Night on our faces

I’ve been following and unfollowing Lyn Hejinian’s poetry for half my life. Lyn first visited Australia twenty years ago, giving a reading at Gleebooks in Sydney on Kate Lilley’s invitation. I remember listening to Lyn’s poems under a dusty ventilation fan and admiring their precise music. I also remember a slow immersion into a radical sense of purpose: here were ideas and aesthetic forms I barely understood, but needed to understand. Was I following Lyn’s reading? What might track from such stellar bundles of cognition? How did these lines chime with local Australian poetics? It was impossible to say. But, electrified by things I couldn’t follow, I decided to write a doctoral thesis on Lyn Hejinian. “Our fates” are always hidden, Lyn reminds us in The Unfollowing, no matter how diligently we try to imagine them.