Positions of the Sun
Author: Lyn Hejinian
Publisher: Belladonna* (2018)
Lyn Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun is a book of twenty-six interlocking “essays with characters” that explores the mid-2000s financial “crisis” through the movements and daily lives of a wide-ranging cast of characters located in the Bay Area. In Positions, Hejinian plays the bricoleur, bringing together whatever’s needed in her to approach to the subject—whether the paratactic tactics of poetry, scholarship’s critical patchwork, or dramatis personae set in time that evokes but frustrates narrative.
More than ever, it seems to me, Lyn Hejinian, by positioning the sun, has sunk her thoughts in her everyday perceptions to capture the continuity of a reality that, in spite of her most concentrated attention, keeps eluding her, (and us). Her present work results in a poetic emanation that creates a celestial map where the sun, discreetly, appears, here and there, and illuminates, like her own mind does, everything it touches, and moves on with it. Yes, “thought is a polyphonic awareness,” as she says, and by including this solar dimension she redeems the (pathetic) totality of the whole landscape.
—Etel Adnan
In Positions of the Sun, Hejinian fashions a way to move forward in language while also turning her mind at 360 degree angles and using her thinking to love every thing and every instance in her path. This turning creates a new shape for the frame of perception and new time. Like Stein’s Tender Buttons and her own seminal My Life, this is one of those works that opens up poetry and opens up prose and gives us more breath and more light to name what we see.
—Renee Gladman
Positions of the Sun extends documentary and personal testimony, dreamwork, correspondence, literary history, and philosophy to the same plane, without rendering all exchangeable. Sentences, their motions incommensurate, build arguments as if counter discursively, the way the opposite of erosion amasses terrain.
—Jennifer Scappettone
Not a second passes in conscious thinking about poetry, what poetry is, what poetry might be, that is not suffused with the presence of Lyn Hejinian’s language. We hear her, now, in all our thinking about “everyday life,” though we might not know the command of her work firsthand, even. Her mind at work routinely shakes us up, sometimes by the simple abundance of her resourcefulness in making words, phrases, sentences bend to the necessities of diverse experience. Positions of the Sun, waves aside the problem of genre (Jean Day “brushing her right hand gently in the air as if to move the statement aside”), as Hejinian pokes the edges of (pokes holes in) fiction, poetry, essay, to explore how each and all might carry on and care for literature as a time-based art. “I myself am not afraid of chaos but of fending it off,” Hejinian writes. This is not a confession of “a component of the secret that sits at the core of one’s singularity,” but a theorem about understanding the persistent fact of writing to live and live better.
—Simone White