Description
Poetic expressions of protest or dissent that argue for art-making—for a turn to art and to its a rmation of life
The three works that constitute Tribunal were written in the current double context of seemingly ubiquitous warfare, both military and societal, and the specter of unabashed neo-fascism, ethno-nationalism, and—especially in the United States—reassertions of white supremacy. The mood of the poems range from fury to sadness and even, at times, to something very close to pity for our humanity, perpetually in thrall to its own penchant for cruelty.
Tribunal (like Hejinian’s previous books) seems dedicated to a form of inventive continuity, an unsentimental affrmation of life’s “irrational exuberance”—but it is also . . . about lived time, and about this time, a time of “tyrants extolling tyranny.” Here Hejinian’s “rejection of closure” is counterbalanced by an impulse to call a halt. She pulls herself and her readers up short when she parodies one of her own best known lines: “Now a pause, now a rose, and now a small coffin, Bitch!” Listen up. “Attention: anarchy! (And its assistant: poetry!).”
Rae Armantrout, author of Wobble
[Tribunal] extends the literary techniques of her most celebrated works in a volume that critiques our social, political, and aesthetic moment—for Hejinian these concerns are always entwined, challenging us to speculate within and beyond the present. Tribunal’s urgency draws on the tension between the numerical system and improvisation of My Life (1980); the philosophical sensibility of Happily (2000); and the linguistic complexity of Writing Is an Aid to Memory (1977). Synthesizing techniques Hejinian has honed since the beginning of her career, Tribunal challenges assumptions of what poetry can think through, and how thinking as a form of language transpires.
Karla Kelsey, Hyperallergic
Reviews
About the Author
Excerpt
Lyn Hejinian is the author of of over twenty volumes of poetry and critical prose, including several poetry collections previously published by Omnidawn: The Unfollowing, The Book of a Thousand Eyes, Saga | Circus, and The Fatalist. She is the editor of Tuumba Press, the co-director (with Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets, and the co-editor (with Jane Gregory and Claire Marie Stancek) of Nion Editions, a chapbook press.
from Ring Burial
1
A work of art is a prophetic loan, drawn on fugitive premises; the
artist acts on it, and, presumably, sustains some faith that others will do so
too, or at least could.
For the present, timing is everything.
Overhead a configuration of crows appears.
Times slide.
Predictions are a different matter; a massive earthquake is
coming, as is the death of the sun, tyranny, another wedding, more war.
The trees rise, elm against fascism, ash against misogyny,
unalienated beech, free willow, trees presenting continuous oak.
It is only by silencing the dead that Death can resist them.
