1963-1983 in one unique volume. The individual early works curated in this volume broaden the existing published collections of Hejinian's works, showing Hejinian's play with form, visual language, and linguistic experiment before the poet's move to project orientated writing practices. With a new Preface by Lyn Hejinian and five essays by prominent critics in the field, the volume offers both a new collection of Hejinian's poetry and an important scholarly resource for students, scholars, and readers of contemporary avant-garde writing more widely. [bio]Lyn Hejinian is a poet, translator, editor and scholar whose literary career has been long associated with language writing. Both as Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley and subsequently, her scholarly work has been addressed to modernist, postmodern and contemporary poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social practices they entail. Hejinian is the author of over twenty-five volumes of poetry and critical prose, the most recent of which includes Tribunal (2019), Positions of the Sun (2019), and a revised edition of Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (2019).