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87 lyn hejinian The Rejection of Closure In her essay, Lyn Hejinian takes up a key distinction in American poetry since the 1950s, between “closed”and“open”forms.Charles Olson,in his epoch-making manifesto“Projective Verse,” defined closed verse as “the verse print bred” (and that literary magazines continued to publish), while he advocated open forms in which one perception “must move, instanter , on another.” Hejinian’s rethinking of this distinction—and the cultural politics of its period—involves both revisionist and innovative arguments.In separating openness and closure in poetry, she refuses their merely formal distinction. Regular stanzas and metrical forms are not necessarily closed if their language is productive of open horizons of interpretation ,and it would be reductive to see open forms as simply those that look like open fields or processual streams. Invoking the Russian Formalists, Hejinian shows how form can be radically constructive of new meaning, and how language’s nonidentity with the world it incompletely names is located at the heart of form’s constructive potential. In seeing the language/world relation as central to the rejection of closure, Hejinian takes up, but finds limited, the French feminist poetics of desire, even though gender was elided in Olson’s account . Her argument is a fundamental contribution to the shift from a subject-centered to a language-centered poetics. [. . . ] In writing, an essential situation, both formal and open, is created by the interplay between two areas of fruitful conflict or struggle. One of these arises from a natural impulse toward closure, whether defensive or comprehensive, and the equal impulse toward a necessarily open-ended and continuous response to what’s perceived as the “world,” unfinished and incomplete. Another , simultaneous struggle is the continually developing one between literary form, or the “constructive principle,” and writing’s material. The first involves the poet with his or her subjective position; the second objectifies the poem in the context of ideas and of language itself. The axes across these two areas of opposition are not parallel. Form cannot be equated with closure, nor can raw material be equated with the open.1 I want to say this at the outset and most emphatically, in order to prevent any misunderstanding. Indeed, the conjunction of form with radical openness may be a version of the “paradise” for which the poem yearns—a flowering focus on confined infinity. 88 lyn hejinian It is not hard to discover devices—structural devices—that may serve to “open” a poetic text, depending on other elements in the work and by all means on the intention of the writer. One set of such devices has to do with arrangement and, particularly, rearrangement within a work. The“open text,” by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy,the authority implicit in other (social,economic,cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive. The writer relinquishes total control and challenges authority as a principle and control as a motive. The “open text” often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material, turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction. It is really a question of another economy which diverts the linearity of a project, undermines the target-object of a desire, explodes the polarization of desire on only one pleasure, and disconcerts fidelity to only one discourse.—Luce Irigaray2 “Field work,”where words and lines are distributed irregularly on the page, such as Robert Grenier’s poster/map entitled “Cambridge M’ass” and Bruce Andrews’s “Love Song 41” (also originally published as a poster), are obvious examples of works in which the order of the reading is not imposed in advance . Any reading of these works is an improvisation; one moves through the work not in straight lines but in curves, swirls, and across intersections, to words that catch the eye or attract attention repeatedly. Repetition, conventionally used to unify a text or harmonize its parts, as if returning melody to the tonic, instead, in these works, and somewhat differently in a work like my My Life, challenges our inclination to isolate, identify, and limit the burden of meaning given to an event (the sentence or line). Here, where certain phrases recur in the work, recontextualized and with...

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