Slowly

Author: Lyn Hejinian

Publisher: Tuumba Press (2002)

I am very much interested in abstraction in language, in pushing language to the point that it becomes fact itself rather than some intermediary or condition.

Written between November 20, 2000 and September 24, 2001, Slowly explores a longer breath than Hejinian's previous poetry, and a more variable, percussive rhythm than her previous prose. The distinction between Sentences and Lines; that which pitches a work towards poetry or secures it within prose, is more difficult here than before, and whatever it is, it stops. It backs up and picks a new direction: "A pelican becomes a cloud, a cloud becomes / a wire, a wire binds Shostakovitch to the stained wall / of a small room becoming this in other words that / becoming my decision."