Lyn Hejinian’s poetry books include The Beginner (Spectacular Books, 2000), Happily (Post Apollo Press, 2000), Sight (with Leslie Scalapino, 1999), The Cold of Poetry (1994), The Cell (1992), My Life (1980), Writing Is an Aid to Memory (1978), and A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking (1976). The University of California Press published her collection of essays titled The Language of Inquiry in 2000. From 1976 to 1984, Hejinian was editor of Tuumba Press, and since 1981 she has been the co-editor of Poetics Journal. She is also the co-director of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets. Her honors include a Writing Fellowship from the California Arts Council, a grant from the Poetry Fund, and a Translation Fellowship (for her Russian translations) from the National Endowment of the Arts. She recently received the sixty-sixth Fellowship from The Academy of American Poets for distinguished poetic achievement at mid-career.

Praise for The Fatalist

“… Hejinian’s stature in this tradition increases with the publication of this book…. Even more than her long poem A Border Comedy and the shorter pieces that have appeared since (Happily; Slowly and the The Beginner), The Fatalist takes advantage of the tropes of fiction while admonishing narrative for not being able to contain the will of the poet…. it’s exciting to see her settle into a new, grand, permissive and open format, and reel out some beautiful sentences in startling succession.”
--Publishers Weekly, October 27, 2003

"Hejinian distinguishes her own other tradition (language writing rejects the notion of genius and the New York School embraces it") yet she returns and a book that constellates brightly with his epic, Flow Chart."
--The Village Voice

“There were some terrific books of poems published by U.S. authors this year, including…. Lyn Hejinian published three engaging new works – Slowly (Tuumba), The Fatalist (Omnidawn), and My Life in the Nineties (Shark)….”
--as mentioned in Publishers Weekly’s “Best Books 2003” section, November 17, 2003

"The Fatalist maps how one might keep referring back to literature, theory, dinner conversation, glimpses of philosophical perception, tiny moments between lovers or among friends, for understanding to coalesce as apples drop from branches or a sheep drowns in a creek. It is in this space of occupied thought--a life lived through intense and multivalenced thinking--that Lyn Hejinian's remarkable and complex poetry is composed."
--Rain Taxi

“’That’s what fate is: whatever’s happened,’ writes Lyn Hejinian at the end of her breathtaking long poem, The Fatalist. In this sense we are all fatalists, since ‘whatever’ has happened to us all, and we all recognize it when we see it. Yet it has seldom been more sumptuously tallied, tabulated and illuminated.”
--John Ashbery

“In The Fatalist Lyn Hejinian continues her distinctive charting of the connections between her life, her reading, and her thinking that was begun in My Life and that fantastically metamorphosed into A Border Comedy. Poems move from how apples fall heavily on the ground and lie in the sun to discussions of the 17th century autobiography and the ‘lyric moment.’ Hejinian’s work often demonstrates how poetry is a way of thinking, a way of encountering and constructing the world, one endless utopian moment even as it is full of failures. The Fatalist is one more wonderful explanation.”
--Juliana Spahr

From The Fatalist (page 15)

Everything that works does so in time and testifies
to time’s inability to stop life. I can make the “pathetic leap” and go
from one moment to another that bears
no emotional relationship to it, obscured
by shadows cast by light one can lend oneself to
in the cozy enclosure provided by surroundings produced again
and again by the rain, the one
that you both very generously came to one
evening laughing and shouting “Whoa!” while I was writing
this letter. There were three women and a man, all markedly given
to eagerness, the three women admirably composed, gripping
the monitor. It didn’t last, at least not long ago. Now
in the pleasure of knowing that distracted restlessness
— their composition an arena for enthusiasms that remain
seemingly irrelevant to their apparent undertakings —
there are too many options, dithered and frittered
away buying groceries in which a lot (and I mean, really
a lot) of money gets spent on travel. Still
it might bring one past glaciers and through the inland passage
in the end. But for now I have the score.
I can’t put some poor woman on a stage
and ask her to sing “wallowing in a state of chaos
that remains closed to me.” To be an anachronism is nothing
more than to be chronologically out of place.

The cosmos written in my calendar can be tenderly regarded
but play, at least in art, should dare more, it should create
chaos. M loves the aquarium, but at the zoo she falls asleep. What is there
about zoos that renders them so abstract? They fade. In my dream
of a frequently painted long-limbed muzzled white dog
as present and perspicacious as it was when it first appeared
in the world almost 40 years ago a whippoorwill calls
me to work. Come Tuesday.
Come spring. The light flickers
and figures. I’m safely home again provided
I adventure and consider fate
as occurrence and happenstance as destiny. I recite an epigraph.
It seems as applicable to the remarks I want to make as disorder
is to order. The corridors are quiet, the plumbing works, the window
(which I always carry when I travel) opens — but there are always those
who say that all reality is an illusion. Astronomers would disagree.
Sure, while we seek to grasp deep sleep from which we wake
our own reality shrinks the totality of reality (a cosmos
from which little heroines are perpetually trying to escape)
which is infinitely extensive. We’re left with a sense
of murky doings, whether it is possibility or impossibility that’s lodged
there is hard to say. The overblown soundtrack (and the voice-over
narration by Tom Hanks) would suggest that everything that lies
between the outer infinity of the cosmos and our own brief spot
in it harbors power, freedom (they are much
the same). The ensuing show is awful.

Plutocrats love to be naughty together
weeping for a moment and then apologizing
and changing the subject as if that were the problem
without waiting to see if their bawdy songs will work
as I suspect they will simply because the guys are, at their age, now
increasingly androgynous (though still aggressively male).
No one of our generation was there. “So publish me!
Publish me!” T often insisted in the course
of the long afternoon. What is there about small lapping waves
that makes them seem so intimate? They are strong
and bend the white oars under the frequently painted rowboat.
Thus the world bound to this chronology can be tenderly observed.
Take the idea of exemplary emotions. They arise. Great!
Celebratory, relaxed, and companionable, we avoid smashing
into other more stolid pedestrians far into the night. Obstinately
memory gets things wrong. I invent aphorisms. Obstinately pity projects distrust
seems applicable. Meanwhile the device called “the crowd” is at work.
But this will do if it draws you along with everyone else into the street
and occasions — a complete shift in mood and direction and before you
know what they shield, what they show, the light that’s tale-telling
flickers, slowing thrown shadows and the lives
they carry. The laughing grandmother laughing
the laughter of the young couple who have volunteered for waterfalls
of unprotection in whatever strange new (sometimes terrible) life they’ll get
as “immigrants” squeezes the young woman’s foot
and sneezes. A ridiculous diamond
drops to the floor. But T was never able to overcome the sleepiness
resulting from my increasing disinterest and by midnight
he was sick. I can’t see
that any of this argues in favor of diaries.