Contemporary Poetry

120 contemporary poetry

Any work dealing with questions of possibility must lead to

new work. (pp. 47 – 8 )

In her critique of an innate and stable subject, Hejinian dramatises
in its place an evolving subjectivity that is situated in linguistic
performance:

This becomes an addictive motion – but not incorrect, despite

such distortion, concentration, condensation, deconstruction

and digressions that association by, for example pun and ety-

mology provide; an allusive psycho-linguism... The process

is composition rather than writing.^43

This interrelationship between performance and composition is
key to Hejinian’s poetry. She indicates that the suggestiveness of
language generates a self-perpetuating linkage of associations.
Throughout My Life we witness a struggle between perceived
gender expectations and the person or protagonist’s attempt to
divert and escape such codifying. We are told a received wisdom:
‘If I was left unmarried after college, I would be single all my life
and lonely in old age’ (p. 53 ). Rather than offering us a chrono-
logical narrative, elements of a life story emerge at strategic points,
codifi ed in terms of social gender expectations. Take for example
the experience of pregnancy and motherhood in the following
extracts:

I couldn’t join the demonstration because I was pregnant, and

so I had revolutionary experience without taking revolution-

ary action. (p. 67 )

The word ‘version’ is a comparative noun, which must imply

its plural form – the one that includes many. Should a mother

have more kids? (p. 68 )

Far from seeing her text as offering only different versions of a life
story, Hejinian’s work is actively engaged in the continual develop-
ment shifts and performances of the subject. This so-called inde-
terminacy is a central concern of her work: she claims that she is