was originally written in 1978 when she was 37: it has 37 sections with
37 lines in each section. When Hejinian became 45 she revised My Life ,
adding eight sections to the book and eight extra sentences to each section.
She did not add these sentences to the end of each section, but interspersed
them at irregular intervals. She has continued to revise the work, by adding
sections: the most recent additions have been published as My Life in the
Nineties (2003). Numerical structures were also fundamental to the very
important French group Oulipo, (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or
Workshop for Potential Literature) founded in 1960, and discussed in
more detail in Chapter 8.
Think up a numerical system that interests you and base a text on it.
Perhaps you want to shape a poem on a rising or descending arithmetical
sequence; a number or set ofnumbers which has particular significance
for you; or any type of mathematical series you are familiar with.
NON-LITERARY FORMS, LITERARY
TRANSFORMATIONS
Exercise 2, at the beginning of this chapter, suggests that you might like to
write a text based on a culturally specific, but non-literary, form or genre.
This will extend your range of forms and structures. But it is also a way of
questioning the supremacy of the literary as a category. Are literary texts,
after all, so different from other genres of writing which are prominent in
our culture such as newspaper articles or popular songs? Contemporary
cultural theory has tended to see all writing as text, and to question the
ideological distinction between the literary and the non-literary. An adver-
tisement, for example, can have linguistic interest comparable to a poem
and may have as much cultural relevance.
So a text of this kind can throw the ‘literary’ world into relief as well as
satirising contemporary modes of communication. It might take one of
the following forms:
- a tourist guide
- a recipe
- a how-to manual
- a newspaper article
- an advertisement
- a diary entry
- a list.
By adapting the literary to the non-literary, you can bring forms of
popular culture into your writing: many contemporary writers have
Working out with structures 59