The experimental poet, essayist, translator, and publisher Lyn Hejinian, best known for her 1987 volume My Life, was one of the founders of the “language” movement in poetry – a name in part derived from a seminal journal titled L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which appeared in the late 1970s. The language movement developed in opposition to the mimetic, personal, and subjective poetry that predominated after World War II and which the language poets view as “transparent” and naively expressivist, since it claims to represent a world without acknowledging the role of language in shaping that world. Their own work, by contrast, foregrounds the materiality of language and its disjunctions, suggesting an idea of language as n…
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Citation: Gray, Jeffrey. "Lyn Hejinian". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 March 2009 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12106, accessed 24 November 2024.]
