Language and Ecology. The Textual Ecopoetics of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life

Abstract

Lyn Hejinian’s “language” poetry, while deeply concerned with socio-political engagements of art “after Auschwitz”, has also responded to the question of what it means to write poetry in the Anthropocene. Hejinian’s experimental postmodern poetry has been criticized for the artificial (de)construction with language that keeps us from engaging with the material world. However, Hejinian takes language as a vantage point from which to re-think our relationship with the material world. This paper draws on My Life and her essays to explore how Hejinian creates a textual ecospace with the material forces of language, in which all human and nonhuman forms are inextricably intertwined.