Sight

Authors: Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino

Publisher: Edge Books (1999)

A collaborative effort by two of today's most famous poets. Equal parts poetry and philosophy, Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino's collaboration is organized around the act and idea of seeing, written in the form of a literary dialogue. We were interested in a joint investigation into the workings of experience, writes Hejinian in the introduction, how experience happens, what it consists of, how the experiencing (perceiving, feeling, thinking) of it occurs, what the sensation of sensing tells us. Visual descriptions interact with meditations on contemporary life, Western intellectual history, dream, film, poetry, and collaboration itself. Scalapino: the sight is the/ reverse of the occurrence Hejinian: Sight is lyrical, because its subtext is annihilation.