Postmodern poetry, avant-garde poetics 185stairs, younger, thinner than when he
had left, was purple—though
moments are no longer so colored.
Somewhere, in the background, rooms share a pattern of small
roses. Pretty is as pretty does. In certain families, the meaning of
necessity is at one with the sentiment of pre-necessity.The better
things were gathered in a pen. The windows were narowed by
white gauze curtains which were never loosened. Here I refer to
irrelevance, that rigidity which never intrudes. Hence, repetitions,
free from all ambition.The shadow of the redwood trees, she said,
was oppressive. The plush must be worn away. On her walks she
stepped into people’s gardens to pinch off cuttings from their
geraniums and succulents. An occasional sunset is reflected on the
windows. A little puddle is overcast. If only you could touch, or,
even, catch those gray great creatures. I was afraid of my uncle
with the wart on his nose, or of his jokes at our expense which
were beyond me, and I was shy of my aunt’s deafness who was his
sister-in-law and who had years earlier fallen into the habit of
nodding, agreeably. Wool station. See lightning, wait for thunder.
Quite mistakenly, as it happened. Long time lines trail behind every
idea, object, person, pet, vehicle, and event.The afternoon happens,
crowded and therefore endless. Thicker, she agreed.From My Life (Hejinian 1987, p. 7)This passage begins with the father’s removal to, and return from, war. But
the father’s absence and return is not developed in a cohesive way in the
sentences that follow, which have an ambiguous and oblique relationship
with this first sentence. In fact the sentences are not ordered so that each
follows on from the one before, or so they add up to a recognisable whole.
Rather, the passage is a generic hybrid: it contains elements of narrative
(‘she stepped into people’s gardens to pinch off cuttings from their gera-
niums and succulents’) and description (‘An occasional sunset is reflected
on the windows’), but never coheres into overall narration or description.
It intersperses image (‘A little puddle is overcast’); impressions (‘An occa-
sional sunset is reflected on the windows’); philosophical ruminations
(‘Here I refer to irrelevance, that rigidity that never intrudes’); and well-
known sayings (‘Pretty is as pretty does’). It also mentions places and
times without firmly locating or linking them. This raises questions about
their relationship to each other: are the windows with the ‘white gauze
curtains’ inside the rooms which ‘share a pattern of small roses’; is the